Big-water Thursday

The kids are in their last week at Keeners kayaking and this week Eric Jackson, kayaking legend, has been coaching. Its been fantastic to observe all Eric's ideas for flat & moving water drills and races. There was quite an emphasis on hand rolling today, the kids were holding their breath upside down, spinning their boats 3 times & then handrolling back up on their offside. Later in the day there was a good eddy line on the river with whirlpools & all the kids were handpaddling in, tipping over, spinning in the

whirlpool & hand rolling back up.

Earlier today the kids were paddling in and around Phils Hole the biggest safe-ish feature on the river, some got a good working in there but noone got hurt & lots of the kids swam thru the hole.

Yesterday there was backwards boatercross down a rapid having to zigzag down touching rocks on either side. In the afternoon most of the kids paddled Garvans the biggest rapid on the river, a big long chute into a hole. I walked, not wanting to get hurt.

Eric's son Dane has been with the group & he is a fantastic kayaker & is always in his boat. He goes in huge holes & does cartwheels & all sorts of tricks in them.

Finn, Max, Otis & Foxy are having a great time. Otie had a great time today going down through Phil's twice & on the second run, I followed him down. He did all the handrolling drills as well. He has caught water snakes in the last 2 days. Today I saw an osprey nest at the top of a dead tree with a parent bringing a fish & feeding it to a chick.

At Keenerville the kids are living in a group of cabins on the riverbank with 3 different kitchen & living areas. They fend for themselves with getting breakfasts & keeping the cabins clean & tidy. Lunches are at the Wilderness Tours rafting lunch hut with burgers, hotdogs & snacks. Yesterday I caught a chipmunk inside the scroggin jar! Dinner most nights is at WT's base building which is 20 minutes drive from here on the banks of the Ottawa. WTis a big operation & in the weekends they have 1000 rafters a day & during the week 400 per day. They have a kayak school going everyday at 2 levels as well as the Keener program. The company also has interests in jetboating operations at Niagara falls & on the Sheen rapids at Montreal.

I'm managing to get in more paddling everyday and am enjoying my surfing. I had my first surfs on corner wave today & am getting in lots of spins. I'm still being carefull with my shoulder & can't paddle very hard with it, probably 75%.

Otie & I are staying in a wee cabin called the Love Shack while Max, Finn & Foxy are staying with a bunch of kids in the White House. There are all sorts of kayakers on this river from squirt boaters going deep on eddy lines to C1 playboaters in weird looking boats. Kayakers are on the good surfing waves from dawn to dusk. There is ettiquite on the surfing wave in which a kayaker coming downstream is not allowed to drop in on the wave but must go to the end of the queue in the eddy waiting to surf. Clear paddle signals are given to kayakers coming down to avoid collisions in the waves. Everyone observes the rules.

Tomorrow is our last day paddling & we fly to California on Saturday.

Kayaking Nirvana

What could be better? Big waves, warm water, sunny skies, being coached every day by the world champion, good food, few chores, hanging out on the river bank in cabins with kids the same age from lotsa countries. Yip this is the spot for the young kayaking enthusiast. Max, Finn & Foxy are in heaven & Otie is having a great time catching frogs & snakes and kayaking. Otie graduated to the full Keener program last week so did the big water beatdown (paddling thru a huge wave), the boatercross race & the freestyle comp on Garburator the biggest wave on the river.

Foxy is getting the airscrew & cleaned up the freesyle comp. Finn has mastered the flat water loop with Max following behind doing his first ones last night. And me, I'm a grade 2 paddler learning how to surf, but did my first spins today. There is a big soft wave called Babyface 5 minutes paddle from camp. I hang out with kids, read my book, look at chipmunks, take kayaking photos, help load & unload boats. I met some guys in a neighbouring cabin & ate fresh bass with them. Very clean living .

We are seeing some wildlife. A racoon visited the lunch spot. A couple of rabbits live nearby. Saw a deer & the kids saw a black bear last week in the field next to our camp. Otie & I saw a pair of woodpeckers on the trees ouside our cabin this morning.

There are 2 Spanish kids here & we watched the world cup final on a computer this afternoon.

The prettiest city in North America

In 1597 Newfoundland was visited by the explorer John Cabot and the city of St Johns has been inhabited by Europeans since then making it the oldest city in North America. Located in a superbly sheltered natural harbour, in its early days it was the scene of many struggles for control between the Britsh, French & Dutch. The nation controlling the harbour also controlled access to the richest fishing grounds in the world, the Atlantic cod on the grand banks. The

fishery was part of a cycle of trade across the Atlantic involving sugar and slaves which lasted almost 300 years. The city was an important staging place for the Atlantic supply convoys in World War 2.I spent a day walking around the old forts, the harbour entrance, the museum & soaking up the ambiance of its lollypop coloured houses.

Nowdays the harbour has many ships which supply the Hibernian oil field off the coast & coast guard icebreakers are based here.

The museum had excellent displays on the earliest human inhabitants and the whale & codfish industries. I soaked up the info on the paleo-eskimos, Beothuk indians & Inuit. There was a real live seal skin kayak hanging up in there, the ancestor of all our boats. I am reading a book on evolution (The greatest show on earth by Richard Dawkins) & a display of the bones of a right whale flipper looked like a giant human hand underpinning our long ago kinship with that species.

I tried a local delicacy of cod tongues, washed down with a pint for lunch.

That evening I went out for a pub dinner with a bunch of kids from the youth hostel.

We then went out on a ghost tour of the back streets & alleys of St johns.

It was very entertaining with stories of floggings, important dead people being pickled in port & shipped back to Europe for burial, murders & hangings.

This city gets my vote because its walkable, has history & a unique celtic-Canadian culture, wildlife (whales & moose), very pretty to walk round, a harbour right in the heart of town, restaurants, breweries, bars & buskers and the locals are friendly & hospitable.

Next day I flew back to Ottawa on my new second favourite airline Porter. I had a chat to a hostess who had been married to a guy from Invercargill.

I bussed & hitched back out to Wilderness Tours & caught up with Max & Otis, both who were having a great time.

Thar she blows!!

Elvis lives!! He is a rock blaster living in Newfoundland & he gave me a ride in his pickup. Like most Newfoundlanders he was a smoker but good at spotting moose on the side of the road. From where I farewell Elvis it was only a couple of short rides to L'ans aux Meadows. I got a ride from the parents of a Crown Prosecutor in this part of the country, one of the few families whose kids had a good job and stayed. Incidently the population of Newfoundland is 500,000 but at $11 billion they have the highest per capital provincial debt in the country. Also Moose are not native here, but were introduced about 1900 and are now prolific. There is a moose hunting season which is a ballot, and the sucessfull hunters are allowed one animal only. Moose weigh around 1000 lbs.

I had arrived at the site where Vikings had sailed from Greenland and landed 1100 years ago & settled for a short time, approx 20 years.Their story is chronicaled in Norse sagas which tell of 4 voyages to far western lands described as Vinland & Markland in those written sagas, the first voyage led by Leif Erikson. It was previously thought that these sagas were legends but a Norweigan archeological couple the Ingsteds set out to find proof of a Viking settlement in North America in the 1950's.

In 1960 they came to l'anse aux Meadows & the locals told them of some mounds by the beach the residents thought were Indian tombs. Excavations over the next few years proved that there was a Viking village here with a number of long houses, forge & boat repair area.

Artifacts uncovered included a copper cloak pin from Ireland, a piece of Baltic pine ship plank, a sewing whorl, some broken iron nails. This is a UNESCO world heritage site & the Canadian national parks built a replica sod covered long house based on the dimensions of an excavated house & finished details are based on an intact Viking house from the same period buried under volcanic ash in Iceland. I had an excellent tour of the site with a local ranger who was a boy in this area when the Ingsteds uncovered the site. Interestingly it was 3 or 4 degrees warmer in this area 1000 years ago & the site has lifted one meter since then as this part of the Canadian sheild continues to uplift following the shedding of the great weight of the ice after the last ice age. So much for global warming & rising sea levels in this part of the world!

There were 2 psuedo-Vikings in the longhouse descibing Norse life & telling stories from the sagas, which were quite bloodthirsty. The first European child was born in the Americas here , a boy called Snorri.

The site got 10 out of 10 from me for its protection & interpretation. The ranger explained that the importance of this place is that when man travelled out of Africa 100,000 years ago one group went north west to Europe and another went east to Asia eventually crossing the Bering Strait into the Americas about 10,000 years ago. It was at L'ans aux Meadows that these two groups met again for the first time in 100,000 years.

Interestingly the Norse were in conflict with the local Beothuk indians who eventually drove them away from Vinland, with the Norse burning their settlement.

It was a southwesterly wind that day because the way the burning buildings fell & where the ash settled & it was a tail wind for the Viking boats to head back to Greenland.

I had a quick look at another nearby site which had a replica Norse longboat, which was the size of a big lifeboat and which carried 35 people. I saw an iceberg way out to sea in the strait between Newfoundland & Labrador.

It was starting to rain & I hitched a ride to the nearby town of St Anthony.

St Anthony is not a tourist town & it was a challenge to find a place to stay & something to eat. It was a major cod fishing center & had a fish factory employing 900 people which closed in the early 1990's when cod moritorium occured. That moritorium was at least 10 years too late & the cod fishery has not, and probably will not recover from nearly 500 years of fishing. I rented a trailer (relocatable home) and ate at Tim Hortons (Canadian chain like Starbucks but with bad coffee). The next day the Tim Hortons staff were fantastic & let me use the phone to organise a whale watching trip & shuttle to the airport later in the day.

We left the harbour on a converted fishing boat run by a family business with the son commentating who had a marine biology background. It was a cloudy day on a grey sea but really good fun looking and seeing whale spouts.

Saw 3 humpback whales who feed here in the summer on caplin fish & who travel to the Dominican Republic coast to breed in the winter. We saw puffins fly past. I realise how lucky we are to have albatrosses & penquins on our New Zealand coast as they are not in the northern hemisphere.

The whales were about 35 tons and completely ignored our boat. Our guide had a big hunk of baleen & I understand now how baleen works.

Back to town, a walk up a hill for a sea & harbour view, past the local graveyard where one of the gravestones was for a lady named Cinderella, then back to Tim Hortons to connect with the airport shuttle.

A great bunch of guys on the shuttle, a drug & alcohol counseller, a Pommie guy who lives in Romania, a oil engineer from Alberta, all who had been in Labrador but who had ferried to Newfoundland cos the airport was fogged in. We got on the plane & the Captain announced we would attempt to land in Labrador to pick up some waiting passengers.

So we took off and 10 minutes later were low over the sea & hit fog, wheels down, through the murk I saw house roofs, but the pilot abandoned the attempt & we flew up & away. It was exciting & how they do things in the remote parts of Canada.

We flew across Newfoundland with the weather increasingly sunny with great views of this large remote island & an hour and a half later landed at St Johns the provincial capital. There were no shuttles to town so I hitched.

I got picked up by Rod the oil engineer off our plane & an old flat mate of his, Arlene who lived in the city.

I got sorted at the youth hostel & then spent the evening with my new friends who showed me round town, went to a couple of pubs & had cod & chips together. We saw a moose in someones back yard. Rods parents live in Labrador & he had been visiting them & showed me video he had shot of the locals scooping caplin fish out of the surf & whales chasing fish right off the beach. Labrador looks wild & the frontier. It was Saturday night in St Johns & the town felt like Dublin, with little breweries, bars & music everywhere. It was all walkable. I split up with Rod & Arlene & soon linked up with a couple of guys from near Toronto over a couple of pints of Yellow Belly stout ( very close to the Guiness taste) who were also good guys. It was a great night out considering I was on my own in a new city.

Moose & lobster

The ferry journey took about 8 hours across a flat foggy sea to Port aux Basques on the south west corner of Newfoundland. We arrived in a small little port surrounded by bleak treeless hills, berthed and off I walked to the highway north. There is only one bus a day which had already gone so hitchhiking was the only way to travel. Luckily for me my first ride took me 350 kms which was amazing. The driver was an American travelling to St Johns from St Louis

for his cousins wedding. His wife, daughter & mother all flew but he gets claustraphobic in planes so drove on his own, except when I was in the car. We got on well & it was very enjoyable. He used to come to Newfoundland as a kid. We stopped & asked some locals where we could get a meal & could barely understand their dialect or directions which was very funny. Had tiggs stew for lunch.There were very few towns, maybe 4 in this stretch and wooded almost all the way, but not big trees because of the short growin season. I jumped out at Deer Lake where the Viking highwaynorth starts. It started to rain & I sheltered at a little roadside food place on the edge of town. The owners gave me a cup of tea & some cake & didn't want me to pay. A couple of people came in who were very chatty. One of them then offered to drive me to Rocky Harbour in the Gros Morne national park 60 kms away which was in the opposite direction of where this lady & her husband were travelling. I was starting to benefit from the legendary hospitality of the Newfoundland people.

The weather cleared up when we hit the west coast & these wonderfull folks dropped me off. Then a short ride, then a long walk & then picked up by Natalie who was Clement Holgates buddy when she spent a year at Otago University.

That was a small world connection on the remote northern peninsular of Newfoundland. Natalie was tramping in the park & didn't take

me far. But then the rides stopped & the big mossies started.

My plan to sleep out quickly changed & I walked 5 kms to the nearby town of Cow Head.

It was Canada day & I booked into a motel & then went for a fundraising $25 lobster dinner in the nearby Anglican church hall. The locals doing the food could have been the Alexandra Primary PTA (much older of course) & were great.

It was pointed out to me that Newfoundland was part of Britain untill 1949 when it became a Canadian province.

The inhabitants here are very similar to Otago & Southland people.

Had a beer in the bar with some locals who told me the cod fish were returning but were being eaten by the 8 million harp seals here.

Also they cull harp seals here in spring for their skins which are made into clothes & shoes.

I got up early & hit the road, it was 3 degrees. I got picked up by another American in a hurry to catch the 10-30 ferry to Labrador from St Barbe about 250 km north. So we ate up the miles & drove quickly through some very pretty areas with forests, rivers and lakes

(called ponds). But generally it was pretty barren with a few fishing villages with their lobster pots sitting in big heaps beside the road.

This guy was in real estate & was going through a messy divorce & he seemed to be travelling to get his mind off things. I saw my first moose which was awesome. I got dropped off in cold light rain with nowhere to shelter so just trudged along the road with very few cars going by. Then I

was picked up by a nice retired couple Hervy & Lorraine Applin who took me to their home in Sunny Cove for a cuppa. I spent awhile with them & they told me about the effect of the cod fishery collapse on the local communities. There is still a smaller fishing fleet here but the fishery is tightly controlled. The halibut season is only for 2 days & there is a week long cod season with a low per person allowance. All young people move away to other parts of Canada and many to the oil sands mining in Alberta. This has resuted in depopulation & in small communities like Sunny Cove half the population are pensioners. Hervy showed me his 2 skidoos, moonshine still & his blokes shed where he hangs out with his bddies. I got back on the road & walked for awhile, then who should stop & pick me up but Hervy & Lorraine who took me on a local tour of the little towns & we saw seal skins out drying.

They dropped me at the only airport in this region & I bought a ticket to St Johns for the following afternoon.

God save the Queen

On Tuesday, one of the coaches Tino & Otie dropped me out on the trans-Canada highway at 7-30 in the morning. Otie was good & looking forward to his kayaking and was not phased about living on his own in our cabin for the next week.

Hitching was very slow & I was starting to worry about missing my flight, but 2 rides in quick succession got me to the airport by 9-30. The lady in my second ride went out of her way and dropped me at the door.

Flew out at 12-30 with a very cute little airline callled Porter. They had a lounge at the airport for all their passengers with complimentary coffee & snacks. On the flight a big complimentary can of Whistlestop beer with sammie & bikkie converted me into a big fan. They have a fleet of Canadian built Bombadier turbo prop planes. Flight over was cloudy so not much to see. Organised hostel accomodation from airport with very helpfull info ladies & then bussed to town.

It was the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Navy so there were 2 aircraft carriers & approx 34 warships from a heap of different countries in the harbour & the Queen was there to do a fleet review. It seems that Liz & Phil sat on comfy chairs on the side of a Canadian ship which steamed past each ship on which the sailors shouted God save the Queen & threw their hats in the air. I think the French and Dutch sailors shouted something different on their ships.

I jumped out of the shuttle where all the crowds were & about 10 minutes later the Queen &

Prince Phil drove past. I didn't get a great look at them but they didn't see me either. There were lots of sea cadets and naval veterans around also so it was a huge occasion.

I was in a boys dorm at the youth hostel with a great bunch of young fellas. Went out on my own for F & C's & a couple of beers. Halifax feels like a cross between an English town & Dunedin cos uni right in town.

The next day was sunnyin Halifax. All the oldies at the hostel were up & about at 7 & not a young traveller to be seen. None of the youngies was in bed when all the oldies lights out at 10-30. I went on tour of a Dutch warship in the morning docked right by the USS Wasp an aircraft carrier & a huge ship. I went across the harbour to look back at Halifax. The library with free internet was in the ferry building. The

people here are very helpfull, polite & I feel quite at home. The weather was like southern NZ.

Later in the day I boarded a bus for a 7 hour journey up thru Novia Scotia and across Cape Breton Island. It was wooded most of the way and sparsely populated. Very few farms because of the harsh winter. Sat next to a very nice lady who chatted much of the way telling me about the French English history of the area. She was French or Acadien as they are called in this area. Also learned about the local politics, the Micmac indians & decline of industry in the area. The recession was hitting this area & tourist numbers were down. Had a meal stop & I couldnt go past the McLobster sandwich which is only found in this area. In the dark I saw a fox run across the road & an accident where a car had hit a deer.

Arrived at North Sydney to catch the ferry across the Cabot strait which was delayed from 2 to 4 in the morning. Rolled out my mat & slept on the terminal floor. I then found some floor space on the boat & off we went.