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.
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