A teaser to start this post. What is unusual about most of these vehicles? Answer at the end of the post.

I have hired a car for 3 weeks, so I can explore more than the city of St John’s. Last Friday I drove over 250 miles north and spent three nights exploring Fogo and Twillingate Islands.

The Trans Canada Highway (TCH) starts in St John’s and goes all the way to Vancouver on the west coast. I followed it to Gander and then turned onto regional roads. It starts off a bit like a motorway, and fairly rapidly reduces in size. Most of the way it is three lanes, with one direction using two and the other one. It seems to change from one direction to the other mostly at random. In between are sections of one lane each way. There is very little traffic once out of St John’s, so driving it is a pleasant experience.

Unfortunately there is nowhere to stop to take photos.

This is a view of Clarenville, the largest place en route, taken by a petrol station and Tim Hortons (fairly downmarket  eatery chain). The towns only exist where the TCH is close to the coast. Away from the coast there is nothing much apart from undulating ground with stunted trees and random ponds. The rock is so close to the surface that trees seem to die before they get large. It is mixed woodland and actually quite interesting scenery. The road is rarely straight for long as it has to negotiate the ponds and steeper ground. It sweeps up and down a lot and has nice gentle curves.

I went to Fogo Island first, which means catching a ferry.

Once off the TCH it was occasionally possible to find somewhere to stop and take a photo. This was the site of a former church, on what in Scotland would be called a sea loch.

This is looking across another ‘sea loch’. It is typical. Houses are always very spread out. Everyone gets a view. After Gander (which will be dealt with on the return journey), there was nowhere that was more than a village, most places are just hamlets. And each place is subject to ribbon development.

I arrived at the queue for the ferry at Farewell. There was just a ticket booth, four lanes to queue in and a small building with toilets and seating for foot passengers.

The ferry approaches!

The ferry has two stops, Change Island and Fogo Island. Vehicles for Change Island are supposed to arrive at least 30 minutes before leaving time as they have to be loaded first, so they can get off first. two of the lanes are for Change Island, and there weren’t many vehicles in them when I got there about 35 minutes before departure. However lots more arrived about 10 minutes before departure time, and they all got on the ferry. When the Fogo Island lanes started to drive on, it turned out there was insufficient space for us all, and seven of us were left behind,

This meant sitting in the car for two and a half hours waiting for the last ferry at 6 pm.

Leaving the mainland behind at last!

It was dark when we reached Change Island about 15 minutes later. It is then another 30 minutes to Fogo Island.

I was staying in Fogo Town on the other side of the island, but only about 20 minutes by car.

Fogo was named by the Portuguese who discovered the fish of the Grand Banks in the 15th century. They sent a fleet there for 5 or 6 months every year, and managed to keep the location secret for a very long time. Salt fish was a very valuable commodity at that era. As they painted their vessels white, it was known as the ‘white fleet’. In the 20th century it used St John’s harbour and there are still people who reminisce about it.

Having driven north in unremitting sunshine, Saturday dawned grey and wet, and continued the same all day. It was also quite cold at 6C, with a strong wind. I drove most of the 4 ‘main’ roads and took a few photos.

This is a lookout at the start of a path up Fogo Head on the edge of Fogo.

And here is the path to the top of the Head.

From 1779 to 1784 there was a temporary battery here, reintroduced in 1812 until 1815. Presumably on both occasions to fend off any attack by the French.

Despite the weather there were dog walkers setting off up the hill.

This is the view in the other direction. All the coast in this part of Newfoundland (and probably elsewhere as well) is deeply indented with bays and peninsulas, generally called coves and arms, and very very rocky. Where there is sand it is gritty and grey. The tidal rise and fall is only 3 to 4 ft.

I then drove to the middle of the island where there are all the useful buildings including the school, the health centre, hospital, fire station and supported living and care facilities. There would have been no settlement there before the roads were built. Earlier settlers would have lived on the coast and got around solely by boat.The permanent population of the island is about 2,700. There are far more houses than that implies as it is a holiday destination, and there are many properties that are empty from September to May (at least).

I then drove to Joe Batt’s Arm (no idea who Joe Batt was), and this is the main village round the bay.

Maybe in the summer this car park would fill up. On the hillside behind you can see that the rocky areas exceed the vegetation. It was the same up most of the TCH.

It services a large play area. In the extreme top left is a pale grey building. It is a 5 star hotel, the Fogo Island Inn, dedicated to all matters artistic! I couldn’t get very close, and it seems designed to vanish into the grey background.

There is not a lot to do in this part of Newfoundland except walk or mess about in boats. However there is a very strong local tradition of quilt making. This house is the most prominent of several such businesses, and apparently sells quilt making requisites, whereas the others just sell quilts. The jams are made from berries, which are, apart from rhubarb, the only fruit that grows on the island due to the extremely acidic soil. Lingonberry is the favourite. I also spotted some signs for potteries, a staple of similar places in the west of Scotland. Though in Newfoundland all the clay will have to be imported, which must make the pottery expensive.

This is where I was staying, Peg’s Place, a B&B in a house at least 100 years old, probably built for a wealthy merchant. This is not far from the Grand Banks, which were a source of great wealth for centuries, until the fish stocks finally collapsed in 1993, after a partial collapse in the 1970s. This followed extreme overfishing in the 1950s. They have never recovered.

The view from Peg’s Place. The large grey building in the centre is the local fishermen’s co-operative. Only small scale fishing is viable nowadays.

The view leftwards. There are many churches on Fogo Island. Some have closed or are now used for other purposes. This one is Anglican.

This is the newish Roman Catholic church in the village of Tilting, taken without getting out of the car, at a crossroads. Tilting is the centre of the Irish Roman Catholic community on Fogo Island. They seem to have closed all the other Roman Catholic churches on the island. I couldn’t find anywhere to park in Tilting, but it is just more wooden houses clustered round a cove, more into fishing than tourists.

Sunday dawned cold and windy but sunny. I caught the 10 am ferry back to Farewell and then drove north to Twillingate Island via New World Island. There are several island very close together, connected by causeways, like North and South Uist in the Outer Hebrides.

There is a village called Newville on New World Island, so it is possible to have the following address :                                         Newville, New World Island, Newfoundland

I headed to Twillingate Island, and the town of Twillingate at its northern end. This makes its living from fishing and tourism, mostly the latter, though it has little extra over Fogo Island other than accessibility, though both Twillingate Island and New World Island do have some depth of soil. The trees are taller for starters.

Like most of the places I have visited it is very proud of its hiking trails, and spends a lot of money keeping them in good repair.

This was my first real view of the town of Twillingate as I drove up the far side of the bay. I was heading for Crow Head, the most northerly point on the island, as after a day doing nothing much, I felt in need of a walk.

Long Point lighthouse at the end of the road.

A good viewpoint, not too far from the car park.

I followed this path away from the car park. As it was 5C with a wind speed of about 30 mph gusting to about 45 mph, I chose the trail that kept away from the cliff edges. My altitude app told me I started at 265 ft, and the cliffs go straight down to the sea.

It loses height quite rapidly, but steps like these made it quite easy going. I don’t think there was a route at all before the steps were constructed. The majority of the conifers in this part of Newfoundland are balsam firs.

From time to time I got a view of the sea as I approached Sleepy Cove.

Keeping a look out where I was placing my feet, I spotted this in the ground. The ‘soil’ is just a sprinkling, it is bolted to solid rock. I am still not sure what it is there for. ANLS is the association of Newfoundland Surveyors and Wayne E Hodder is on their list of current professionals, and is based in Gander. The blue colour possibly means that he had found a source of potable water.

The flat area was almost certainly the site of a small community of fishermen and their families.. Sleepy Cove is off to the right. The flat area is reachable by car along a track and has an information hut in the holiday season.

Life must have been hard if it required a winch this size to get the boats and catch up from the cove. and yes, that is graffiti on the rocks on the right. There is quite a lot around Twillingate.

This is taken from by the winch, and at the end of the path is a smaller winch. It was far too windy to venture along the path as there is a sheer drop on each side. Possibly this was the original winch, as I can’t think why they would have needed more than one.

The more interesting route from here followed the coast, but the gusts where these steps turned made it unsafe in the conditions, so I chose to go inland.

I was actually walking along a track, but inland was all like this. There is apparently, a pond so a water source.

The track came to the coast again just above the village of Crow Head. I dropped down to the road and started to follow it back to the lighthouse.

It has been resurfaced very recently, but was tedious. Fortunately after a while I found a path leading off to the left, which met up with the route I had followed down from the lighthouse.

The woods are where I had descended and found the steps.

As this post seems to be longer than intended, I will pause here and continue with Twillingate and Gander in the next post.

Finally, did you notice that only one vehicle had a registration plate showing? Vehicles registered in Newfoundland and Labrador do not display front plates. The odd one out is registered in Ontario. I can’t think of anywhere else  that does this.