Go North!

I've been learning lots. Here's some of it:

Sometime around 100,000 years ago, some early homo sapiens turned their backs on the African landscapes from which they'd evolved and walked. Or ran. Whatever their motivations (and according speed of movement), they thought that what might be over the next mountain, and then the next, had a decent chance of offering better chances of individual and/or group survival. Some of these early human travelers wandered east, populating--over tens of thousands of ensuing years--the Middle East, Asia, the South Pacific, North America (via the Bering Strait), and South America. They made it all the way to Newfoundland & Labrador, the easternmost edge of the Americas, before being stopped by the Atlantic  Ocean and their lack of ships capable of tackling the cold, open ocean that faced them there.

Meanwhile, other early humans had wandered north from Africa rather than east, thriving in what is now Europe and Scandanavia. By 1000 A.D., the Norse people of Scandanavia (with the help of the new technology developed in the Iron Age) had developed ship-building techniques that allowed them to venture into the cold swells of the Atlantic to Iceland, and then Greenland, in search of timber and other profitable resources. (When they went marauding with the express purpose of plundering and pillaging--or "viking"--these fearsome Norse were referred to as "Vikings.") Eventually, they began exploring the coast of Labrador and discovered a spot that was, thanks to the nearby coast and distinctive islands acting as landmarks, relatively easy to find year after year. It was the very northern tip of what is now Newfoundland, and for about a decade they used it as base for exploring areas at least as far south as New Brunswick, where they collected wine grapes and butternut wood. When they first arrived, the area was unoccupied, but they must have seen signs of other peoples having inhabited the area before them. Whether they eventually had unfriendly encounters with those other people that encouraged them to decamp, or whether the withdrawal was purely due to the long voyage from Greenland not being economically beneficial, the Norse soon abandoned the site. Back home, they developed sagas that referred to this territory they'd briefly explored as Vinland and hinted at conflicts with other humans they'd encountered there.

What they could not have known is that the Norse settlement at what is now L'Anse Aux Meadows is the earliest known European settlement in the Americas, and the earliest documented figurative--and likely, at some point, literal--re-meeting of the human race 100,000 years after it first ventured forth from Africa. At this place, humans completed an encircling the planet, for better or worse.

Because of the cultural significance of this spot, L'Anse Aux Meadows is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the remains of the Norse settlement here, as well as the reconstructions of their dwellings created by Parks Canada just adjacent to the actual structures of the settlement, are icing on the cake.

Compared with the journey humanity took to arrive at this place, my five-hour drive north from Gros Morne to reach it was pretty much nothing. It was still very exciting for me, though, as after wondering if I would get to see any icebergs at all after my failed attempt at Twillingate, I started seeing bergs about halfway up the northern peninsula. (Little did I yet know that icebergs would be the main feature of the watery landscape from that point on until I finally turned from the Labrador coast inland several days later. And that it was kind of laughable of me to ever have worried that I wouldn't see any and to have stopped to take a picture of this first, tiny one that I spotted.)

In addition to all its cultural significance, L'Anse Aux Meadows has the benefit of being a forlornly beautiful place with the feeling of being at the edge of nowhere. Though, honestly, much of Newfoundland and Labrador has that feeling. I love it.

This sculpture was created to signify/commemorate the meeting of east and west here, the completion of human migration around the globe.

And most likely, very literally, Leif Erikson (son of the great Norse explorer Erik the Red--and not too shabby an explorer himself) slept in a long-ago shelter whose foundation impressions can still be seen right here.

Though clearly not the real thing, the Parks Canada reconstructions of what the structures built here by the Norse probably looked like were fun to see.

And check out this anchor, which is probably what anchors looked like before people figured out how to produce iron in quantities that allowed them to be made of metal!:

I'm usually not a museum person, and don't get particularly captivated by sites and stories revolving around human history. But as you can tell, L'Anse Aux Meadows really made a big impression on me. As did northern Newfoundland in general. There were the moose, which finally made an appearance en masse after much hype about their local nuisance--though too late for my mom to enjoy them scattered at the roadside at dusk.

And there were the charming gardens appearing seemingly at random on the roadside.

I learned that people here, almost exclusively fishermen by trade, would come a bit inland, away from the cold northern winds that whip the coast year-round, to plant gardens where they could be more productive. Now that a highway (truly a single road up the peninsula, with the rest of it wild forest and bogs and mountains--take a look at a map) runs through, it provides convenient access for the people, still living on the coast, to take a jaunt inland and set up a garden, which they are apparently free to do wherever they please. (It also struck me how consistently I saw people walking or jogging on highways like this--even the part of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs through Newfoundland. I finally realized that they walk and run on the highway because there is nowhere else to do it, no other roads, just trees and water and moose and hills, as far as the eye can see.)

Another thing I learned yet again in northern Newfoundland, is how resoundingly NICE the people here are. They are ruggedly self-sufficient, asking for nothing from anyone, expecting nothing but hard work. And yet they are so genuinely NICE. Who could not love the Newfie accent, sometimes nearly incomprehensible to us outsiders, with every sentence ended with a sympathetic, "right?" (Encouraging you to nod even if you have no idea what was just said.) Or the way everyone--young, old, male, female--called me "my darlin'"? If there are awarded global prizes for the flat-out nicest people on the planet, I would like to nominate the natives of the Canadian province of Newfoundland & Labrador. For, as I was about to learn, the niceness is still there across the Straits of Belle Isle, in Labrador. I hopped a ferry...

...and sailed the short but choppy ride (past increasingly large icebergs)...

...in they grey, cold rain back to the mainland, for the next chapter of the adventure.