… a start this morning when the alarm went off – to such an extent that reaching out for the telephone I knocked everything onto the floor. And that made more noise than the alarm did.
I can see me being really popular at breakfast later.
But at least it shows you just how comfortable my bed is. That really was a good night.
During the night I’d been on my travels too but don’t ask me where too. Waking up like that, it had all gone completely out of my head … “well, not that there’s much to stop it, is there?” – ed.
For breakfast I sampled the local delights. Partridgeberry jam and cloudberry (bakeapple) jam. Bakeapple jam is apparently the thing out here and people go wild for it, with the berries fetching as much as $80 per gallon due to their scarcity and the very short growing season. But to me, the jam tasted of cheese and I much preferred the partridgeberry jam.
My landlady tells me that she is half M’iqmak on her father’s side and also on her mother’s side too. And that the precious metals prospectors who I met here in 2014 did actually find enough to make exploitation a profitable enterprise, but they can’t raise the capital to start – something that totally surprised me.
After breakfast I did some work on the laptop and then I went off to explore the village.
I’ve been past here on the main road on several occasions as you know, but I’ve only ever stopped for petrol at the garage up on top of the hill.
I’ve never ever taken the time to come off the road and go for a look around.
I was surprised at just how big the town is. There may not be a great number of people living here but it certainly covers a lot of ground.
Down there is the fuel oil store for the harbour and, presumably, the residents.
I hadn’t realised that the harbour was so far out of town – in the opposite direction to the main road.
I drove right the way through the town (and that took a while as I said) and to the quayside.
And at the quayside I fell in with a couple of locals. They told me much of what I needed to know.
Most importantly, this is indeed the quayside where the coastal boats used to tie up and also where the commercial boats used to tie up.
And coastal boats-a-plenty used to come here in the olden days.
Port Hope Simpson is a comparatively modern town and, surprisingly, it wasn’t due to the Resettlement programme but for commercial considerations.
Just like many towns that we have visited in Quebec in the past, Port Hope Simpson was founded as a lumber town, with the aim of exploiting the natural resources of the area.
A survey in the 1930s revealed that the area had a huge potential for the exploitation of timber products.
A really impressive deep, natural harbour was an added bonus and so a small town was created to house the workers who came to exploit the forest.
Unfortunately, the timber exploitation did not last as long as it might have done. By 1968 Bowaters had gone but in 1956 the first of the resettlers had arrived
They had come from the community of Kerry Cove which was abandoned. And other resettlers followed on subsequently from other isolated communities.
Port Hope Simpson is situated on the Alexis River, and it’s certainly one of the most beautiful places to be in the whole of southern Labrador.
And that’s saying something because there are many beautiful places around here as you know. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall having visited plenty of them with me in the past
And I might be lucky with the weather too – the sun is doing its best to peek out from behind the clouds. We might even have a nice day.
Lucky with the weather we might be – but lucky with the roads – well, I’ll let you decide that. It all depends upon which side of the fence you are sitting.
But you’ll notice that a great deal of work seems to be going on right now on the highway and there are work crews about in many places.
In five years time travelling this road will be a completely different prospect, and I can’t help thinking that this will be a bad idea, although of course this is written from the point of view of someone who doesn’t have to battle with the natural environment 365 days per year.
There’s a quarry a little further up the road and they are digging out loads of rock.
And so they have a whole fleet of these huge dump trucks fetching the rocks down to the stone crusher.
Why they can’t move the stone crusher to the quarry is something that bewilders me. That would make far more sense, for the stone would only have to be moved by road once.
So here we are again, at the time-zone changing point.
I can understand why Newfoundland would have a time zone all of its own (but not one of 3 hours and 30 minutes) but I could never understand why only part of the mainland – and a small part of that – followed Newfoundland time and not Atlantic time.
That was how come I had MY FERRY ISSUES IN 2010 – because I hadn’t realised this.
Mind you – in a couple of years time there will be a sign up at Dover “You are entering the United Kingdom. Adjust your clock by subtracting 150 years”.
After a while we cross the Paradise River Eastern Arm – something which implies that there’s a western arm somewhere.
I would have expected it to have been flowing towards the sea, which is to the east, but in fact it’s flowing to the west i.e. inland, and that’s something that causes more than a little confusion.
I suppose that it goes in a great big loop round inland and then doubles back on itself and into Sandwich Bay.
After lunch, which I take at the Transport Department’s snowplough store and where I’m attacked by a swarm of blackfly, I turn off onto the Metis Trail and Cartwright.
There’s a few things that I need to do at Paradise River, and then I’m going to Cartwright.
I’ve not been to Cartwright since MY JOURNEY IN 2010 my journey in 2010 and I have an outstanding project to attend to there too, about which you’ll discover as you read on.
When the sun comes out from behind a cloud the view is really nice here.
It’s not quite lighting up the mountains as much as I would like or as much as we have seen in the past, but that can’t be helped I suppose. It’s still beautiful.
And I’m lucky that I made it here at all given my health issues.
According to a Pilots’ Handbook that I downloaded from the internet (and I make no apologies for the spelling) –
“There is important and usefull airport in Paradise River. It is important for people and goverment of Canada.
Paradise River Aerodrome is the most important airport of Paradise River, Newfoundland And Labrador, Canada.
It is modern and one of the largest airport of the North America. Paradise River Aerodrome is important for people and goverment of Canada.”
What more can anyone say?
Happy landing
Down to our usual spot right at the end of the road to see what’s happening.
According to legend, the entrepreneur George Cartwright was one of the first Europeans to come here and when he arrived, on 27th June 1775, he was so captivated by its beauty that he gave it its name.
And you can understand that, can’t you?
Paradise River was one of the largest settlements in this area, and certainly the largest in Sandwich Bay, but it was devastated by the Spanish Influenza outbreak of November 1918.
The Reverend Gordon, minister at Cartwright, wrote in 1918 that “Paradise (River), once the largest settlement in the Bay, is a veritable city of the dead”
Today, just a handful of families cling on, although there are several summer fishing cabins.
One of the reasons for visiting the place again was to look for the cemetery to see the victims of the Influenza epidemic and to see if anyone from the 1945 census was in here
The cemetery took some finding and I had to rely on a very vocal local yokel to point me in the right direction.
Here lie Maud and Robert Mesher (Mesher is one of the “big” names of this region) who, according to the census, had 6 children in 1945.
The cemetery, despite being really overgrown and quasi-abandoned, is quite modern. And despite a great amount of searching I couldn’t find an older one.
Subsequent enquiries revealed that it’s across on the other side of the river and there’s no way of crossing if you don’t happen to have a boat handy.
Next stop – in fact the end of the road – is the town of Cartwright. And while I was taking this photograph, a funny thing happened.
Malcolm the Mountie and a friend pulled up alongside me.
“Have you come from the Highway?”
“As a matter of fact I have”
“Did you see anyone walking along the road just now?”
As it happened, I did, and so the Mountie asked me to describe him – and so I did.
The Mountie broke out into a big, beaming smile, shook my hand (he really did, too!), leapt back into his pickup (I was rather disappointed that he didn’t have a komatic) and shot off down the road towards the highway.
Cartwright is looking sadder and more derelict than I remembered, which is a shame, and I noticed something straight away as I entered town that filled me with foreboding – the big hotel has gone, and the petrol station opposite has closed down.
Like most things in Canada, the hotel has been the victim of a fire – in 2011 so I was told, and the petrol station, run by the same owners, closed down when the owners moved away.
There’s another motel in town right on the docks – where I stayed last time that I was here – but doors wide open, stuff lying around, and as deserted as the Marie Celeste. The girl in the supermarket tracked down the owner and told me to go back and wait.
Eventually, after quite a while, she turned up. But she needn’t have bothered. She could have told the girl on the telephone that the motel was fully-booked. And with Cartwright now being abandoned and off the beaten track since the new road has been built, there’s no-one else in town offering accommodation.
So that was me snookered.
But not quite.
There’s a place across the bay that does these tailor-made adventure tours and they have some kind of accommodation over there. This is, would you believe, the place that I’m looking for anyway and so I went hot-foot over there.
So now I’m installed at an astonishing price in a caravan on the site of this adventure tour place, across the bay from the town.
It’s dark outside and rhe view across the bay to the town is quite spectacular.
As for me, I eating baked potatoes, beans and vegan sausages (at least the kitchen is worth something) and tomorrow I might have some good news, depending on the weather.
Right now though, I’m off to bed.
