Travel Guides to Canada

2016 Travel Guide to Canada

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TRAVEL GUIDE TO CANADA E arth, sea, sky: the common elements that defi ne the Atlantic Canadian landscape have an uncommon appeal in Newfoundland & Labrador. The province's northerly position lends the last of these a special quality of light, and the water washing its 17,542-km (10,900-mi.) coast seems to change character constantly. Moreover, the earth itself is diverse, encompassing everything from daunting mountains and dense boreal forests to starkly beautiful barrens. Further blessed with a rich history and wondrous wildlife, this faraway place is clearly far from ordinary. TIMELESS TOPOGRAPHY "Rugged" is the word best used to describe the look of Newfoundland & Labrador. Wedged between water and woodlands are cliff-top fi shing hamlets, balanced precari- ously on the jagged shore. The scenery in national parks is even more dramatic. Witness perennially popular Gros Morne, a UNESCO-anointed site where you can fl oat on a fjord carved during the last ice age and admire photogenic rock forma- tions created hundreds of millions of years ago when the planet's tectonic plates collided; or remote Torngat Mountains National Park, where glacier-dotted peaks that date back nearly four billion years rise up out of natural amphitheatres. MANKIND'S MARK A human story is also etched upon this ancient earth. Labrador's Native people, for example, have called "The Big Land" home for several millennia: indeed, stone caribou fences, burial mounds and other archaeological evidence they left behind predate the pyramids. The Rock, mean- while, has its own long history. After all, Newfoundland has been welcoming "people from away" since 1000 AD when Leif Eriksson and his Viking cohorts set up camp on the Great Northern Peninsula, building huts out of the sod and crafting iron from the bog-ore it yielded. Their L'Anse aux Meadows landing spot is now a haunting UNESCO World Heritage Site. AWEƒINSPIRING ANIMALS In the centuries following Eriksson's arrival, European fi shermen came to reap the ocean's bounty. Luckily for wildlife watchers, some spectacular animals still do SiMPLY eXtraorDinarY BY SUSAN MACCALLUMWHITCOMB SiMPLY eXtraorDinarY neWfoUnDLanD & NEWFOUNDLAND & LABRADOR

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