Saint-Pierre, St. Pierre and MiquelonA mere 25 km from Newfoundland lies a geopolitical curiosity. Canada shares a border with the US, and a maritime border with Greenland, but did you know it also shares one with France?
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St. John’s, Newfoundland and LabradorIt’s worth the trouble.
Yes, the trouble of driving four and a half hours from Halifax to North Sydney, Nova Scotia, paying C$338 for a passenger and vehicle ticket for the 14-hour ferry, eating nothing but peanut butter sandwiches for something like four consecutive meals, sleeping in a chair and on the floor, then driving an hour and a half from Argentia to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.
I’ve always wanted to go to Newfoundland (and Labrador, but that’s not fitting into this trip because the gravel roads won’t jibe with my tiny rental car). British Columbia is actually further from Newfoundland than England is! Being from one end of the country, it’s only natural that I’d like to see how the other is, but the little I’ve heard — generalisations like its very different accent, the fact that it only joined Canada in 1949, its nonchalance to icebergs and whales, its incredible natural offerings, and its cultural distinction from the rest of Canada — only made me want to see it more.
No matter how you get there or what you do there, it isn’t easy. I’ve run into cross-Canada bikers (many from BC), roadtrippers from all over Canada (primarily Ontarians, Quebecois, and BCians), and people who took the very expensive flight in. Getting around is also next to impossible without a car or the patience to hitchhike over and over again, and distances are incredibly long. Any of these factors are prohibitive enough to reduce tourism from what it could be.
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Halifax, Nova ScotiaSo I got a little too attached to Moncton (more specifically, the good company), which led me to cut time in Halifax (arguably more of a “city” than Moncton, and far more cosmopolitan in ethnic composition). Still, two weekday afternoons to wander around the compact, pleasant downtown and waterfront were enough to just barely glean off a general idea of a cool place to live. I definitely did not do it justice though, and I’ll have to return someday. (What I know I definitely missed was the music scene, but you can’t really expect much on a Monday or Tuesday night.)
I should mention two significant ties that bind Halifax and Boston: the assistance Boston provided after the Halifax Explosion (which is why Nova Scotia provides a big Christmas tree every year to Boston), and Boston’s prominent refusal to accept deported Acadians way back in the day. (Tying back to the last entry, Nova Scotia was also home to Acadians, who were deported and largely supplanted by New Englanders and Scottish immigrants.)
In addition, I’m pretty amused by the similarities – a beautiful public garden next to a green common space (Citadel Hill, which I sadly did not know was open to all even without paying admission), a lovely, long harbourwalk, the actually-argyle Argyle St being a pedestrian area akin to parts of Boston’s Downtown Crossing, microbreweries abound, including one right next to a bouldering space… Hmm, I could live here!
Within municipality limits is also Peggy’s Cove and its famous lighthouse and barren landscape, and a hop-skip west from there being the UNESCO-listed town of Lunenburg. The coastal drive between and including the two is an hour and forty minutes of quiet fishing villages, rocky shores, quaint churches, and colourful houses, and I could not have asked for a better time for a mix of fog and sun.
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Moncton, New BrunswickCanada’s huge. It should come as no surprise that I can even feel like a foreigner in my own country sometimes. Yet…it is surprising! And awesome! If anything, it tells me how little I know and how much more is left to be seen.
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Boston, MassachusettsIt’s hard to believe I’ve spent just about three years here. And my, how life has changed.
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Kandy and Dambulla, Sri LankaWith extra time on my hands, thanks to still-inefficient but favorable public transport, I decided to do things a little differently. Heading into Kandy, Sri Lanka’s second-largest city, I opted to scour Couchsurfing and found a generous host in Leslie, his wife, Vasanti, and their young-teenage son, Jehan. They live in a village 12 km east of Kandy — not a terribly far distance, but with local buses, it meant being an hour out of the city. Despite the crowded buses, fellow passengers were super helpful and also a little surprised to see a foreigner on their rather untouristy bus route, making for a pleasantly peaceful experience, zooming by non-descript shops and the countryside.
Staying with a family in a decidedly normal, sub-sub-suburban neighbourhood away from general tourism was a refreshing break that provided a much clearer perspective of local life. Leslie and his family were incredibly welcoming, with Vasanti’s amazing cooking and their homegrown backyard bananas being an extra treat, and I was beyond grateful to be received as a friend, on super short notice and overlapping a night while they were hosting another couchsurfer too.
With Leslie at work, or at home helping Jehan with his math homework, and Vasanti seeming prepping food at all hours of the day (waking up at 3:30 to start a fire and make breakfast!), I busied myself reading or writing or watching TV courtesy of Leslie’s homemade satellite that I helped him install. Between all that though, we had some fascinating conversations about something that I had really wanted to learn more about, but was afraid to ask — and I didn’t even have to ask.
War and politics. Easy stuff, eh?
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Adam’s Peak, Sri LankaSri Lanka has a great railway network with modern, roomy train cars — who’d have thought? With a four-hour ride costing barely $2, plus beautiful scenery through the mountains, it was a no brainer to take it from Haputale to Hatton.
From Hatton, I took a bus to Nallatanniya (Dalhousie), the entry point to Adam’s Peak, also known as Sri Pada. Here, Sri Lanka’s four religions have an odd point of convergence. At the top of Adam’s Peak is a footprint. Buddhists say it’s that of the Buddha himself. Hindus say it’s that of the god Shiva. Most bizarrely, some Muslims say it’s either the footprint of Adam (as in Adam and Eve, and hence the name of the peak — kind of unlikely, given that Biblical Eden is in modern-day Iraq or Iran) and Christians say it’s St. Thomas (somewhat more likely, due to his later life in Chennai, but barely). It’s a point of pilgrimage for everyone, but for Buddhists most of all.
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Haputale, Sri LankaAfter being badly sunburnt from head to toe, carrying a bag of shoes still heavy and wet from the flash flood, little sleep, and 6 hours of buses whose interiors flash colourfully like mini discos and have subwoofers blaring out upbeat Sinhalese pop music non-stop… I gotta say, just arriving in Haputale was a welcome reprieve. More tea estates? Yes please.
A small town perched on the ridge of a tall mountain, with expansive views of mist-covered peaks on one side and a tea estate and village-covered valley on the other, the geography of the town was such that getting around was far easier by walking along the train tracks than along the road. So I did just that, walking towards the outskirts of town to find a guesthouse. The first thing I notice? Butterflies, everywhere. (Given how tiny they are, they’re pretty hard to photograph.) You literally can’t turn your head anywhere and go more than two seconds without seeing a butterfly. With the fresh air and the pleasant locals, all smiling as we passed each other going opposite ways on the train tracks, I was pretty much enamored by the town within five minutes, before even finding a place and putting my stuff down.
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Galle and Mirissa, Sri LankaBoth the road and train to Galle hug the western coast of Sri Lanka, with nondescript villages and beaches (and the odd low-key resort) lining the route. I could only watch as they flitted past me on my bus ride to Galle — sacrifices needed to be made, with only 11 days in a country.
Only a few days in, I notice that most people in Sri Lanka are pretty smiley. I get on a bus, people smile at me. Someone takes the seat next to me, they smile at me. Indeed, one man did just that, but then struck up a conversation. Shukry introduced himself, and after the usual pleasantries of “where are you from?”, “where are you going?”, and “do you like Sri Lanka?”, gave me a warm welcome. A local gem seller himself (one of Sri Lanka’s more famous exports), he lit up when I mentioned where I was from; he has family in Chicago and Toronto. And that was enough for him to invite me to stay at his house, where his son was already hosting a German friend for the past month, and where he has direct access to the water, a boat, and some jetskis on hand.
Why did I not take that offer?! I’m stupid. But nonetheless, I’m struck by how open people are to strangers here.
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Colombo, Sri LankaI had little knowledge of Sri Lanka prior to arriving. A shame, I know — I always like to read up a little before I get somewhere, and I hadn’t really this time.
My assumptions? Okay, probably South Indian-influenced… Decades of civil war just ended maybe 5 years ago… Majority Buddhist, minority Muslim. More specifically, majority Sinhalese, minority Tamil. So, what does that spell? An India-like place with sustained war damage, and lots of monks around?
So imagine my surprise when I land in a gleaming airport, and on the one-hour ride into Colombo, passed mostly immaculate, new streets (unlike most of India, with actual sidewalks!) with smooth-moving traffic and minimal honking, with people laconically walking about not in dhotis and saris, but in Western clothing. Huh. Moral of the story? Don’t assume.
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