Labrador's Siren Song

These totemic stones are the hallmark of Labrador's Inuit people.

We answered the siren song of Labrador. How could we not? It beckoned to us from across the Straits of Belle Isle, dark, forbidding, barren. But how could we not take the ferry across to this remotest of places?

Even though it is part of the Province of Newfoundland-Labrador, it stand apart and alone. There are only 22,000 humans who live in this triangle of rock that is 293,000 square kilometers. And 16,000 of those folks live in two towns – Goose Bay and Labrador City. The huge majority of humans are Inuit and Innu.

What Labrador has in the extreme is 750,000 caribou – the largest herd on Earth.

There are very few roads: one comes in from the eastern edge of Quebec and is gravel for 300 kilometers. The other is the road we traveled from the ferry. The boat dropped us off in Blanc Sabon, Quebec, and we drove the only tarred road east to Red Bay.

This place feels so remote. We stopped so I could photograph a pastoral scene of a dinghy tied off in a lake, with a lonely house on the shore. The silence grabs at you and announces itself. There is utter quietness. Perhaps an osprey screes overhead. But it is perfectly peaceful.

The snow lies still in the crevices of the hills and it is CLEAN and white. For there is no pollution here. No people, no pollution. It's simple.

Jo and I made our way through tiny fishing communities – mostly descendants of the Scots, Irish, English and French. The little settlement of Red Bay, where the road changed to gravel, was a whaling outpost, settled by the Basques of Spain in the mid-1500s. We visited a Canada Parks interpretative site and discovered the government had found the remains of a Basque sailing ship of around 3,000 tons capacity at the bottom of Red Bay. The archaeologists spent years excavating under water, using hot-water suits that allowed the drivers to stay down twice as long as if using dry suits. Hot water was pumped down to them and circulated through their suits to remove some of the chill from the near-freezing water.

And then we discovered Paul Comparelli and his daughter, Jo, who had just arrived from British Columbia after driving his Russian-built Ural motorcycle and sidecar across the gravel road.

Paul is a bit of a character. He loves his bike, even though he says it is a piece of crap. He says he has had to rebuild almost every piece of it. Formerly it was all-Russian. Now it has Taiwanese tires, Toyota alternator, Italian brakes, and a couple of German tires, too. He says he only get about 10,000 kilometers out of a set of tires, so he carries a spare tire and a spare wheel and tire, as well as all their gear. His original Russian tires gave him 2,000 kilometers, he said.

They stay in motels along the way and he decried the $151 a night it cost him to stay the previous night in a Labrador hotel in the back of beyond. Paul and Jo came over on the ferry to Newfoundland and were planning to scoot south and head for a motorbike rally in Pennsylvania in another week.