Author: Amajin

It was this spot that brought us so far north. Here is where Leif Erikson established a base camp, occupied for ten years in a fifteen year period around 1000 AD. He wanted to gather the natural bounty available further south in “Vinland” (most likely current New Brunswick) to support the colonies in western Greenland. Here is the oldest documented spot – with tangible human artifacts – occupied both by Europeans and Native Americans, where the humans who left Africa heading east ended up at the same place as those heading north and west, completing a circle.

After the initial archeological work, Parks Canada took over and developed a National Historical Site (and UNESCO World Heritage Site) that includes both a museum with the artifacts recovered and a reconstruction of a number of the “Viking” huts. The ridges in the field are, of course, the dig site and one of the huts is directly below.

We know the L’Anse aux Meadow (yes, it’s butchered French) site was a base camp, rather than an attempt at settlement because the buildings are all close together, rather than spaced out into farmsteads such as the settlements in both eastern and western Greenland. The huts themselves are quite spacious and extremely well insulated with wall construction of peat, birch bark and gravel, giving them an R rating of 100. The only detail as to which the archeologists are uncertain is the construction of the smoke holes, although we do know that the huts were very smoky because the life expectancy of women (who spent a lot more of their time inside) was less than that of men and their second leading cause of death (after childbirth) was lung disease. In the reconstructions they’ve compromised and burn propane so that the reenactors have safe working conditions.

The Norse around the year 1000 were a relatively sophisticated people with complex social and religious systems (including an opportunistic nod to Christianity) and some technology. At L’Anse aux Meadow they smelted iron using bog iron and produced nails used to repair their boats. In Europe they were highly effective as both raiders and traders, ranging as far as the Middle East and Africa. And, we were told by our Norse/French Canadian guide, “viking” is a verb for raiding, not a noun. In fact, the iconic image of Viking helmets with horns was apparently an invention of propagandists whipping up support for effective defenses against the Norse. Only one iron Norse helmet was ever found – and it lacked horns.

Dawn brought us to Newfoundland. Prior to a treaty of union with Canada in 1948, Newfoundland and Labrador was a British Dominion. It is a different world, including a quirky 1/2 hour offset for their time zone (1 1/2 hours ahead of US Eastern Time).

As an island, of course, everything must arrive on Newfoundland by sea or air. Our ferry boat had two enormous decks for trucks and other vehicles. As we drove up the Trans Canada Highway after disembarking, we noticed quite a line at Tim Horton’s (Canada’s far superior version of Dunkin’ Donuts or breakfast at McDonald’s).

Our objective was to dash north (and east, of course) to within a day’s striking distance of a National Historic Site (a Viking basecamp) at the opposite tip of this very large island. So, we made breakfast at a Tim Horton’s our reward for persevering for another two hours on the road. We found our way to Stephenville, site of an abandoned Air Force base, where we enjoyed our reward. After asking a number of people for directions in the parking lot, we got plausible directions for the most direct way back to the highway to head north again.

Finding your way isn’t too bad on Newfoundland roads. We met a native of Cape Breton who explained that the difference in driving on Newfoundland is that you don’t plot a course in a circuit from point to point because there just aren’t very many roads. It’s more of a hub and spoke. You simply go out the road to your destination and back again. In fact, there is no direct route to go from our entry point of Port aux Basques to the capital of St. John’s. You must go all the way around the north of the island. It takes a long time to get places on Newfoundland, unless you have an airplane.

Even though it was a little rainy, we looked forward to a stopover at Gros Morne National Park. The terrain was extremely varied with a lot of highland freshwater bogs and different forested environments. This little toad was quite stubborn and wouldn’t move aside to let us pass. Instead, he scrunched down his little head each time one of us passed him, almost as if he were anticipating having to bear our weight on his shoulders. Odd little fellow.

We launched ourselves towards Canada, pulling out of the parking lot of our hotel in Bangor, Maine, at the ungodly hour of 5:15 AM on September 4th. We had planned a more leisurely start, but revised the timetable to make a noon ferry out of Saint John, New Brunswick, when Jim noticed that we were consistently driving east, not north, on our way to our jumping off point of Bangor, Maine. Checking time zones, we found that crossing the border meant losing an hour and – oops – we had forgotten to budget time for dealing with border formalities. So, 5:15 it was. We didn’t want to miss our ferry to Nova Scotia.

The visit of Cousin Gwen was a wonderful excuse to go back to the sea, in search of Moby Dick. She had a long drive from Harrisburg and we wanted to make it worth her while!

We headed out to Provincetown, once a thriving fishing and whaling port, but now a colorful resort town out as far as you can go at the very fingertips of Cape Cod. It was a six icehouse town, with try-pots for rendering blubber to oil and fish processors providing full employment to four times today’s summertime population.

Amanda’s mother, Martha, forgot her hat and made a quick purchase before boarding our boat. It’s the first baseball cap she’s ever owned (and a nice one!).

Dennis, the ship’s naturalist, was also from Harrisburg. When he moved to Cape Cod in 1968 there were 60 fishing boats that went out from Provincetown harbor. Now there are ten. Dennis explained the difference between toothed whales and baleen whales, the latter of which don’t have teeth, but scoop up enormous amounts of fish in their mouths and squeeze the water out through large sheets of, well, baleen. As you can see from the chart, the ones with no teeth get very, very big. In fact, they are the largest creatures to have ever lived. They aren’t vegetarians, they just don’t bother with teeth. Interestingly enough, they evolved from toothed whales.

After coming out of Provincetown harbor and Cape Cod Bay, we were on the open ocean where we saw a Cory’s shearwater. It’s a pelagic bird that never ventures over land (except to nest).

We motored down along the outside of the Cape by Truro because the fish on which whales feed are plentiful there. We saw a Minke whale and a few Fin whales, including this one. The Fin whale is the one on the chart right above the Blue whale and is the second largest animal to have ever lived, at up to about 75 feet long or 85 feet in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, we couldn’t get a true appreciation of size by only seeing what was above water.

This is what everyone wants to see on a whale watch – the classic fluke display of a humpback whale as it executes its dive after surfacing to breath. We encountered the humpback whales after running out to Stellwagen Bank, east of Boston and north of Cape Cod, where life abounds because of the modest water depth of 65 to 100 feet, as compared to the surrounding 300 feet. You can tell you’ve arrived because there are fishing boats all around you.

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Every humpback whale has a unique pattern on its fluke and a large number have been named and catalogued so that individuals can be identified in the field from a guide maintained by naturalists that organizes the fluke patterns in order of the relative predominance of black or white in the pattern, much as a bird guide book is organized. The numbers of humpback whales have increased, so that it’s believed there are roughly 15,000 swimming the oceans.

The whale watching boats are remarkably close to the whales. The whale watching industry has developed protocols for behavior near the whales so as not to disturb them and, with other naturalists and nature organizations, they’ve applied the expertise of working with whales from whaling days to now help to conserve them. For instance, when whales become entangled in fishing gear, grappling harpoons must be used to bring human rescuers and untanglers up close to the whales, just as was done by whalers to deliver a mortal wound to a hunted whale.

Yes, the suitcases are all packed and ready to go. Romania is the last stop and tomorrow we fly back to Massachusetts. Still, we’re not convinced that all good things must come to an end.

On the ride into Bucharest we passed a Gypsy house and grabbed a quick snapshot through the bus window, thereby violating our commitment to you to step through the window and not offer you narratives gained by sitting on our duffs. Sorry about that, but this was just too unique to keep to ourselves. The Gypsies are a significant percentage of the population in most of the countries we’ve been through and people speak of the “Gypsy problem.” What they mean is that the Gypsies are still not well integrated into their communities. Of course, this is all beyond the scope of our modest blog. We were told that, at least in Romania, the Gypsies prefer the term “Gypsy” to the term “Roma,” even though the origins of “Gypsy” are apparently derogatory. They identify with it, much as many Native Americans prefer to be called Indians.

One place we visited in Bucharest was the Village Museum. It’s said to be the largest open air museum in Europe and was founded in 1936 by bringing buildings from all over Romania. We enjoyed it quite a bit. Pictured is a peasant house that was half buried in the ground and then thatched so that it would blend into the wheat fields and escape the notice of Ottoman troops as they swept yet again through the area.

You may remember that Romania was the last country in the region to have a successful revolt against Communist rule in 1989 (and it wasn’t peaceful). Nicolae Ceausescu was a totalitarian dictator in all the worst ways. One of the ways he drove his country to despair in the 1980s was by building the People’s Palace, now known as the Parliament Palace (as Parliament now meets there). He didn’t live to see it completed, meeting with summary justice back in ’89. 20,000 workers and 700 architects worked 24/7 to build the palace and it is impressive in its own way. Being the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon in surface area and clocking in at 1,100 rooms, walking through the main public rooms is like entering a series of overdone, impossibly large spaces. It’s like a series of enormous train station central halls, like something Donald Trump would do if he had the resources of Bill Gates. Rather than serve as the government headquarters of Romania, it would be well suited as the headquarters of the Federation of Planets. But, that’s just our opinion. During our tour, we stood on the very large balcony from which Michael Jackson famously greeted the people of Bucharest with a “Hello, Budapest!” Some years later, he did return and got it right. Some things can be forgiven.

Having docked in Rousse, Bulgaria, we traveled into the mountains to the neighboring towns of Arbanasi and Veliko Tărnovo.

Veliko Tărnovo, clinging to a steep hillside, was the capital of the Bulgarian Second Empire from the 12th through the 14th Centuries.

In Arbanassi there is a museum in Konstantsaliyata’s House, an example of a well-to-do Ottoman family dwelling from the 18th century. Arbanassi remains a desirable place for privileged Bulgarians to have second homes.

Down the river from Belgrade, but still in Serbia, are the ruins of the 14th Century Golubac fortress. Looks like a good defensive position for those times, although it attracted a lot of battles and changed hands often. All of the powers in the region seem to have held it at some point. Doesn’t look very comfortable these days.

On the Romanian bank of the river there is an enormous likeness of King Decebalus, carved in 2004. He was a Dacian king who reigned from 87-106 AD and was defeated by the Romans. The Romanians are proud of their history as a non-Slavic people who have been in the region for thousands of years.

As we go further down the Danube towards the Black Sea, we venture further into the territories formerly occupied by the Ottoman Empire: the further we go, the longer the areas were retained in the back and forth history of the region. At a strategic geographic choke point in the contest between two great world civilizations Belgrade (“beo” = white; “grad” = city) was besieged in 115 wars and razed 44 times in its long history. Our local guide quipped that even having been born in 1984 she had lived in four countries, without moving once.

Serbia has something of a violent past when it comes to their monarchy. We walked by the former royal palace (now town hall) where winners of Olympic medals and the like stand on the balcony to be recognized. When we had passed by earlier in a bus with our guide, she also mentioned that a King and Queen had been thrown from the same balcony. Actually, that’s not quite the full story and it reminded us of the defenestrations in Prague (although the happenings in Prague were rather tame in comparison). It seems that young King Alexander I had acceded to the throne when his father King Milan abdicated and fled the country. Alexander proceeded to do many unpopular things, such as marrying a widowed former lady-in-waiting and then considering naming her wildly unpopular brother as heir presumptive when Alexander and Queen Draga turned out to be unable to have children. To make a long and fascinating story shorter, there was an army conspiracy, headed by a key member of the same Black Hand society responsible for later goings-on in Sarajevo, to assasinate the King and Queen to make way for a new dynasty . They invaded the palace, found the couple hiding in a cupboard in her bedroom, shot them, mutilated them, disembowled them, and threw what remained off the balony onto a pile of animal manure. Nicely done, don’t you think?

Our visit to the Tesla Museum was a fascinating detour into the life of Nicola Tesla, an extraordinary pioneer in electronics. He invented, among other things, the induction motor, radio (per the US Supreme Court in a ruling against Marconi), and remote control. Here, our guide (a local student in contention for an internship at SpaceX) demonstrates how transmission of electricity remotely can light of a fluorescent sign and Jim helped to demonstrate the same principle with a huge jolt of high frequency current (see the bolt of electricity under the black ball). Some of you may recall that Matsumoto uses low frequency current as a murder weapon in his detective novel Inspector Imanishi Investigates. It turns out that this isn’t fanciful after all. High frequency is safe, or at least that’s what we were told.

Belgrade is a city we were sorry to leave. We could easily have spent another day. One reason, of course, is that people in Belgrade apparently love dogs. It’s our kind of place (and the coffees and cakes are good, too).

A visit to Eastern Europe wouldn’t be complete without sighting a stork. Besides, we thought it would be nice to start out this post with something gentle and upbeat.

The tour proceeded to visit a very funny entrepreneur and his family out in the country. He has brandy and wines and savory treats and cakes for the tourists to try at 10:00 in the morning, plus the all-important toilets. There are displays of fishing gear and crafts and lots of things for sale. Nino puts on a zany presentation in which he manages to actually convey serious information about his country to his unwitting audience. Here he is sporting a Buso mask, asking to be photographed, but which he used to launch into an explanation of the two Battles of Mohacs (in nearby Hungary). The 1st battle was won decisively by the Ottomans in 1526, beginning Ottoman occupation of the region. In the 2nd battle in 1687, the forces of the Holy Roman Empire crushed the Ottomans and the Ottoman army subsequently fell apart, paving the way for Hapsburg forces to gain control over substantial territory. Nino tied the Buso mask to a legend that people from Mohacs were hiding in the forest to avoid Ottoman troops occupying the town. They were told to don scary masks and sneak up on the troops making a lot of noise. The troops, obviously, ran away and the people regained the town. An older legend that’s not as much fun maintains that they chased away Winter. Maybe that’s slightly more plausible.

It is hard to disagree with what seems to be a tour company talking point for guides: every country from time to time does good things and does bad things. Unfortunately, that may be true, but it doesn’t offer much solace for the future. (Cue the music for an upbeat conclusion to this posting.)

Finally, we’re off! We loved Prague and Budapest, but motoring down a waterway and seeing the smaller locales is what river cruising is all about. The first stop was a place called Kalocsa. It also has a history, with a bishopric created there by King Stephen right after the turn of the millenium (the first one). Right off the bus, we were herded into an interesting church (although we’re certain you’re beginning to tire of church interiors, so we’ll spare you the picture) and were treated to an organ concert by this priest peering out from the organ loft. Bach and the usual suspects.

Now that the Bishop has his residence back after the close of the Soviet era, it’s again an active Catholic town. Of course, there always seems to be a quirkiness about things. It seems that one of the prized possessions of this Bishopric is a Bible with comments by Martin Luther and signed by him. In a borderland of cultures and empires, it’s good to keep an open-ish mind and soften the hard edges of culture and religion. Besides, we keep being reminded by guides that the history of Hungary seems to be mostly that of occupation and a continual shrinking of its territory (most significantly after WWI), one quipping that Hungary is the only country that is surrounded by itself.

We moved on to the Puszta horse farm for a horse show and a look in a barn. We must admit that descriptions of this excursion elicited groans from yours truly. Of course, we thoroughly enjoyed what we most dreaded. The horses were modest in size, a mixture of Mongolian and Arabian horses, and were exceptionally well trained.

Amanda got pulled out of the crowd for a demonstration of precise whip control (oh, great!).

This was also demonstrated by knocking pegs off posts, as there were no more human volunteers.

The grey cattle are prized for beef (purportedly on a par with Kobe beef), although they didn’t seem to be too afraid of us.

These rather odd looking pigs (and piglets) aren’t half sheep, but the result of breeding Serbian pigs with Hungarian pigs. However they do it, the bacon and ham we’ve been having in Hungary have been exceptional. The sort of selection of hams that you may remember from Jim’s lunch the other day is also offered on board the ship.