The new-found charm of Atlantic Canada

There's a hometown feeling about Atlantic Canada. The folk are friendly, the wit quick and the pace slow. It's a place, RICHARD PENNICK finds, where people have time to talk.


Along the Halifax waterfront in spring, people step out with a spirit that the warmer weather seems to bring out in those emerging from winter.

Keen winds can gust across the harbour, but cafes and restaurants ripple with laughter and early-season visitors fossick through bookstores and art shops.

A gathering place for both locals and visitors are the historic buildings, a collection of timber warehouses and granite buildings that still bear the names of long-departed shipping companies and traders. The buildings now host all manner of enterprises.

Along the piers is the heritage of this maritime region: cutters and tallmasted schooners evoke days of Caribbean rum-runners and privateers; sightseeing boats, working tugs and fishing boats cross paths with bobbing yachts and the Dartmouth ferry.

The compelling Maritime Museum chronicles a fascinating history and includes a Titanic exhibit.

Captain Cook tarried in these parts and his coastal navigation charts and samples of his journals are on display.

You are never far from the sound of the pipes, which typify the fierce pride people from this region have in their Celtic heritage - Nova Scotia's provincial flag bears the cross of St Andrew.

The many historic buildings, churches and museums exemplify the practical if austere approach of the hardy settlers who established this community in the 1750s, but the many lively pubs hint that their descendants may have loosened up a bit.

Cape Breton Island, on the northern tip of Nova Scotia, has been a stopping place for travellers for centuries. Its people harvest the sea. The uncertainty of making a living from cod, lobster or halibut breeds a hardy, staunch but romantic character with a love of music, poetry and humour.

Near Sydney, on the cape's east coast, the fortress at Louisbourg has been reconstructed. British troops took the fortress in 1744 as they began to eject France from Canada.

It stands on moorland between harbour and sea, the land side guarded by impressive walls of earth faced with stone and standing 10m.

In summer the fortress is manned by dozens of costumed locals who become the residents of 1744. Period homes, exhibits and theme centres line the Rue Toulouse and Rue Royale and the busy waterfront.

You can talk to a soldier about guard duty, living conditions, armaments, security and food.

Within the fortress, costumed staff prepare and serve food and beverages based on 18th-century tradition.

The Cabot Trail, named after the explorer John Cabot, winds for nearly 300km around Cape Breton's coastline. Pods of whales can often be seen close inshore and bald eagles soar aloft.

The trail is dotted with small villages with neat little harbours and their colourful fishing boats. Communities boast "lobster shacks" where you can enjoy one or two broiled.

Cheticamp is the centre of Acadian French heritage, with French-language radio stations and interesting Acadian cuisine.

The museum will give you a good insight into the early Acadian history of the area.

At St Ann's, a Gaelic college features displays on the region's early Scottish settlers. Gaelic is still spoken on Cape Breton.

Nova Scotia moves to the sound of music - the fiddle, the pipes, guitar and voice - and is a centre for traditional, Celtic-inspired melody. Cape Breton Island is home to some of the finest practitioners of Irish and Scots fiddling, and Acadian music - with ties to ancient French folk music and the Cajun genre it shares with its Louisiana cousin.

Humour, charm, history and romance are the spirit of Newfoundland; the body - the land - is of stark, wild and almost primeval beauty.

Newfies call their island the Rock. In Gros Morne National Park, sheer rock faces rise from fiord to clouds; there are picturesque valleys and waterfalls; ice floes drift in the harbour.

From the charm of Rocky Harbour you can head up the Viking Trail, where moose amble imperiously over the highway and where you can see Arctic hares, mink and bald eagles. There were almost too many seabirds Atlantic puffins, storm petrels, gannets and many more.

You stop on the way to photograph icebergs - yes, icebergs - and visit wildlife sanctuaries and the lighthouse at Lobster Cove

In the early 11th century the first Europeans to set foot in North America arrived on the shores of modern day L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.

These Norse had travelled west from their colonies in Iceland and Greenland. They had not come to raid, but to cut timber, hunt and explore the unknown wilderness they called Vinland.

Nine centuries later, in 1960, Norwegian explorer and writer Helge Ingstad came upon the site at L'Anse aux Meadows. For the next eight years, Ingstad and his archaeologist wife Anne led an international team of archaeologists in excavations.

They found that overgrown ridges hid the lower courses of the walls of eight Norse 11th-century buildings. The walls and roofs had been of sods laid over a frame. Long, narrow fireplaces in the middle of the floor served for heating, lighting and cooking.

Unearthed in the ruins were the kind of artefacts found on similar sites in Iceland and Greenland.

Inside the cooking pit of one of the large dwellings lay a bronze, ringheaded pin of the kind Norsemen used to fasten their cloaks. Inside another building was a stone oil lamp and a small spindle whorl, once used as the flywheel of a handheld spindle, and in a fire-pit was the fragment of a bone needle.

Many of the artefacts form an important part of the displays in the Visitor Reception Centre. Replicas of the Norse buildings are just a short walk from the centre.

Towards St Anthony the horizon is dotted with icebergs.

Canada's North Atlantic Labrador current delivers these 15,000-year-old, blue crystalline giants. To mariners the world over these waters are known as Iceberg Alley.

* Richard Pennick is the New Zealand representative for the Canadian Tourism Commission.