Twillingate

The iceberg was there when I woke up. I had rented a room in a house on the Long Point headland and the landlady had said, casually, the night before — “there’s a nice one just off the point, you’ll want to see it in the morning light.” I opened the curtain at seven and there it was, about three hundred metres offshore, a cathedral of blue-white ice perhaps forty metres high, rotating almost imperceptibly in the current. The morning sun had caught one of its faces and turned it a deep, impossible turquoise. I stood there in my socks for a while.

Twillingate sits on two islands connected by a causeway, at the tip of a long peninsula that juts into Notre Dame Bay. The islands are covered in the usual Newfoundland domestic architecture — painted clapboard houses, fishing stages over the water, lobster traps stacked in yards — but the scale of what arrives offshore in June and July gives the whole place a surreal quality. Icebergs calved from Greenland’s glaciers drift south on the Labrador Current and pile up in this stretch of coast, sometimes in numbers. The season lasts roughly from May through July, peaking in June and early July, and locals track the bergs the way people in other places track weather systems, with personal investment.

The boat tours run from the marina in the mornings, driven by retired fishermen who have spent forty years reading this water. I went out with a captain named Carl, who pointed out that the blue colour runs deepest where the ice is most compressed — centuries of snow packed so tight it has expelled all the air. He cut the engine near the base of the berg and we floated there, the cold coming off it in waves, and then there was a sound — a low, irregular crack from somewhere deep inside — and a chunk the size of a refrigerator calved off the underwater section and surfaced behind us in a rush of white water. Carl nodded. “She’s rolling,” he said.

The town itself is small and unassuming in the way of all Newfoundland outports — a few streets, a museum dedicated to the fishery and local history, a bakery where the partridgeberry muffins are worth the stop. The Auk Island Winery makes wines from local berries — bakeapple, blueberry, partridgeberry — that are sweet in a way that feels honest, like something a grandmother would have made. What the place doesn’t have is artifice. The icebergs are the draw and everyone knows it, and nobody feels the need to pretend otherwise. It is, in this sense, one of the most straightforward travel experiences I’ve had anywhere.

When to go: Late June to mid-July for peak iceberg season. Icebergs can appear as early as May and as late as August, but the volume and size peak in early July. Book accommodation well ahead — this is a small town and word has spread. The NL Iceberg Finder website tracks bergs in real time if you want to maximize your chances of seeing a large one.