Tuesday, July 22nd.

The hotel is right in downtown, and the only parking is on meters.  So the hotel offers a service whereby you leave your car’s details and location, and they pay the first 2 hours of the meter for you.  Nice.  Saves you from needing to set an alarm simply to feed a meter at 8am. 

We drove out to Bull Bay where we took a boat tour to Witless Bay Ecological Reserve.  We were primarily hoping to see Puffins, but had an unexpected bonus of a great Humpback Whale show on the way out to the island.  These animals were huge and appeared to enjoy showing off for us. At one point one as on his side waving his pectoral fin in the air – we’ve never seen anything like that before.  The guide said they are very social and love to show off for the boats.   We watched them for about 40 minutes before motoring around the “Puffin” island.  We saw literally thousands of Puffins, Murres, Kittiwakes and Seagulls.  The Puffins were fun to watch.  They’re not very good at flying and take forever, ‘running’ along the surface of the water trying to take off.  They are very good swimmers though and we saw some swimming underwater.  They were much more elegant there and looked as though they were flying (gracefully). 

Some stats:  there are 260,000 pairs of breeding Puffins in the Reserve, i.e. 520,000 birds.  The population of Newfoundland AND Labrador is 560,000 (½ million), 200,000 of which live in the city of St. John’s.  Newfoundland and Labrador is about the same size as England, Scotland and Wales, Population 65 million. 

A pleasant culinary surprise awaited us when we returned to the city – a excellent  Indian Restaurant!  It would have been rude not to have eaten there, so we did.  Teresa had a dish with a local twist, Chicken Tikka Labrador – yummy!