I had a quick trip to Natuashish last weekend. It was quite interesting! The town is newly built and well laid out. The entire area is beautiful with lots to do if you like the outdoors. I was contracted to go up and figure out their networking setup and to help get everything working on a number of computer networks throughout the reserve.
I checked into the hotel and started working as soon as I got up there. Upon discovering some problems with Aliant’s configuration of the DSL connections I ended up spending quite a bit of time on the phone with their tech support. We quit at midnight and headed back to the hotel… only to discover that I had been locked out and everyone else had crashed for the night. While the hotel is nice and very clean, it is not run like your typical hotel as there are limited travellers in the area due to being so remote. You are given a key to the cookhouse (all meals included with your stay, and good meals at that!) and a key to your room. However at night once everyone goes to bed the cook locks up the cookhouse from the inside. I was glad that my Uncle didn’t pull out of the parking lot and I crashed at my cousin’s house for the night.
The next day I worked until early in the afternoon. We figured everythign out and got all the DSL connections running. For the next day or so my Uncle and I explored the area and did some fishing.
There’s a bit of road in Natuashish to be explored. The land is flat and the trees are nicely spaced. All I could think of was exploring the area on my dirt bike. It looks liek you could go anywhere! The flies weren’t that bad and the weather was fairly nice. I’d say the temperature was in the twenties the day I arrived and the day I left. The second day it probably only got to around ten degrees.
All in all it was a great trip. The kids in Natuashish were as happy and playful as any child anywhere. They all seem to love fishing and those without rods have managed to come up with quite an inventive way of fishing using a hook, line and a Pepsi Can. If I do get to go up again I’ll probably bring along a few fishing rods to give to some of the kids.
The plane ride up was great. I flew to Goose Bay where I boarded a twin engined Otter and flew to Nain for our first stop. From there I flew to Natuashish. On the way down there were three stops, Postville, Makkovik and Hopedale. All small isolated towns with dirt runways. The scenery was great with lots of iceburgs to see in the ocean. I then spent the night at a friend’s house in Goose Bay before heading back Home.
Rene