Wildland Tours is all about sharing with you your own unique, hands-on, life experience in Newfoundland and Labrador. As you breathe in the fresh salt air, we hope you will also breathe in our culture and traditions.

We have been told we are a hospitable, colourful, and humble people; something we describe as ‘salt of the earth’. Be prepared to hear phrases like: “Whaddya at” (What are you doing?), “How’s ye getting’ on?” (How are you today?), “Best Kind” (Just fine.) Anyone that does not live here and visits from somewhere else is fondly referred to as a “CFA” (Come From Away).

Located on the edge of the New World jutting out into the cold North Atlantic and being one of the first and oldest English colony, our cultural history runs deep. Today, Newfoundland and Labrador mixes cutting edge technology with old character nuances. We implore you to come along with Wildland Tours to discover a wild land... a diamond in the rough!

In more recent years, Newfoundland and Labrador has become world renowned not only for its fine dining cuisine, but its organic fruit wines and spirits, and unique crafted beers as well. Distilleries and microbreweries are cropping up everywhere. Ironically, this reputation is nothing new but is steeped in history. Savour beers and spirits infused with water from 10,000 year old ice bergs!

From 1679 to 1996, St. John’s became the aging location of the delectable Newman’s Celebrated Port wines of England. A Portuguese vessel enroute to London found itself evading privateers in pursuit and severe Atlantic storms. It eventually found its way into the St. John’s port. Here, it stashed its wine safely in the Southside Hills. Following its arduous journey back to England in the Spring, the wine was determined to have taken on a unique smoothness and bouquet. St. John’s became the ‘port for Ports’! If you are visiting St. John’s anytime between mid-May and October, you may wish to take in the Newman Wine Vault Provincial Historic Site experience. While your Wildland Tour’s holiday will certainly introduce you to and integrate where possible ‘a drop of the pure’, opportunities abound in our lively local pubs, taverns, and restaurants when you are out exploring on your own.

The province boasts it’s having one of the continent’s best assortment of wines and spirits. It’s closeness to the French islands of St. Pierre et Miquelon for access to the best of French wines and its long-time, historical relationship of trading Jamaican rum for salt fish, that we now bottle locally and so dearly call ‘Newfoundland Screech Rum’, provides a colourful history to recount over a drink. Today, Newfoundland and Labrador is a wine sommelier’s, beer cicerone’s, and spirits connoisseur’s heaven!

The crafts, arts, and music of the Newfoundland and Labrador people are also entwined in their natural, cultural, and geological histories. Innu teadolls, a craft our native peoples adopted from visiting Moravian missionaries and now prized around the world, became an innovative receptacle. When the Innu of Labrador migrated to their summer hunting grounds, the teadolls were stuffed with tea so that even the children could help carry provisions. Handknit fair isle pattern sweaters, three fingered ‘trigger’ mitts, hand stitched quilts, hand hooked rugs, and hand-crafted rustic furniture are but a few of the incredible examples integrating vernacular art into the traditional lifestyle of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.

Some of Canada’s most evocative music and images comes from artisans who find roots in the sea and the small communities that dot the coast. The nighttime songs of millions of nocturnal seabirds and the underwater moans of whales add ghostly sounds to the warmest of nights. They also become the inspiration for vibrant ballads, melodic poetry, world class theatre, movie sets, and television shows! Traditions and ghost stories, dating back to medieval Europe, hang on in this ‘wonderful, terrible place’. Foghorns, lighthouses, and mesmerizing dramatic seascapes create inspirational and unforgettable interactions. The isolation associated with the Island of Newfoundland and the remote Labrador coast has preserved accents that are more Irish than that of Ireland and preserved Celtic musical traditions long ago lost on the British Isles. Linguists from around the world arrive here to study the purest form of Elizabethan English… “Are ye going to the dance?”