Day 85 - Faroes - day 1

Day 85 Faroe Isles

Before this trip I didn’t know much about the Faroes other than a Specsavers TV ad filmed where the old sheep shearer shears his collie instead of one of his sheep.....and fish.

The Faroes are made up of many islands (15 of which are inhabited) just as our Orkneys and Shetland isles are and they are also of a similar size. The climate is pretty much the same  if not a little wetter, they have their own language and they share their currency with Denmark. Their nearest neighbours are Shetland but it is their remoteness and small size that really characterises them as does their landscape.

The van at the head of the Fjord

The mists cling to the high ground much of the time and it is home to the highest sea cliff in the world – 750m vertically straight into the ocean. But what is very much different from our own remote Scottish islands is the massive investment they have put in to their infrastructure.

There is very little farm land, the islands are all steep sided, stepped and soil coverage is thin. They struggled to find a large enough flat area low enough to put an airport on and have settled for a site which they have had to build out on at both ends to get a decent length of runway on. However each fjord and inlet, of which there are many, has a harbour and each harbour, without exception,  has fishing boats both big and small and it is their income from fish that keeps the islands prosperous.

Over the last 40 years they have progressively interconnected their islands with tunnels or causeways and connected up remote village after remote village with tunnels. I just can’t imagine us ever building a 1.5 Km tunnel though a mountain to connect up a hamlet of 15 houses and 40 inhabitants, nor building 4 tunnels of a total length of 7 Km to a village of 30 houses. They have aggressively tackled depopulation such that it is not an issue; the bonus for us as visitors is that we get to really see all around the islands and it is a real treat to enjoy.  

Faroes - Fish in water, sheep on land

The drunk sat in his boat

After our 4;30 am bed it is a struggle to get everyone up. The sun is up and I walk around the fjord to a small harbour where I am surprised by a greeting from a fisherman who is sat in a boat. He speaks no English and although it is only 08:00 a.m. he offers me a drink from his bottle of wine -  I politely decline and then we have some sort of conversation about fishing and camping before I make my way back to the van.

We spend the day making our way slowly north and east heading to Vidoy to find a place to stay. We stop for the best ‘coffee and cake’ in someone’s front room in Erdi, waffles and apple cake, jugs of coffee and tea, meringues and an invite into their own bathroom as the ‘cafe’ toilet.....it also had our 1^st wifi for a while which went down well.

Coffee and cakes in someone's dining room

Over the hill we stop off at Gjogv and walk down to the sea. All Faroese villages and towns have some multi coloured wooden houses, some of which have turf roofs and Gjogv is a perhaps one of their best examples. 

Gyogv - picture perfect 

The seas are big – cliffs and massive waves are all around and Gjogv is pretty  typical of many of the small places where the effort and risk out in to fishing is something to be admired. Harbours constructed in the most difficult of places most of which with steep winch ramps to get the boats in and out of the water.

We move on through a 7 Km undersea tunnel to the eastern isles and at the most northerly tip of the whole island group, on a road to nowhere, we find a top spot for the van. The view is the wild seas and it in all directions but south

Jack on the BBQ

It is then that I read in my tourist info material that camping outside of campsites is strictly forbidden on the Faroes....a minute later a bloke mysteriously appears from nowhere, loiters for a while, rings someone and then returns. We expect a full turn out of the locals, the neighbourhood watch or the police but it all comes to nothing.

Day 85 Kaldbakstobotnur (Fo) to Vidareidi ( Fo)     158 Km     Total  12294 Km