Day 19: Cliffs & Caves

Vestmanna harbor - on board yet another bird watching boat

De rigueur gear for tour boats in this area

Captain sneaks right up into tight grottoes

Heading south, waves too bad on usual north coast route

300 days of rain a year produces a lot of waterfalls

Village abandoned in the 60's - no road, no harbor, = no go in modern times

Captain backed whole boat right into this cave!

Few birds but cliffs and sea stacks were amazing 

Looking thru 3 arches at once

Weather: all at once

17 generations of farmers have lived here, the left side is a museum

And the farmer greeted this calf like a pet, he's running here to join the dog on the front porch!

Wonder if they fight over who gets to sleep in the doghouse?

Day 17: Faroe Islands

So the last post: "back again" referred to being back in Reykjavik, but that was just a pit stop. I'm not done traveling yet!

Here I am, not yet 2 kilometers from the airport in the Faroe Islands and I'm already taking photos! This place is green! From the looks of things, I don't expect to see many trees while I'm here, I guess those all disappeared long ago.

The Faroes are made up of 18 islands - the big close together ones connected by bridges and tunnels, the outer islands by ferry and helicopter. They lie between Iceland and Norway, NW of Scotland. Only 49,000 people live here so that means there's lots of wide open space for me to explore. I've rented a car for the time I'm here so I'll 3 full days of driving to check it all out!

I'm staying in student housing on the outskirts of the main town, Torshavn. The students are on summer break, so they open up the housing to tourists for 2 months each summer. They've had problems with my building apparently - flooding that went unnoticed for who knows how long, so the rooms are not in great condition. The manager was very apologetic and offered free dinner (& a beer) for each night I'm here. I'm cool with that. 

No evidence of anything but wear & tear here. I've a private bathroom too but it's one of those shower in the toilet kinda deals :-(

Day 16: Back Again

One last hike out to the icefjord before getting ready for my flight back to Reykjavik. They are 2 hours ahead so I don't land until 7:25pm. Can't imagine there'll be anything else of interest to post about tonight....

Day 15: Kayaking at Oqaatsut

Morning coffee with the icebergs again. It's a constantly changing tableaux, the big one just offshore last night is gone but now there's lots of little ones in its place. They get swept north, then out to the Baffin Strait, where currents then take them east towards Iceland and the Azores, or south as far as New York. 

Today's adventure had a German couple and myself taking a boat 45 mins north to the tiny village of Oqaatsut, aka Rodebay, which means red bay, so named for when they carve up their catch of whales the bay can run red with blood. 

             Oqaatsut- population 37

There we met 2 Americans who had hiked there the day before (16kms) and stayed overnight at a guesthouse, and our 2 Spanish guides who were going to take us kayaking amongst the icebergs for a couple of hours. They guys could not have been nicer - considerate, humorous, instructive, helpful. It was a fantastic day!

Coffee and cake when we arrived in their cute office/gear room

                    Getting our instructions

Amongst the icebergs - the trip included a free stick with all the photos they took of us during the day!

                                    Being silly

Lunch was included - the best fish soup I've ever had 

Tonight I'm going on the Midnight Sun boat cruise. Just a chance to get a bit closer to the big icebergs at the mouth of the icefjord and to see them in a nicer light. 10pm - 12:30am!

     Our guide explained the different types of ice

     And served us some blue ice with vermouth!

Day 14: Ilimanaq

I'm 300 kms above the Arctic Circle. I just realized that. The sun won't set till August. Just to see what perma-daylight was like, I got up at 3am to take a picture:

                      Yup, still light out. Not a bad view from my apartment kitchen...

My boat tour didn't start till 9:30am so earlier this morning I took a thermos of coffee down to the shore to watch the icebergs and the little fishing boats zipping in amongst them. Very tranquil.

Ilimanaq, the day's destination, is a little village of about 45-50 souls (80 in winter when the fishermen have returned) that has a long history in this area. The tour consisted of a 1.5hr cruise through the icebergs south to the settlement, a walk around town, then a typical Greenlandic lunch at a local's home, and the cruise back. It was great value - the icebergs were phenomenal, the village sparse yet attractive, and we were served seal soup, salmon soup, boiled seal, and homemade cake. Our hosts had caught and cooked the food themselves, and she told us about the Inuit culture and some local myths. 

                                                          Our little tour boat

                                                     Bergs right in town

                                          Massive - some large as small islands!

                                                    A bit bumpy at times

                                                           Ilimanaq 

The little chapel doubles as a 'body freezer' in winter until the permafrost melts and they can then bury the dead

                                                         Dog sleds for all sizes

9pm I set out for a 2.5 mile hike around the peninsula to the icefjord. A wall of white greeted me - the entrance was still clogged with icebergs. Our tour guide today told me that they backed up so badly last year that even the town's harbor, 2kms away was blocked solid and his boat couldn't get back to port from a day trip for 4 days! I forgot to ask what they did with the tourists- maybe helicopter them out from another village?

They're very active at this time of night, the icebergs. I'm often hearing what sounds like gunshots or a distant thundering crash as they break apart. The sun melts them, and the currents and tides push & pull them - it's a constantly moving scene. There's the occasional sign along the cliff side of the path: don't get too close to the water as calving bergs can cause tsunamis up to 10m high!

Day 13: Off To Greenland

I'm off today for 3 nights in Greenland - Ilulissat, to be exact. Where is that? Right about there.....

Why? Well, why not? I was in the neighborhood, and probably won't ever be so near again; so, why not?

Ilulissat is the 3rd largest town in Greenland, with a population of 4500, and probably 3x as many dogsled dogs. They say you can hear them howling at night; I heard them whining and yipping at feeding time and let me tell you, these are not household pets!

The draw of Ilulissat is the Ilulissat Kangerlua (Jakobson Icefjord, a Unesco World Heritage site), which clogs up Disko Bay with gargantuan icebergs, and a solid expanse of bitty bergs. The most productive and proliferate glacier outside Antarctica, it's probably here that the berg that sunk the Titanic came from.  I had thought the glacier lagoon in Iceland was cool - this is mind-blowing!

                               Icebergs coming down from the glacier, 55kms away

   Reaching the mouth of the bay the big ones get hung up on the shallower bottom creating a backlog

There's 3 walking trails from town down to the icefjord, so I took a wander and I had a hard time picking my jaw up off the ground. Massive is such a puny description of these icebergs, some must have been 100's of feet high. The water depth at the edge of the glacier where they calve off is 1500m deep, and some of the icebergs are so huge they are dragging on the ocean floor!

I've booked a boat tour tomorrow to a little Inuit village, and we pass thru the outer edge of the fjord so I'm sure I'll learn even more about it.

For now, I'm off to enjoy a Greenlandic buffet dinner at the Hotel Hvide Falk - I'm gonna try all the exotic local delicacies!

After: in addition to the usual shrimp, king crab, cod, salmon, sushi, lamb there was wolf fish, dried fish, dried whale, whale skin, narwhals skin; reindeer, musk ox, seal, whale - the latter 4 stewed, dried, marinated, you name it. And I ate pretty much it all, and enjoyed it. I sat with a local Italian tour operator and his Greenlandic family and they went to town on the narwhal skin. I guess it's extremely expensive here. It was tasty but had a hard crunch, like chewing cartilage, and they dip it in a powder that tasted (and looked like) chicken bouillon. Go figure.

                              Spicy mussels, fish patty, seal, whale, musk oxen, and reindeer 

When in Rome....