A Strange Life

24 June 2017

How strange to be sitting here in a car park on the edge of a fjord. It's gloomy and cold with rain dotting the water; the mist half concealing the mountains that go straight up from the water's edge in geological strata, each one divided by a band of grass  until they taper to a peak now lost in cloud.

This is - and I have to look at the map to find out - Fuglafjordur - Bird Fjord, though the only birds are a few gulls, and was that a Great Skua? It's not cold but I have a fan heater going to bring my 8 square metres of living space up to normal house temperature. The fan heater is courtesy of the hook-up electricity supply here which nobody monitors. It comes with the price of camping, but  it's Saturday night and the information office closed at mid-day so there's nobody to pay. There are supposed to be toilets and showers and wifi in the Culture House - that's the building with arty murals on it just over there. But it's Saturday evening and the Culture House is locked up, with a dark, dead look which does not bode well for Culture on Saturday nights in this otherwise lively looking town.

There was another van here with an F plate but they've unplugged and gone. I feel a twinge of discomfort about this. Do they know something I don't? I keep checking my travel details to make sure I've got the date right. The thought of missing the ferry and spending another week here fills me with dread - not that in other circumstances I wouldn't love to spend a week here, but the extra expense and another week away from home would be hard to take. I've even calculated the hours it would take for the ship to get to Hirtsals, turn round and get back here, and there is no way they could do it by tonight, so it has to be tomorrow night. I still don’t understand why they are doing this double trip though.

There were perhaps 30 or 40 vehicles which left the ship in Torshavn, and all of them have foreign plates so they are not hard to recognise. Most of them are German and most of the Germans seem to be of late middle age, the men with grey beards and the women - well, they are European women of a certain age. I'm sure they are all good people but I don't feel much in common with them. The others are a mixture of French, Belgian and surprisingly at least 3 or 4 other Brits.

I met one of the couples last night at the campsite in Vestmanna. The man I'd identified earlier walking round the decks of the Narrona with a confident stride, short grey beard and long grey hair and a sort of smock shirt - I had him down as a German art teacher or academic of some sort. It turns out he and his very pleasant wife live near Lampeter!

Earlier today I stopped at a place called Vid Air. It's not much to look at but it's all that remains of the last whaling station in Iceland, and there are only two others like it in the world, one in Australia and one in South Georgia. It's an appropriately grim looking place. They plan to make it into a museum but only the flensing deck has been started:

Now, it's 20:45 and I feel I should go for a walk before sealing myself in here. It's gloomy out and will probably stay gloomy but light for the next 8 hours or so, but its not raining so I'll give it a go.

Half an hour later:

Whoo - fierce wind blowing and I wished I'd put an extra layer on when I got down to the industrial area - yes, a fully fledged industrial area in a place barely large enough to be called a town. It's not light industry either this is Big Fish, with four big trawlers parked up and one just leaving. According to the guide book 20% of the country's exports pass through here.

There's a fish filleting factory, an oil depot, a shipyard and a net making factory.  In fact one of the things that impresses me most about what I've seen of the Faroes is that all these pretty fjord-side villages are each centres of different industries.  The houses are painted in all these nice colours out of pride, not to attract tourists. I detect an important difference between Iceland and the Faroes. Here people smile at you and seem pleased to see you, and that's it. In Iceland too many of the front line staff don't smile. For them it seems to be business. Here perhaps it's more pleasure or pride in their unknown country. To be fair, Iceland has enjoyed or suffered a huge upsurge in tourism in the last few years and there are probably not enough people trained in how to deal with strangers. This place barely features on the tourist trail. It's less exciting than Iceland but kinder. Duller but nicer.