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Wales to Iceland by Sea
Wednesday 17 January 2018
Saturday 1 July 2017
What have I learnt from my Bucket List Trip?
Iceland is a
wonderful playground for the adventurous young. If, like me, you are old and feel the cold then a camping
holiday is not for you.
A flourishing
tourist industry is always a mixed blessing - for all that it gives it also
takes away something of great value, some essence of what human societies
should be. Iceland is in great danger of losing something it won't be able to get back.
It's cold: during
June the weather was mostly dry and mostly sunny but a cold north wind kept the
temperature between 2 and 10 for most of the month - a British winter with leaves.
The campervan is a
mixed blessing. It gives you great freedom and a level of comfort, but I found
it isolated me from other people and led me to do a lot more driving than I
intended. There were places where, with hindsight, I should have stayed put and
waited for the weather to change - something fairly reliable in Iceland. The
temptation is to use a cold wet day to drive on to the next destination. I am
though still fascinated by the challenge of living in a small mobile space so
will continue to improve the van. Would I do another conversion? If it could
earn me some money then yes.
It seems that
everywhere you find greenery in Iceland there are birds nesting, and not just
any old birds, but the most elegant and charismatic birds, the waders, wildfowl
and seabirds. It's a visual and aural feast and a delight to photograph.
The landscape is
breath-taking, and the light a photographer's dream.
The people: With two
notable exceptions, I met only those who were working in the tourist and
service industries. They were almost all young and always polite, speaking
excellent English with mid-Atlantic accents, but too many were unsmiling. I did
not often feel welcome as a person. The exceptions were Imgimar Garthanson, the
nice old hippie with the long grey beard at Reykir, and Runar, the camp site
manager at Seidisfjordur with the Nottingham accent, and also with a long
beard! (Beards - what is it with beards now? I hardly saw a smooth cheek on a
man.) I had great difficulty understanding Imgimar, but still managed some sort
of friendly relationship.
So this I suppose is
the big learn: a deaf man in a camper is not, without huge effort, going to
forge relationships with other people. As a handicapped communicator I had
largely failed.
The Faroes of course
are different in several ways.
- Tourism is a minor factor, so their society has not been distorted by it in the way that Iceland's has.
- There are no lava plains or geothermal vents so the landscape is green and mountainous - sheep country like Wales.
- The summers are even cooler than Iceland - average high in the summer is 11 compared to Iceland's 13.
- The bird and animal life is poorer with fewer species and all of them available in Iceland.
Much as I liked the
place, for as long as my focus is on photographing birds I am unlikely to
re-visit.
So would I visit
Iceland again? Yes, but not by sea! I would focus closely on the wildlife I
wanted to experience and pay a local expert to get me to the right places. I
would fly and either use buses, or hire a 4x4 and stay in hostels. A two-week
stay would be plenty unless I was with a family or in some other social situation with people I
could hear and communicate with.
So here I am at home
and back into my old routines, the future an open book. I've enjoyed writing
this weblog and all the comments I've had, so I will probably start a new one
soon.
If you have been,
thank you for reading.
Friday 30 June 2017
Home again
It felt good
arriving in Denmark in warm sun. Now all I had to do was drive 1000 miles and I
would be home.
I won't bore you
with all the details. It was an ordeal. The motorways round Hamburg are being
doubled in width and all the traffic is restricted to narrow lanes for mile
after mile. Despite this we all drove at normal speed - completely
hair-raising. I stayed the night at a campsite just south of the city, hoping
to do the last 750 kilometers to Calais in one day.
I didn't make it.
Desperate to stop driving I drove round in circles in a seaside resort to the
north of Ostend until by chance I found a campsite. At 5:30 next morning I was
away and reached Calais in time to find out that the reservation I had made for
the Shuttle was for Folkstone to Calais. They wouldn't change it so I had to go
on the ferry - wished I'd booked the ferry in the first place. They are
amazingly quick and efficient - many years of practise I suppose.
I still had to get
from Dover to Cilycwm, and get used to driving on the left again. I drove from
warm sun in Kent to the familiar cool cloud in Wales, and I was glad. Cool
Cilycwm was wonderful. I was home.
Angry, uncomfortable and bored.
26 June 2017
The Norrona en route
to Denmark.
I'm pissed off,
angry, disgruntled, fed up, bored, lonely, homesick and tired of all these
foreigners.
It shouldn't be like
this because the morning started well. I woke late feeling refreshed and went
for a shower. I undress and begin to run the shower, but there is no shower
head - just a single jet of water. I get partially dressed again and move to the
other one. It has a shower head but the heat control is broken and even after
leaving it to run long enough to get my feet wet, I can't get it warm enough.
Dry feet, put shoes, pants and t shirt on and stamp up and down the corridors
looking for another male shower - Ah, there's one, thank goodness. It's locked.
There is not a single male shower available on the couchette deck.
Sod it. I wash as
best I can and decide to blow £16 on the full breakfast buffet. An hour later
I'm cursing myself for having eaten too much. Greedy pig. I even saved a Danish
pastry to eat later.
Ah well, I'll go and
enjoy the sunshine on deck. It's a bright sunny morning with a stiff breeze and
the gannets and fulmars are gliding along-side the ship, coasting above the
white tops with effortless grace, ever in search of a meal. The Great Skuas too
are doing the same sort of thing, but they are bulky and brown and lacking in
grace. I'm looking at a string of islands and we are passing close enough to
see details - smooth green on the tops and black cliffs cut into jagged shapes.
It's the Shetland Islands and they're British!
What? How could I
possibly feel homesickness at the sight of a place I've never been to and know
little about. It's an even stranger
reaction from someone who would like to see the now Disunited Kingdom broken
up. I don't wave a flag for the British state, but when someone asks me what my
country is I say "Britain". I can't say "Wales" because
Wales isn't a country and even if it were, part of me has to remain English.
When I've had enough
of the cold wind I sit down to check on the email on my phone. I bought £20
worth of data last night - 20 megabites. I've checked a few emails, read a
couple of news articles and I get a message saying "You've used all your
data, but don't worry you can buy an add-on." How can I possibly have used
all the data? Somehow I'm being ripped off, but the wifi here is so slow and
expensive that I have no means of finding out what's happening. I have a
contract for 500 megabites of data per month and in both the last months it ran
out on the first day. Could it be "background use?" I go through the
phone turning off all the "bloatware" I can find. What is all this
crap and why is it legal? It's an Android phone so I'm being ripped off by one
of two massively wealthy organisations: Google or the unpronounceable EE. They
will probably tell me it's my fault.
It's 12:30 Faroes
time, which is also GMT. Normally I would be hungry now and ready for a frugal
lunch, but I don't feel at all hungry after my late breakfast. Unfortunately my
lunch is already paid for, and the set lunch is a dreary meat and 2 veg type of
things which I wouldn't fancy anyway. Perhaps I can get it credited to the
evening meal. The supper would still cost an arm, but I might save the leg.
Done. Full marks to
the young staff here. A couple of toes of the saved leg go on coffee 39DKK -
that's £4.60. Is it a total rip-off or the result of our Brexit-devalued
currency.
Bah Humbug!
Sunday 25 June 2017
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.
Friday 23 June 2017
The rain did stop.
- for a while anyway.
I got plugged in, set the voltometer going in the right direction,
(charging the batteries for the un-techies) got the wifi sorted, found a big
supermarket tucked out of site in the harbour, found a cashpoint at the other
end of town, went back to the supermarket to get some change and then got my
washing in the coin operated machine. Phew.
In the process I had a very
pleasant walk round town and have come to a few tentative conclusions about
this strange little country:
It's rich -
everywhere there are smart buildings, good tarmac roads, new tunnels.
It's egalitarian -
no big posh houses
It's tasteful -
Farrow and Ball eat your heart out, these are very trendy colours:
It has plenty of
hydro - the two power plants in this little town supply the whole of the main
island.
It has a healthy
fish farming industry - no lice or pollution here.(In the distance)
I like it.
Back to the Faroes - for 3 days
It began bad and
steadily got worse.
The ship was
supposed to dock at Torshavn in the Faroes at 3:00, and we were asked to leave
our "cabins" at 2. I set an alarm, and woke at the time it sounded,
so not sure which came first. I quickly packed everything up and headed to the
green stairs where the door to the car deck was - nobody there. I couldn't open
the door so waited a while and then sent back up a deck or two where I met a
crewman who said it had been delayed and wouldn't dock until 4:00 Evidently
there had been an announcement on the tannoy none of which I could understand.
I was tired and
irritable and the wait seemed interminable. To really shove it in our faces,
those of us waiting at 4:00 on the green staircase were eventually told to move
to a red staircase because the doors wouldn't open.
Finally I drove out
to pouring rain - Welsh type rain which just goes on and on: everything dark
and gloomy. I stopped and made breakfast with what I had left. That improved
things for a while, but I had no internet, no google maps to guide me and found
myself driving over one stretch of road three times.
I needed electricity
to charge the leisure batteries - with what amounted to negative sunshine I
wasn't going to get any power from the solar charger. I also needed food and
wifi to buy more data for the phone. I tried the first town I came to - actually more of a village called
Kollafjordur but no campsite and no shop - so went on to the main town on the
main island: Vestmanna, and here I am in a dreary looking campsite but with
full facilities and a nice Swiss girl called Dagmar who I
can barely hear but who is very patient with me.
She is travelling by bus and
tent camping for 6 weeks.
I think we are both
waiting for the rain to stop, which looks at least possible now. Perhaps it's
not real Welsh rain but more like the Icelandic variety which tends to move on.
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