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!

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.

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.

The End of the Fjord

This is Runar who seems to the boss man at the campsite in Seidisfjordur:

I thought he was a Yorkshireman, but it turns out he is Icelandic but spent a lot of time in Nottingham. Anyway he was very helpful in sorting out some wifi for me and was one of the many reasons I enjoyed the last two nights in this charming little town. It has a real Scandinavian feel to it - a lot of Iceland settlements look and feel more like US or Australian frontier towns. Here are some pics.

I have lots more but I'm now on board the ship heading for the Faroes and the wifi here, like everything else on the ship, is expensive and unbelievably slow, so I'll have to sign off until a better connection is available.

Magma - the power and the stink

With two days left in Iceland I had one final stab at getting a decent picture of a Gyr Falcon. I took all the gear including tripod and extender lens and, for the second time took the long route round the lava crags of Dimmuborgir, where my Dutch birder friends had seen one, and the spectacular pale morph at that. Last time it was cold and wet, this time I arrived well before anyone else and it was warm and dry. If you've ever walked in Scottish or Welsh forests in June you'll know what to expect. I was prepared - I had extra strong insect repellent - so strong it melted the plastic on my hearing aid!

The equivalent to our midges here are little flies. They don't bite but they do everything they can to get in hair, eyes, mouth, ears and nose. I could keep them at bay as long as I was walking, but stopping was inadvisable.

The only birds I saw were the omnipresent redwings, but I'd bought the tripod so I set it up for a self-portrait. I just about managed it before being overcome with flies:

So, that was it. I'd got plenty of bird, landscape and animal pictures I was well pleased with even if the big ones were missing. I decided to do some touristy things, and there are several tourist hot-spots round Myvatn. I went for the site of the last irruptions in the eighties.

It's a grim landscape with everywhere plumes of steam and the stink of sulphur. I realise now that whenever I'd worried about a fleeting smell of gas, or held my nose in the shower because of the drain smell, it was the gas from the hot vents I was smelling.

The most interesting thing here was the geothermal power station, but the crater was pretty good.

I find it astonishing that for so many people the idea of a holiday in a place like this is driving round a pre-determined circuit stopping everywhere flagged up as a "sight". You see the sight, take a few pictures, get back in the car or camper and then drive on to the next one. Half a day of it was enough for me and it felt great coming over a high mountain pass and down into the steep fjord where the ship dock - Seidisfjordur.