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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.

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.