Petra - The Rose-Red City

There’s a bandwagon around – it's 200 years since Petra was rediscovered – so I thought it was time to jump on.

If you’ve been fortunate enough to spend a few days working in Amman in Jordan, and it’s a few days until your next meeting, there probably isn’t anything better than to hail a taxi, and head south to Petra.

Getting to Petra

There are two roads from Amman to Petra. There’s the new Desert Highway which goes straight to Ma’an, before turning off to Petra and Wadi Musa which takes about three hours, and there’s the old Kings Highway which twists and winds its way past a series of little towns and crumbling castles which takes much longer. My taxi driver wouldn’t hear of my using the Desert Highway for my first visit to Petra.  He was insistent that to see the real Jordan you needed to do what travellers to Jordan have been doing for hundreds of years, and follow the route of the ancient Kings.  True to his word we stopped at crumbling crusader castles at Karak and Shobak, we ate fresh hot bread from roadside bakeries, we went through the Wadi Mujib, we looked for (and found) black irises on the roadside, we visited the Dana Nature Reserve – and to top things off I wound up being dropped at the Crowne Plaza Resort Hotel in Wadi Musa.  I’d picked this hotel from the internet – and the feature in the description that got my attention was ‘200 metres from the entrance to the Ancient City of Petra’.   The hotel didn’t disappoint and I spent the evening sitting on a hotel balcony looking out onto the hills that surround Petra – the hills that give absolutely no clue as to what they are hiding.   Johann Ludwig Burckhardt probably sat somewhere nearby, albeit it in less comfort, in 1812 and wondered what he was going to see when he was taken into the city.

First Sight of the Treasury

The real benefit of having a hotel close to the entrance is getting in early.  I was going to be able to spend two full days (plus a short visit early on a third day) around Petra, so I was first in line when the ticket office opened to get my three-day pass, and to start on the short walk down towards the gateway into the Siq.  The Siq, the narrow passageway into the city, and the Treasury at the far end of the Siq, feature in all the guide books to Petra and you might think that this would take away any novelty or excitement. It doesn’t.  The Siq draws you gradually down into the city.  As you follow each twist and turn, you hope for a first glimpse of the Treasury.  If it’s early in the morning you might disturb a few birds and the only sound is likely to be that of your own footsteps on the rock.  Eventually the Treasury appears between two curves of rock, looking exactly like it does in the guidebooks. But bigger.  And redder.

What the guide books really don’t prepare you for is the sheer scale of Petra.  The buildings, which were famous even before Indiana Jones visited, are spread out over a huge area, and over quite substantial mountains.

There are several different areas within Petra, some dating back to the Nabataeans, others to the later Roman occupation of the site.  The temples and tombs from the earlier period are in some places amazingly well preserved – the Treasury at the end of the Siq, and the Monastery high above the main (Roman) city centre being the most dramatic.  The sequence of elaborate tombs carved into the cliffs also raise graveyards to a whole new level of grandeur.

The High Tops

Once you’ve seen the Treasury and the city centre, it’s time to start climbing.  The Monastery is the most visited of the remote sites, and in addition to the dramatic façade, the climb and the cliff tops beyond give fantastic views across southern Jordan.  On the other high points are dramatic sacrifice sites, some looking down onto the dramatic fascades.  My favourite was Al Madbah, or the Place of High Sacrifice. Some of the routes are easy to follow up staircases and well-marked paths, other are much less obvious and make the map you’ve been carrying worthwhile.

People

Until 1985, when Petra was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Site List, there were still people living in the caves around the old city.  Part of the deal for being added to the list was that the residents would be provided with a new village outside the old city boundary, which had things like electricity and water.  The other part of the deal is that the former residents were given permission to come into the old city and continue to act as guides or to run stalls and shops.  They do all these things, and also give the interested visitor the chance to talk about living in the caves.  Some of the residents were happy, and able, to talk in English and to tell me that the new houses weren’t as good as the caves.  The houses were too hot in summer, and too cold in winter while the caves stay at the same comfortable temperature all year round.  Other residents weren’t able to talk much English, but were still very able to communicate.  My strongest memory was encountering a young goat herd on one of the hill tops.  He gestured me over to the little camp fire he had nearby, and insisted that I have tea with him – we weren’t able to talk but I really enjoyed just spending a quiet few minutes sitting with him before I headed back to the crowds around the main sites.

Petra by Night

There are lots of tourist things to do around Petra, but if you only opt to do one thing to complement the walking and wandering, you should visit Petra by night.  The site closes at dusk, but on a few evenings the site reopens again after dark.  You are guided down to the entrance to the Siq by torchlight then left to find your own way down the Siq which is lit from end-to-end by candles, and around the Treasury, which is also lit by hundreds of candles, local musicians play.  I’m not sure that this really gives a realistic picture of which life might have been like in Petra, but it does give your imagination plenty to work with.

Logistics

Petra is really easy to reach from either Amman in the north of the country, or from Aqaba in the south.  Organised trips to Petra run from the big hotels in both cities, but only give you a very short time in Petra.  

There are lots of hotels in/around Wadi Musa, and although all the hotels offer lifts to the entrance gates, however I think there is a real plus to being within walking distance.  This makes it easy to get in early each day, and to be ahead of the crowds.  Petra does get busy, so go early – when it’s both cooler and quieter.

Two days is barely enough to see the big sights, and get a feel for the place, so if you can manage three days do.  By the time you add in the climbs to the various temples sites around the hills you are likely to be pretty tired and foot-sore.   When I go again I’m going to take decent  walking boots, and if the final walk back up the Siq to the hotel is just too much, there are always going to be local taxis to take the strain.

Confession of a Travel Writer

I've heard it said that the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance is about 5 years.  One is entirely legal, if not entirely commendable, and the other is definitely illegal.

I suspect there is a similar distinction in exams.  There are some practises which are clearly in the illegal category. Peering over your neighbours shoulder to see their answer to question 7 (tip: make sure neighbour knows more than you). Writing miscellaneous facts on your arm in the hope that the fact is needed and that you can roll your sleeve up far enough to locate said fact without attracting undue attention.  Both of these are illegal, and I've never done either. I was always far too scared of getting found out. 

I did however indulge in the examination version of tax avoidance (the legal option) - this was my first foray into travel writing.

Many years ago I did an O-level in German (for those from outside the UK, or just too young - a school exam typically taken at age 15 or 16).  I enjoyed most of the course ahead of the exam, had a reasonable vocabulary, had some clue about the grammar and could do the direct translation bits adequately.  However, the bit of the exam that always flummoxed me was the bit when you needed to write an essay (in German, of course) about some random topic set by the examiner. Net result was that I only just scraped a pass, at Grade 'C', not exactly an academic high point.

The next year, the O-level in French loomed.  Again I knew some vocab, I knew some grammar, but this time I wasn't going to let the essay get in the way.  Whatever the topic set by the fiendish examiner, it was going to include a journey. Monsieur Bleu was going to get on a train (or possibly a bus), the weather was going to be good (or possibly wet), he was going to buy a ticket (and get some change), he'd be able to reflect on what he was seeing out of the window, and possibly on some of his fellow passengers (which might well include either a cat or a dog).  And both he and I would satisfactorily complete our journeys. He to the bank or supermarket or beach, me to a significantly better grade than the previous year. Result, a first bit of creative travel writing. And, since you ask, a Grade 'A'.

This recollection of "travel writing" came back to me this morning, as I wandered round the fascinating 'Writing Britain' exhibition at the British Library.  The collection of items  'exploring literature and place' made me think about how much writing is actually travel writing.  Some strands of travel writing are about the journey - and I don't just mean Monsieur Bleu's bus trip - others are about place and experience of place.  A good writer is able to transport the reader into that other place, which is certainly the goal of a lot of travel writing.  The travel writer tries to capture place and experience, the fiction writer is trying to do that too, and to overlay a plot round the place and experience too.

The exhibition at the British Library covers almost all aspects of British life from rural living to 'dark satanic mills', the development of the suburbs and life at the coast.  It also covers, geographically, almost all of the British Isles, from Daphne du Maurier and Sherlock Holmes in the south west of England, via Shakespeare in the Forest of Arden, George Orwell at the end of Wigan Pier and Robert Burns at the Falls of Foyers.  My only disappointment was the very limited mention of the Shetland Islands.  The only reference I spotted was 'The Gray Wolf' by George MacDonald, which I've not read, but I gather includes Orkney, Shetland and werewolves.  And I thought the only wildlife I needed to worry about on Shetland was the occasional territorial bonxie.

My Ten Favourite Little Islands

National Geographic Traveller put together a long list of islands that included lots of my favourites.  Trip Advisor sent a list round recently that I really didn't agree with.  So, here's my list of ideal little islands to visit, and to paraphrase (very slightly) a work colleague from earlier this year, “Ross was never going to pick a warm Caribbean island”.

These are my favourite little islands – they’re mostly remote, and mostly uncrowded, sometimes icy and they all appear in my picture library.

I could put together another list of the bigger islands I've been to, and I certainly could put together an even longer list of remote islands I haven’t yet been to.  In the meantime and in no particular order, my ten favourite little islands.

Streymoy, Faroe Islands

This is the biggest island in the Faroe Islands group, looks and feels like a Shetland-Iceland hybrid, which is geographically apt.  Very friendly people, despite an unfortunate (in my mind) line in whaling, with a very long lived democratic tradition, and one of the few grass-roofed parliament buildings in the world.  You can get to the Faroe Islands either by boat or plane – but pretty much every visit to the islands is going to need to be preceded by a trip to Denmark.

Austvågøy, Lofoten Islands

The Lofoten Islands are a string of mountainous little islands off the coast of Norway – from a distance it’s easy to see why there are collectively called the Lofoten Wall, they stretch across the coastline appearing to block the way north. Austvågøy is one of the bigger islands and it’s rugged mountain interior is ringed by fantastically picturesque little villages.  There are lots of ways to get to the Lofoten Islands  - the Norwegian Coastal Steamer stops here every day on both northerly and southerly journeys, there are a couple of little airports, and if you are so inclined and have the time you can get here by road too.  The Norwegian government recently built a series of bridges and tunnels to connect the islands to the Norwegian mainland.

Mainland, Shetland

This probably only just fits the little island designation – but I wasn’t ever going to leave the main island on Shetland off a list of my favourite islands. Despite holding most of the Shetland Islands 22,000 people Mainland rarely feels crowded, and there are plenty of places where you can be far away from people with only the wind (of which there is plenty) and sea birds (of which there are also plenty) for company.  In days gone by Shetland was pretty cut off from Scotland, but these days there are regular flights to the southern end of the mainland from Aberdeen Glasgow and Edinburgh, and there is an overnight ferry to and from Aberdeen every day.  There's even an occasional flight to Bergen in Norway if you want fit Shetland into you  bigger Scandinavia tour.

Barra, Outer Hebrides

Barra is at the southern end of the Outer Hebrides, and is a delightful little island.  One of the unique features is that there is an airport but no runway. The little planes from the mainland take off and land on the beach (tide permitting).  If you don’t fancy tangling with the tides, the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry turns up two or three times a week.

East Falkland, Falkland Islands

East Falkland is one of the two big islands in the Falkland group.  There are lots of little islands around that are the main lure for the wildlife watching tourist, but pretty much everyone turns up to have a look at Stanley – the main town in the Falklands – at some point in a visit to the islands.  Most people get here on cruise ships, and get to spend an hour or two around the harbour visiting the local pubs (there are several) and the souvenir shops (there are many).   A little further afield is the most accessible King Penguin colony in the world, at Volunteer Point about 2 hours drive from Stanley.  Accessible is a relative term here – the first hour of the drive is on a gravel road, the second hour needs a decent four-wheel drive vehicle and a driver who knows how to use it. If you want to get here other than on a cruise ship, you only have two options, flying on an RAF charter flight from the UK (8000 miles with a refuelling stop on Ascension Island), or on the weekly scheduled flight from Santiago in Chile.

South Georgia

If the Falkland Islands aren’t remote enough, the next stop is South Georgia.  To get here you either need to get posted by the British Antarctic Survey, or buy a berth on one of the small number of expedition cruise ships that visit here each year.  It’s about 72 hours sailing on an expedition ship to get here from the Falklands across what can be pretty entertaining seas.  The reward of getting here, in the summer at least, is unbelievable numbers of seals, penguins and lots of other seabirds. Until you’ve shared a beach with 400,000 King Penguins and several hundred very grumpy fur seals, you can’t really imagine what it’s going to look, sound and smell like.  Neither the penguins nor the fur seals are frightened of tourists. The penguins are just curious.  The fur seals seem to have a vague recollection that we tried to make them all into fur coats in the 1920's, and if then can get close enough to take a revenge bite of a tourist they will happily do so.

Alderney, Channel Islands

One of the smaller of the Channel Islands, and arriving here is a bit like stepping back in time. The island has a remarkable resident to restaurant ratio, and from any point on the lovely coast path you are only a few hundred yards from a good lunch.  The only real downside is that the island probably isn’t big enough to walk off the lunches without getting dizzy. The easiest way to get to Alderney is on one of the little yellow planes operated by Aurigny, the Channel Island airline – the runway was a grass field until recently, but it’s now a ‘proper’ runway, and much less fun to land on.

Svalbard

The most northerly of my islands is Svalbard.  This is close to 80 degrees north, and until recently it was mainly a mining colony.   Nowadays most visitors turn in the hope of seeing polar bears and other wildlife in the amazing clear northern air.  Despite the remote location and the fact that it’s dark for several months in the winter, there are regular flights each day from mainland Norway.

Lewis, Outer Hebrides

This is at the other end of the Outer Hebrides to Barra – and is a much bigger island.  This means that there is space to fit in more beaches, more cliffs and even the magnificent Standing Stones at Callanish.  These may not be quite as big or well known as Stonehenge, but they are in a much more dramatic setting.  Lewis is comfortably the biggest of the Outer Hebrides and main town Stornaway is able to offer both a little airport and a regular ferry service across the Minch to mainland Scotland.

Fair Isle, Shetland

  

The Shetland Islands spread over quite a large area but the extreme southern outpost is Fair Isle, twenty-five miles south of the Shetland mainland, and just visible on a good day.  The island is owned by the National Trust for Scotland and occupied by less than 100 people and (in the summer at least) by an awful lot of seabirds.  The main reason most people visit is to see the birds and to stay at the Fair Isle Bird Observatory.  The poor sailor will need to get to the island on one of the weather dependent little planes run by the Shetland Islands Council, the good sailor (and those foiled by the weather) will need to run the gauntlet of the Good Shepherd IV as it crosses the Noost south of the Shetland mainland.  This bit of sea is where the currents from the North Sea and the Atlantic mingle – and it can be a challenge to the most hardened seafarer.

Travels with a D200

I've had my trusty Nikon D200 for nearly five years.  It's taken close to 45,000 images (some of them quite good). It's clocked up some 120,000 airmiles. It's got a few scratches on the body and a speck or two on the sensor.  It's time it went back to Nikon for a little tlc, and to get set up for a few more years of travel.

My D200 wasn't my first foray into digital photography.  I'd already been using both a Fuji compact and Nikon D70 for a couple of years, but the D200 was a big stepping stone.  It was, at the time at least, a significant investment but more importantly it marked my final  transition from film. When I collected my D200, I traded in a big bag of film-based kit.  I had real qualms about getting rid of my film camera collection, but given that it's main purpose over the previous couple of years had been occupying cupboard space and gathering dust it was undoubtedly the right thing to do.

So where has the D200 been to while it's been in my camera bag. 

Port Lockroy, Antarctica

For several years it was my main camera, with the D70 lurking in the bottom of the bag as a spare.  During this time it got as far south as the Antarctic, north to Tromso, east to Beijing and west to Seattle.  It's role as main camera meant that it made it into my bag on any trip where I thought there were likely to be interesting photo opportunities - but it did miss out on quite a few short trips, and on work trips, where the itinerary fitted the 'plane-hotel-plane' model.

Black-browed Albatross, Falkland Islands

In early 2010, having been top dog in my camera bag for two years, the D200 acquired a serious rival, a D700.  This addition made a big change in how the D200 got used, but it didn't mean that it got relegated to being just a spare.  While I was carrying the D70 and the D200, I tended to regard the D70 as little more than a (mosty unused) backup.  I carried the D70 round the Falkland Islands in 2009 simply because I could run it on standard AA batteries if I wound up somewhere where I couldn't charge the normal batteries, but hardly used it. This wasn't the fate that has met the D200.

Polar Bears, Svalbard

With the arrival of the D700, the two cameras became a complementary pair.  It helped that they used the same memory cards and the same batteries, but the real bonus was that they had different sensors. The D200 and D70 have small (DX in Nikon-speak) sensors making them great with longer lenses, but less versatile with short, wide-angle lenses.  The D700 has a full-frame (FX in Nikon) sensor, which gives fantastic image quality in all light conditions and great wide-angle images but doesn't have quite the same reach as the D200.  This pairing means that I've moved to the approach, on most days at least, of trying to figure what I'm going to be during the day, and setting up each camera with an appropriate lens for the day.  Usually this has meant putting a longer lens on the D200, and a wide-angle zoom on the D700.  This double act meant that I can easily swap between long and wide-angle shooting (and back again) without needing swap lenses in the back of a dusty landrover, or in a bobbing zodiac, meaning both faster change-overs and minimising the sensor muck-collecting opportunities.  This means that the D200 can still claim some of the most memorable images in my recent collections - from Svalbard, South Georgia and Sri Lanka.

King Penguins, South Georgia

As the D200 (certainly the most heavily used camera I've owned) has started to get longer in the tooth, I started to think about whether it's time to replace it and, if so, with what.  Nikon have recently launched the D800, and there are D600 rumours, both with FX sensors, and the D7000 (with a DX sensor) has has wonderful reviews.  Any of these would be great company for the D700.  I've found, since I've been carrying both D200 and D700, that this DX/FX combination is an ideal one for the mix of wildlife and landscape photography I like to do. 

In the short term at least, I think I'll be hanging on to the D200.  Might revisit the decision when it reaches 100,000 frames.

All the images in this post were taken with my D200, except one.

A Career break is for life, not just for six months.

I've been back from my career break for a couple of months now, and it seems like a good time to reflect on the experience, and particularly on coming back.

When I first returned I people expressed surprise that I'd came back at all, and then sympathised that I had to come back.  However, recently I've started to hear more direct questions like "Have you settled down again yet?", "Have you got that out of your system?" and "Does it feel like you've never been away?".  The answers to these questions are, in order, No, No and No.

More Penguins

A holiday might well "wear off" after a few weeks, but I think a long period of time doing other things, rather than just being on holiday, does have a deeper, more long lasting impact. There is plenty of writing around about career breaks, and lots of that is about the mechanics and emotions of re-entry.  For me, so far at least, re-entry has been in three phases.

There's the denial phase.  This involved floating above the job rather than engaging with it and spending lots of time talking to people about what I'd been doing, usually in the guise of finding out what they had been doing in my absence. This phase lasted for a couple of weeks, at the end of which I probably annoyed people sufficiently with my penguin anecdotes for them to start to wish that I was about to go off and spend a bit more time with them.

The Joys of the Commute

The second phase is the resentment phase.  I’ve resented having to drop back into a routine. I’ve resented being told what to do.  I’ve resented not having time to act on the creative ideas bubbling up out of my travels.  And most of all I’ve resented the commuting time.  I had always recognised that I wasn't going to enjoy coming back to the regular drive between Oxford and Milton Keynes, but I'd rationalised that away by telling myself that when I came back it would be summer and there wouldn't be so much traffic around.  I had failed to recognised that although we'd moved to British Summer Time, the entire population hadn't committed to taking extended summer vacations, and that the commuter traffic in April and May is always heavy as most folks work through this time before taking summer holidays in July and August.  I fear that the resentment was pretty obvious to those around me both at work and at home.  At one level I was trying to pretend I was still away, and that there was the space to do the job (which I was now re-engaging with) and to do the more free-spirited stuff I'd been able to do before.  The attempt to do both of these on top of the inevitable tiredness induced by the commute was always going to turn into frustration and resentment.

Shetland - the nearest Wilderness?

And then there's the third phase, which is where I am now.  I hesitate to the use the label enlightenment, but as I’ve got past the resentment, I started to think about how to balance the demands of working life with the uplift of being out in the wilderness.  This step involves recognizing that there are parallel worlds around.  There’s a work world – of meetings, reports, busy-ness and commutes, and there’s a real world – of wilderness, photographs, peacefulness and being in the place.  Both universes exist and barring a big win on the lottery life will, for a few years yet, need to include some of each.  The trick, rather than trying to pretend that southern England is in some way satisfactory wilderness, for me is to find ways of swapping between the two realities.  Being able to ‘park’ the real routine and pick up the work routine is as important as being able to do the reverse.  The really difficult and possibly most frustrating option is trying to juggle the two worlds together, which is what I’ve probably been trying to do for the last few years.

The career break has given me both a long glimpse of the real universe, and the time and space to think about how to best to appreciate it.  When I’m in the office I will carry on thinking about the day job, but when I get out into the real world I expect to leave the office far behind.   My plan for the next few years is going to be about how I can balance (or re-balance) the time I spend in each of the realities.

UPDATE: 10 months after return. I have finally decided that it's time to look seriously at rebalancing so that there can be more real world and less office world.  At the start of January I resigned from my job at The Open University, and I'm due to finish there at the end of March.  Exactly 12 months after I got back from the Temporary Escape.  So in the spirit of the rest of this piece. Phase Four. Escape.

And I've added a Plan B post - my thoughts on what happens next.

Just Another Tuesday: Photographing A Monkey's Birthday

Tuesday 15th May 2012

This was just a routine (working) Tuesday - but it was also Aday - a day when photographers of all sorts from all over the world were being urged to capture their perspectives on life.

I thought I'd use this as an excuse to take a few more pictures than I would usually take on a working Tuesday. I also discovered that phenomenon of rain falling while the sun is shining has a name - in the UK at least it's a "Monkey's Birthday".

24 pictures from today.

 6:57 Real shirt on - must be a workday.

 7:05 Breakfast - at least the first meal of the day is healthy.

 7:39 Start of the morning commute - this is the hardest part to get back into after my six months away.

 7:41 It's bin day on our part of Oxford - it's a recycling week, so it's the blue and brown bins.

 8:26 En route to work - some of the commute involves sitting in a nearly stationary queue of cars.

 8:46 Still en route to work - other bits of the commute involve sitting in a nearly stationary queue of cars on a dual carriageway.

 9:02 Learning and Teaching Solutions at the Open University - only a couple of minutes later than intended (probably something to do with taking photos in the morning).

 9:08 Desk view.

 12:20 From the office window - storm clouds over the Open University Library.

 12:42 My lunchtime walk - storm clouds look even stormier over the Institute of Educational Technology.

 12:43 And stormier still over the Church

 12:45 Hiding in the car to escape the seasonal lunchtime hailstorm.

 13:12  After the hailstorm - Walking along the river Ouzel on the edge of the OU Campus. I suspect this canoe was washed here during the floods a couple of weeks ago.

 13:16 Sunshine and clouds

 13:18 Along the Ouzel, between the showers

 13:28 Past the Hub - the main OU refectory and coffee shop. Still storm clouds around.

 13:30 Educational Inspiration.  A statue carved form an old plane tree that stood beside Walton Hall on the OU campus.

 17:42 After an afternoon of meetings (both face to face and alone) past the OU sign towards the car park.

 17:43 Not quite empty.  Wasn't the first to arrive this morning, but wasn't the first to leave either.

18:12 Back in the queues.  Almost as much traffic in the evening as in the morning.

 18:53 Home again.

 18:59 Other half got home first, so the tea is already underway. :-)

 19:02 Although I suspect Dora may have her eyes on the turkey curry too.

19:15 But there was time for a brief walk round the still wet, but sunny garden.

Faroe Islands February 2012

It really ought to be easier to get here.

Torshavn, the picturesque capital town of the Faroe Islands is only 230 miles from Lerwick, the only slightly less picturesque capital town of Shetland.  There used to be a boat between the two - but that got cancelled, for reasons that I've never seen adequately explained, a few years ago. There used to be a plane between the two, but that also stopped a couple of years ago apparently it's foggy too often in the summer in Shetland.  Nowadays to get to the Faroe Islands from Shetland requires a long (and expensive) detour via the UK mainland and Denmark.  Of course my route had been even more circuitous taking in Oxford, Stockholm, Oslo, Bergen, Tromso, Kirkenes, Narvik and Gothenburg before I got to the Atlantic Airways check-in desk at Copenhagen Airport.

I really couldn't help but compare the folks in the departure lounge with the folks I usually see in the Edinburgh departure lounge on my way up to Shetland.  All the regulars were there - the business people and the local politicians, the shoppers and families loaded with packages (does any airline - other than Ryanair- enforce the one bag rule?) and a few tourists (February can't by any measure be called peak tourist season) usually equally laden with backpacks and camera bags.  The other similarity is the hospital cases - it's not unusual to see people on Shetland flights on their way to or from hospitals on the Scottish mainland, and although there weren't any obvious hospital cases on my flight to Torshavn I did get re-seated so that the plane could be reconfigured to carry a stretcher which was going to be needed on the return flight into Copenhagen.

The flight from Copenhagen takes a little over 2 hours which is enough time for Atlantic Airways (the Faroe national airline) to offer sandwiches and drinks and (unlike Loganair) the duty-free trolley, definitely more traditonal full-service rather than budget airline.  The flight route crosses just north of Shetland - heightening the sense that it should be easier to get between there and Faroe.

The approach into the airport at Vagar immediately triggered déjà vu moments. At one moment the similarity with Shetland was obvious, and at other moments I was back on the approach to Keflavik in Iceland.  Once on the ground, it was clear that the airport was more like Sumburgh than Keflavik (albeit with a duty free shop attached).  It was easy to distinguish between the locals returning home and the tourists arriving.  The arriving tourists stood around waiting for the baggage carousel to come to life, and the locals all piled into duty free to stock up before facing up the Scandinavian-priced booze elsewhere on the islands.

My bus ride from the airport again had Shetland moments to it.  At the airport lots of people climbed on having stowed cases and backpacks under the bus, however as soon as the bus left the airport it immediately became the local bus service into Torshavn, stopping in lots of villages to let school kids and housewives get into town.  The big difference between modern-day Faroe and Shetland became apparent about 20 minutes into the journey as we plunged into a long tunnel. Like Shetland, the Faroes is an archipelago of both large and small islands, but unlike Shetland almost all of the main populated islands here now have fixed links using tunnels or bridges.  The airport is on the island of Vagar, and where there used to be a ferry to the 'big' island, Streymoy, there is now a tunnel.  The building of the bridges and tunnels has made a huge difference to the islands, the often weather delayed journeys between the islands heightened the isolation of, particularly, the more remote communities.  The links have made everything feel closer together.  The tunnel digging hasn't just made it easier to get from one island to the next, it has also allowed communities on opposite sides of the steep mountains to reach each other much more readily.

In any group of remote islands (and I've been to several over the last few months) weather is a big deal - and the Faroe Islands are definitely in the front line when it comes to facing up to the north Atlantic storms.  Over four days I saw every weather variant bar snow.  I saw bright sunshine. I saw torrential rains. I saw steady drizzle. And I saw winds strong enough both rip off car doors (if you weren't careful) and to ensure that water 'falls' went upwards.  But when the clouds did clear, it was really easy to see the scenic attractions of the Faroe Islands; long narrow twisting fjords separating steep rocky mountain peaks.

The main traditional industries in Faroe are, like so many remote islands, based on the surrounding seas.  I don't think there is (yet) an oil or gas element to the economy, but fishing has always been a big deal.  Fishing in the north Atlantic certainly doesn't fall into the catalogue of safe jobs, and every community round the Faroe coastline seems to have a legacy of fishing disasters.  In many of the villages this is symbolised by statues, some poignant representations of waiting women and children looking out to sea, in other cases showing boats being dragged down (or carried aloft) by shoals of fishes and in yet more cases modern statues commemorating both local fishermen and other fishing communities further afield. One of the really dramatic aspects of the memorials are the long lists of names associated with particular disasters.  When you stand in a little village with no more than 10 or 20 houses looking at a list of 20 young (and not so young) men, you can only imagine what trauma the accident would have had on the community.

One other maritime tradition in the Faroe Islands that is pretty hard to stomach, particularly since it is still going happening, is whaling.  I saw no direct evidence of it while I was there, but the grindadrap does still happen.  This is a whale hunt where pilot whales are driven onto a beach and killed in huge numbers.  Shockingly there is a Shetland parallel here.  There are photographs in the museum in Lerwick showing hunts of this sort happening near our house in southern Shetland in the early years of the 20th Century.  The only real defence is that at least the Shetland folk have stopped doing it now. As an outsider it's very easy to dismiss the hunt as barbaric and out-dated, but it's still important as a Faroese tradition, albeit one that I'd be delighted to see stopped.

I had time to explore the two biggest Faroe islands - Streymoy and Eysturoy - in addition to having a brief look at Vagar, as I went to and from the airport.  The strongest memories are of the remote villages at the north and south ends of each island – such as Eidi and Gjogv on Eysturoy and Tjornuvik and Kirkjubour on Streymoy.

One thing that continued to surprise me throughout my travels in Scandinavia this spring is the Second World War history.  I knew that Norway and Denmark were both occupied, I'd heard of Vidkun Quisling and I was vaguely aware (presumably from Sunday afternoon movies) of the 'heavy water' story and the Heroes of Telemark, but that was about the extent of my knowledge.  There's a much longer blog post in there somewhere, but suffice to say that my knowledge of the Faroe Islands  wartime history was definitely very sketchy.  The islands were occupied by the British in early 1940 as a precaution, just after Germany invaded mainland Denmark.  Before the war, the Faroes were effectively a 'county' within Denmark, after the British invasion the islands needed to assume a lot more autonomy.  In many ways this was forced on the Faroese at the time - to the extent that British warships tracked down Faroese boats and ordered them to get rid of their Danish flags and replace them with Faroe ones.  At the end of the war this autonomy was (eventually) formalised after Denmark regained its independence.

There is still a legacy of the British invasion, although the practice of driving on the left on Vagar did eventually get reformed.  The airport is still inconveniently long way from Torshavn - the location was picked on the basis of the difficulty of attacking it from the sea rather than on what was likely to be useful for tourists after the war.  And there's still Cadbury's Dairy Milk on sale in the shops. The British troops seem to have handed out enough chocolate to hook the Faroese population for good.  I guess they were lucky that it wasn't the Americans that invaded, I can't see Hershey's chocolate having such a long-term legacy.

I had a really good time wandering around the islands, and I certainly hope I can figure out a way to do a much longer stay in the islands – and next time I’ll try and get back in the birding season when I can go and have a look at the cliffs at Vestmanna and on Mykines.

My favourite place on this trip was, I think, the village of Tournivik at the north end of Streymoy. This village was one of the last places to be connected to the Faroe road network, and sits in a perfect 'botnur', a circular glacial valley, looking out towards the sea stacks and cliffs at the northern end of Eysturoy.

A little bit about logistics.  I flew from Copenhagen to Faroe on Atlantic Airways. They fly between mainland Denmark and the islands four or five times each day, the flight takes just over two hours.  While on the islands I stayed in Torshavn at Hotel Streym - this is a small modern hotel just beside the harbour - it's very comfortable and they do a really good buffet breakfast.  The hotel also has a number of hire cars available - which are good value.  I can't say much about Faroese cuisine, but my restaurant recommendation for Torshavn is the italian restraurant Carrello which overlooks the harbour just round the corner from Hotel Streym.

There are more pictures from the Faroe Islands on my Flickr stream

Scandinavia February 2012

I've finally had the chance to work through the collection of photographs I took on my Scandinavian tour in February 2012.

There were four phases to the tour.

1.  Following the railways along the 60N line - starting in Stockholm (59.3N), going west to Oslo(59.9N) and then to Bergen (60.4N).  Flickr.

2. Going North (and East) along the Norwegian coast on the Hurtigruten ship MS Lofoten, from Bergen to Kirkenes (70N, 30E) then back South to Svolvaer in the Lofoten Islands. Flickr

3. Exploring the Lofoten Islands (based in Svolvaer) Flickr

4. Exploring the Faroe Islands (based in Torshavn) Flickr