FAR15.1: Suðuroy

Back in November I made my first trip down to the South Island, Suðuroy, to stay with some friends and visit the second Salvation Army corps in the Faroe Islands (see here). This last weekend saw me go back to Suðuroy, together with the band from the Salvation Army in Tórshavn, to lead a music festival down there. I didn’t actually take too many photos there this time (I hear a sigh of relief), but I’ll just write a little bit about what we got up to.

After arriving very early Saturday morning (the journey only takes 2 hours, but when you had to get up at 5am, it feels quite an ordeal), we travelled around the island putting up a few posters advertising the concert. Unfortunately it turned out there was another concert in the north of the island the same night, but I’m sure they felt just as threatened as we did.

As the rehearsal wasn’t until late afternoon, a couple of guys from the band very kindly offered to take me sightseeing – I’d seen quite a lot of the island on my first visit, but I had been hoping to get to the village of Fámjin, on the west coast of the island, to see the original Faroese flag, which is displayed in the church there. A student from Fámjin designed the flag in Copenhagen in 1919 – you can’t say you don’t learn stuff here. The guys from the band very kindly said they’d take me there. After a little drive, we arrived in the very picturesque village, and found the church. I say ‘found’ the church, but that wasn’t particularly difficult when the village had about twenty houses, which were centred around the church:

Another group of home-grown tourists arrived just before we did (the village is something of a Mecca to Faroese living further north) who discovered for us that the church was locked. But all was not lost, as there was a perfectly good view of the flag from outside: (As nice as the flag is, I can’t help but think they rejected one of the earlier designs a little too quickly...)

From Fámjin we travelled down to Akraberg, which is the southernmost point on the islands:

This is me wearing the jeans that I’m using as a half-way point to skinny jeans...

Before heading back to the corps, one of the guys, Ole, wanted to track down a geocache. Now this was a word I’d never heard before, but it’s a kind of cool idea. All over the world people hide these geocaches, a kind of box, and record their co-ordinates on a website. Others then have to try to find these geocaches using GPS. Upon finding one, you write something, or leave something, etc. (there’s a range of options). Ole had heard that there was a geocache on Suðuroy, and as something of a keen geocacher, he wanted to find it – and find it he did (after a fairly dangerous stretch over the side of a mountain):

And he got the certificate for being the first person ever to find this geocache. I don’t think it’s a hobby I’ll get involved in, but trekking over the hills, looking for this thing with the GPS system on Ole’s phone was actually kind of exciting.Anyway, the concert went well – I was asked to sing, and I sang ‘Because He Lives’ (that song has fantastic words) – and we ate a LOT of pizza afterwards. Next morning we caught the ferry at 7am, and still made it back for the morning meeting at the Salvation Army in Tórshavn. How good are we?!