FAR20.2: Excursion Thursday (Part One)

Destination: Nólsoy

I only have a few weeks left in the Faroes now... There’s a fair few places I still want to see before I go home, but I also have rather a lot of work to do. Consequently I decided to start having Excursion Thursdays. Thursday is when the library shuts early anyway, so I thought I could work every other day, and use my Thursdays to see a little more of the Faroes. This week marked the first Excursion Thursday, and my destination was to be the island of Nólsoy.

Anybody who reads this blog regularly will probably already be familiar with Nólsoy. It’s right opposite Tórshavn and has featured in a lot of my photos (see here and here, for example), as it’s nearly always visible wherever you are in the city, but I’d never made it over there. Bright and early on Excursion Thursday morning, I set off down to the quay to catch the boat for the twenty minute journey over the imaginatively named Nólsoyarfjørður (Nólsoy Fjord/Sound).

(Well that’s what should have happened – what actually happened was that I woke up bright and early, turned off my alarm, fell asleep again, and was woken by my friend Danni who just happened to text twenty minutes before the boat was due to sail. D’oh! But I made it – another benefit of living downtown!)

I was very excited – I have a bit of a thing about islands (clearly), and I love the idea of sailing to a new one I haven’t been to before. I’ve always wanted to live on an island (and in a way, I guess I do, but with its 60 million inhabitants, the UK doesn’t really have the same island community feel, does it?).

Sailing across the sound: As soon as we sailed into Nólsoy, I fell in love with the place. Look at the whalebone entrance to the village: How perfect is that?

I strolled around the island for a good long while (three hours in fact), just taking it all in. With its 250 inhabitants and no cars, Nósloy couldn’t be more different from Tórshavn (although a tractor did attempt to run me over within seconds of me arriving).

Here’s a few views of Nólsoy:

I don’t know why, I just thought this fire station was cool: This is evidently the centre of Nólsoy’s nightlife – Undirbeat, which with its ‘over 18s only’ sign appears to be a night club: Only 20 minutes away from the metropolis: Nólsoy, seemingly a place that has too many road names and not enough roads... These are some ruins, which were apparently where a princess from Scotland fled to when her father wouldn’t let her marry her lover. One final thing – there’s a bench in the centre of the village that’s famous for the old men that sit on it, putting the world to rights and observing the island’s few visitors. And they were really there! I desperately wanted to take a photo, but I can tell you that they looked a lot like this (taken from a postcard): That’s it – if I ever move to the Faroes, I’m buying me a house on Nólsoy. I’m sold.

P.S. I’ve been updating the mitchenstein365 blog.