Lofoten
Pop (Rick's stepfather Billy Clarke) was here for one short week, but we made the most of it. We allowed him two nights in Trondheim to get over the jet lag, then we all boarded a plane for Bodø, north of the arctic circle in Nordland.
Next we weighed anchor on the good ship Nordlys, a northbound Hurtigruta vessel that took us to the town of Svolvær. The voyage was only about six hours long, but it included an elegant supper in the ship's dining room. Svolvær is one of the larger towns on Vestvågøya, the first and largest of the Lofoten Islands. The town is guarded by Svolværgeita (the Svolvær Goat), a pillar of rock with twin horns at its summit. Our waterfront hotel was just across the parking lot from a fish processing plant and there looked to be about as many boats in the harbor as cars on the streets. Summer with its tourists turns out to be the Lofoten Islands' slow season. The dark winter months, when the cod come inshore, have for centuries been fishin' season.
The islands are a drowned mountain range, with sharp summits rising straight out of the cold North Sea. We took a day-long cruise on a small fishing boat, the Trollfjord II, to see its namesake, a perilously narrow fjord cut into one of the mountain walls. The cruise included a time-out for fishing. Molly caught one of the biggest sei (coal fish) of the day.
One highlight of the cruise was this havorn (white-tailed sea eagle) called in and fed fish heads by the first mate. We ate the rest of the fish ourselves.
We stayed two nights in two different
rorbuer (singular rorbu), the first in the village of Nusfjord. Rorbuer
are the rustic shacks used by fisherman in the winter and tourists in the
summer. Fishermen have been coming to Lofoten from points south, including the
Trondheim area, for centuries, to catch and dry cod for sale abroad. Our first
rorbu had a sleeping loft, the second an actual working TV.
We took a midnight drive to the north shore of the island to watch sunset/rise at 1 AM local time (solar midnight, daylight savings time). The sun got about halfway below the horizon and then started coming up again. A few weeks earlier, nearer summer solstice, the sun would have remained above the horizon at midnight. The dramatic peaks of the islands were bathed in pink light for hours.
Here are a couple of viking maidens and a warrior we rain into at Lofotr, a museum that inludes a reconstruction of a Viking chieftan's homestead.
And here is the view from Å, the last letter of the Norwegian alphabet and the end of the Lofoten road on Moskenesøya. Here the island chain drops off into the sea. There is a ferry across the treacherous Moskenstraumen to the one-town island of Værøya, seen here, and on out to the even smaller island of Røst, which in turn is surrounded by a horde of smaller islands and skerries. We, however, turned around and drove back to Svolvær, by way of another night in a rorbu in Hemingsvær, and flew back to Trondheim.