Another Recovery Day

I spent the day indoors, trying to get my body to stop aching. In the afternoon I took a nap.

The AirBnB owner came by to chat, and when I asked about food he volunteered to give me a ride to the local restaurant up the road, and waited in the car while I grabbed my phone-in meal.  What a great guy! Along the way we chatted about work and travel schedules.  He said he wanted to visit the US some time.  I said he could stay in my spare room if he ever visited San Francisco.

He asked about my journey and I talked a little about Iceland and Denmark, and how I had managed to negotiate a chunk of remote work.  He said that getting time off to travel was a very different situation in the Faroe Islands:  “If you want time off, you just go to your boss and say, ‘I want to take three months off,’ and your boss will nod, and off you go.”

In the evening I watched more brainless Marvel entertainment: “Thor” and part of “The Avengers.” There were whole middle sections of both movies I’d completely forgotten.  After that I stayed up much later than I expected, writing short emails to catch up with friends and workmates.

As I settled into the bed I could feel my mind scratching at the old relationship question again, like a dog digging around an old burrow, asking, “What do I want in a partner now, given that I’ve turned down so many different kinds of people over these last few years?”

To Gjógv Harbor

Today would be long, because I would be going over the top of one of the island ridges, rather than following the coast.

The weather looked squally. I left the AirBnB with all my rain gear in place.

By the time I passed the pizza joint up the road it had started and stopped raining twice. The joint itself was closed.  Glad I bought stuff the previous night!

I crossed over the bridge just beyond to the town of Oyrarbakki, then stopped at a gas station.  They sold two-part epoxy which would have been a much better material for repairing my mirror and headphones, but I had already used the superglue.  Oh well!  Nothing on the shelves was inspiring, but I grabbed some peanuts and a chocolate bar anyway.

At the checkout counter I noticed this headline on a local paper. It was about the recent slaughter of dolphins during the yearly hunt called “the grind” that the Faroese consider a tradition. Over 1400 dolphins had been killed this year, which was causing an international backlash. The massacre had occurred in a fjord just a few kilometers away from where I was standing.

Here’s the best I can do to puzzle out a translation:

Sunday night’s massive killing, which is the largest in our history, has put the Faroe Islands in the crosshairs of the international media. It is worse than the previous massive killing in the Faroe Islands, but there are also several examples of poachers letting large groups pass, precisely because it would have been overkill to slaughter them.

I was not at all surprised by the defensive tone of the reporter.

On the way out of the little town I accidentally missed a left turn, and rode up a big slope alongside the hill for no reason. Whoops!

For the next couple of hours I rode north. Rain and sunlight passed over the road multiple times.  I put on music by Joe Hisashi and reveled in it.

Across the way I spotted one of the highest waterfalls in the islands.

I arrived at the coastal town of Eiði, a picturesque collection of houses on rolling hills, dominated by a church with an orderly graveyard tacked onto the side.  I went to the one store in town and parked there, then rambled around inside for a while trying to find things I actually wanted to eat.  I bought a pear and a banana, plus a little box of chocolate milk. The town cafe was closed, but that was alright:  I wasn’t hungry enough for a full meal.

I poked up and down a few streets, then went up towards the church and looked down the road towards the campsite.  I was expecting it to have quite a few trailers and RVs in it, like I’d seen in the campsite across the bay, but there were only a few.  It looked very exposed to the wind, and I didn’t fancy the idea of setting up a tent in the rain and having it nearly ripped out of the ground some time at night.

I decided to continue up over the pass and get to Gjógv.  It meant that I wouldn’t have a day to spend climbing Slættaratindur, the tallest peak in Faroe, but on the other hand, the peak was lost in cloud cover now and would almost definitely be lost in cloud cover tomorrow as well.  Might as well skip it.

Before leaving town I stopped at the little Fisk And Kips wagon parked by the church.  The wind was blasting all around and I had a hard time finding a place to rest the bike, but eventually located a sheltered alcove built into a set of public bathrooms nearby.  I hunkered down in there to eat the meal, and it was totally delicious.  The chef had given me four huge chunks of fish which seemed excessive.  Maybe he knew how hungry bike tourists are in general? I could feel my body drawing the heat out of the food as I ate it.

Then I started uphill, due east, towards the base of Slættaratindur. The wind was at my back and seemed to shove me up the road. I barely had to pedal as the highway squiggled for a bit, past sheep laying low in the grass. Soon I reached a plateau where I could look northwest out to sea, and see two rock formations called Risin og Kellingin, or the Giant and the Witch.

As the legend goes, these are the remains of two creatures from Iceland, who came to try and steal the Faroe islands and haul them back to Iceland with a giant rope. But the task was too difficult and as they struggled the sun rose, turning them to stone.

A bit farther up the road, I came across a strange formation of shells mixed into dirt. It was as though someone had collected an enormous quantity of shells, then heaped dirt on top of them, and the dirt had eroded on one side causing the shells to spill out.

What in the world was this? An early settler trash midden?  Why so far from the water? Is it the effort of a farmer or a soil scientist, trying to enhance the topsoil or provide nourishment to animals? I could not figure it out. Why would shells be mixed with fully-formed soil, 300 meters up from sea level?

My best theory was that it was cheap reinforcement for the soil used to shore up the highway. Perhaps some time in the future I would find an answer.

After some long pauses to snack and empty my bladder, I wiggled my way to the top of the pass, at the highest point of the road. Slættaratindur loomed up into the mist to the north of me. The wind made the clouds move alarmingly fast.

I sat around for a bit, admiring the mountain, and then began the descent. At a fork in the road I went left. Below me to the west I could see the town of Funningur, but my destination was north.

Just past the fork a gust of wind battered the bike and my side mirror snapped off. As soon as it hit the pavement, the wind tried to scoot it along over the edge of the road. “Hey! I need that!” I yelled at the wind, and chased comedically after the mirror as it scooted away. I scooped it up just before it sailed down towards Funningur, and jammed it into a bag. Perhaps I could glue it on again tomorrow.

The wind shuffled a bit, then began to push at my back again, moving me upward over another small mountain pass. Then the road was just a long gentle coast downward to Gjógv, and I had to apply my brakes constantly because the wind kept speeding me up like a poltergeist intent on murder.

“Whoo-eee!” I shouted, but in my mind I also thought, “I hope the wind isn’t blowing this way tomorrow, or going back up over this pass is going to suck.”

As soon as I swung the bike into the town, I aimed for a restaurant. It was late in the day but they were happy to feed me. I ate a good meal plus dessert, and used the wifi to figure out a riding schedule for the next few days.

On the wall I noticed this cool old map. I was in the town in the upper right.

I also did some shopping for a new jacket, but left the item in the electronic cart, since there was no point in ordering it yet.  Even if I had my nephew prepare me a package for DHL to send, where would he send it?  Copenhagen?  I’d be there only a few days before flying home.

I went from the restaurant to my AirBnB, and unpacked my gear all over the dining room so things could dry out. The bike was dripping on the floor so I laid a few towels under it. While I was fumbling in the kitchen I noticed these cool glass drawers:

I was tired, but felt the need to settle down before crawling under the covers. I opened the laptop and rattled off a few notes.

An interesting thought: There are car campers, and there are backpackers. As a cycle tourist, I carry an amount of gear somewhere between these two groups. But it skews toward the backpacker, because unlike the car camper I still have to use my own energy to move all my stuff around. I pay a price for additional weight, just not as high a price as a backpacker.

My biggest extravagance? Definitely my camera. With the extra lens and the battery, it adds 3.7kg – eight pounds – to my load.

If I had all the relevant statistics, I could probably come up with an accurate estimate of how much time I have lost from every day of biking, by spending additional energy pedaling up hills because of the added weight of the camera.  My completely unsubstantiated back-of-the-envelope calculation, sitting there in the gloom of a cement-walled house on the windy shore of an island in the North Atlantic, put the cost at an extra 15 minutes out of an 8-hour day, or about 3% of my time on the bike.

Considering the fact that this extra 3 percent of my time on a hill would also be spent looking at beautiful terrain and listening to a podcast, that’s a pretty good tradeoff…