Faroe Islands Day 1

Thursday, 1 August 2024

It seems that every time we catch a plane we have to get up at 5am.  The upside is that it had us landing in the Faroe Islands just after 9am in the drizzling rain. We had no rental car hassles (our 4^th rental car of this trip) as the company just left it for us in the car park with the keys in the ignition.

Our first stop was 10 minutes from the airport to see a big waterfall cascade into the sea..

then we had a 1 hour boat trip to take in some cool rock formations, the same waterfall from the bottom, and lots of cute puffins nesting on the steep grassy slopes.

After this we headed to do a 6k hike to some very high sea cliffs and also a lake that empties straight into the sea.  In the Faroes a lot of the hikes are on private land so you have to pay to do them – sometimes quite a lot.  Unfortunately for us the cloud was pretty low for a lot of this so we didn’t get the full views but it was still pretty spectacular anyway.

From here we had a short drive to another hike – a free one this time which is a good thing as we saw next to nothing at the ‘Witches Finger’ due to the low cloud.

After that we had a few stops to admire waterfalls then we drove down windy roads to get to the cutest little town called Tornuvik. It even had a surf shop and a town dog which would campaign for anyone to throw it a stick.

After what felt like a huge day we had one final challenge – to get ourselves and all our luggage up a 15 minute track to our little cabin.  The owner had advised that this was the best route as the farmers track could be muddy and not great for cars.  So we dragged ourselves up the little path and only caught sight of our little blue cabin at the very end, which was a great relief as every other hut we’d seen along the way was designed for sheep not humans. 

The cabin is cute and warm but unfortunately doesn’t have wifi which we thought would be fine when we booked it, but neither Jon’s or my sim card works in the Faroe Islands which means if Jon hadn’t had the foresight to download offline maps from the airport, we’d be in trouble! To add to the digital isolation, all the shops (including libraries with wifi) are closed from Sunday to Tuesday for St Olav’s day, the Faroes national day – so after debating whether we’d need to go back to the airport to buy food we ended up getting dinner from the service station which thankfully had freshish bread, frozen pizza and 2 minute noodles!