Norway 2014 – 05 Lofoten
24.08.2014 Lofoten
Nikolai has woken before me, a warm coffee awaits me, and the view, as you can guess, is mind-boggling. Not only that, but coming out of the "bungalow", I find myself in the company of these three gorgeous feathered creatures:
It only affirms my sincere love and interest in birds, and these three in particular had absolutely nothing against the proximity of my lens.
From the parking lot where we slept, we make another visit to Nusfjord, which we reached late last night in the dark. For this purpose we must cross the ridges and find ourselves on the other side of the ever-narrowing Lofoten peninsula, the end of which we are inevitably approaching.
It is one of the many freshwater lakes, a meter above which the ghostly mist drifted at sunset last night.
Nusfjord itself is about fifteen fishing huts, huddled together on a little flat (yes!) land nestled between the waters of the fjord and the steep slopes of its shores. There is no place. Just after the entrance to the village, on a little higher, on probably the only free place, people have tidied up a small parking lot for people like us. There is no further road, much less a place for cars of curious tourists.
For these pile houses we argued for some time whether they were for permanent residence or rather villas. I don't think there is an adequate way to resolve the dispute, but it is a fact that they are new, nailed and, of course, red!
In the throat of the fjord there is a fish farm (fever, probably, I saw it jumping between the hoops), and on top of it are settled those ready to act beasts, for whom I have no idea what family they are from.
We return to the main road and literally one turn after the beach where we slept last night, we come across another, even bigger and trying to deceive us with its tropical traits.
In our desire to make the most of the moment when the land under our feet will simply run out and we will have to board a ferry to Norway mainland, we do not miss a turnoff. Anyway the road there is only one, and the detours in total 2. One reaches the village of Sund, which has a total of thirty museums - a whole museum - of technology! In other words, of all types of internal combustion engines that can be mounted on a vessel, and where there are engines, there are also those that can repair them. This one in particular is a living Metallurgist - so far from everything and everyone, when your propeller breaks in the middle of winter, the only way is to make yourself a new one from what you already have.
At risk of saying some nonsense, as if in the picture above, in the lower left corner, a crankshaft from a ship's internal combustion engine, already retired, entered the frame…
Just before Å (it says A with a circle at the top, but it reads O, it works in Old Norse) we go through a road construction event, which I just can't help noticing. in this travelogue there seems to be too little modern architecture (or architecture at all), to say the least.
The ones above are tension irons, the string-thin columns at the front (as thin as possible so as not to obstruct the view…) are made from galvanized steel.
The only picture of a drying fish. All the wooden crabs were already empty. On this one, however, not fish is dried, but fish heads! Shortly after that we reach the places where they harvest the crops.
On Lofoten, unlike much of mainland Norway, there is neither agriculture nor cattle-breeding, simply nowhere; there is only fish…
What they do with dried fish heads I can only guess. Somewhere I even heard that they used to fertilize their lands with ground dried fish residues…
Penultimate town Reine:
The cottages land on the stones below them like this:
The ferry takes hours to tour several inhabited islands along the way and take us to the town of Bodo; we arrive in the dark.
