Today’s port of call, the Lofoten Islands, is an archipelago made up of five large and five small islands. The port city of Gravdal sits on the second largest island, Vestvagoy.
Today is the first time this cruise that we don’t dock in the port, the ship being moored at anchor in the bay and the passengers are tendered ashore using the lifeboats. They now refer to this as using a water shuttle!! In order to board the water shuttle you need to pick up a boarding ticket. In the past these were numbered but people knew when their number was approaching and attempted to beat the queue. Today the tickets were given the name of British cities. It was quite strange to hear the announcement “All those with Sunderland tickets can now board the shuttle”.
After sitting on a coach for a long time on the trip to North Cape, Sylvia’s knee was feeling a bit uncomfortable so I went on today’s excursion by myself.
The journey to the mainland took around twenty minutes on the water shuttle and here I boarded the coach for the journey south over several of the islands. Tunnels and bridges make the journey easy but the roads are very narrow so the driver had to be very careful especially with the number of cyclists around.
We drove for about an hour through beautiful fishing villages against a towering mountainous background. Our first stop was the Southernmost village on Moskenes island, Å. This is shortest village name in the world and is the last letter of the 29 letter Norwegian alphabet.
Here we were treated to lunch of Fish Head Soup (I declined), Poached Fish, Roast Goat with potatoes, vegetables and salad. The main course was delicious and I wouldn’t have known it was goat if it hadn’t been labelled. For dessert a caramel Mousse completed the meal.
Outside the restaurant was a living museum showing all aspects of local life including the drying of stock fish.
Our next stop was the pretty fishing village of Reine, voted the most beautiful village in Norway by Conde Nash magazine, and you can see why.
Fishing is obviously the most important economic activity on the islands with much of the cod catch being dried in the air as “Stock Fish”. These have been Norway’s most important export for over 900 years with Portugal, Spain and Italy being the principal markets. The fish heads are sold separately to countries such as Algeria and Morocco. You can see racks of the fish drying in many of the fishing villages.
Salmon farming is also important in this region and disappointingly so is seal and whale hunting. They justify this by hunting only the Minke whale which they say is not endangered.
Next our travels took us to the village of Sund where we were treated to a demonstration by the local blacksmith. He crafted a cormorant from a piece of metal. The cormorant is the bird of the Lofoten Islands as historically they were used by the fishing fleet to identify the location of the shoals of fish.
The last stop of our excursion was the little church in the village of Flakstad, built in 1780.
The altarpiece was painted on wood in 1765 and pictures The Last Supper flanked by Moses and his brother Aaron.
We returned to the ship at around 6.45, about seven hours in total. I think that Sylvia made the right decision staying on the ship and sketching views from the balcony but I throughly enjoyed the trip. Tomorrow is a sea day so I have plenty of time to recover.