Faroe Islands

There is a local phrase about the weather here that translates roughly as "if you do not like it, wait twenty minutes." This is not a joke, it is a logistics plan. We had fog, sun, horizontal rain and a rainbow within a single hour on the road to Gásadalur.

The landscape does something to your sense of scale. Cliffs go into cloud. A waterfall drops off the edge of an island directly into the Atlantic with no intermediate stage. You keep reaching for comparisons and the comparisons keep being inadequate.

What stays with me is not the drama though, it is the quiet. Villages of forty people. Grass roofs. A church, a harbour, and a road that ends because there is nowhere else for it to go.

Getting around

We drove almost every day and never once resented it. The tunnels between islands are long and lit like something from a film, including one roundabout under the sea decorated with a steel sculpture, which is the single most Faroese thing I can report.