Halló & Takk Fyri
Hi, friends. And family. Hi, mom.
The last leg of this journey feels distant.
We awoke in Reykjavik, Iceland, weeks ago to the knock of Meredith’s sister at our cold, hole-in-the-wall rental, and took off over the choppy Norwegian Sea from the Faroe Islands 10 days later, US-bound.
In between were hipster horses, wet tents, and $20 beers. A colony of a million puffins, saxophones in soggy grottoes, and houses covered in grass.
In Trumbull, Connecticut, where we are today, it’s 82F. The sun will go down at 7:34pm, like sunsets do.
In Reykjavik tonight, leaving a limb exposed would mean frostbite and the sun will only hover at the horizon until midnight, climbing back up into what feels like the same day a few hours later.
The end of our first leg abroad, appropriately lingering and unfinished.
Parkas on.
Where we’ve been: The Faroe Islands, Iceland, Denmark
How long we’ve been here: 2 weeks
Hello: Halló! (Faroese)
Thank you: Takk fyri (“talk fee reh”)
Where we’re headed next: United States
There’s a revealing tradition in Iceland.
Farmers let their sheep roam wild over the grassy, primordial surface of the country starting in the spring. No fencing or boundaries. The sheep wander the highway that draws a loop around the island, stare at you from mountainsides, pose on mossy rocks. They plod and graze.
Then the country gets together on horseback in the fall - whoever can help - and collectively rounds up the nation’s herd. Puts them into pens. Gets the sheep back to their rightful owners.
That’s it.
The simplicity that draws striking granite edges across the skyline and long lines toward the horizon from countless farms - that makes room for a national round up and means the President’s home number is still in the phone book - is what attracts people here.
Grass. Water. Ice. Rock.
Horses wear haircuts like they’re in emo bands and stare lazily at you like you interrupted a busy 5,000 years of absolutely nothing on this chilly outcropping near the Arctic Circle.
It’s peace by lack of interruption. Geological, human or otherwise.
Now brand name backpacks slip down the oversized luggage chute in heaps at Keflavik International, monied twenty year olds jump in taxis to drink in Reykjavik, and camper vans head out into the countryside to find a piece of cold idyll they can Instagram alone.
Attention that’s both warranted and crippling.
Meredith, Mere's sister Lindsey and I rented a lime-green camper from a square-jawed Viking named (really) Thor and headed out to find our slice of Iceland. We stopped at churches, angular and strange, admired stark blues, whites, and greens, woke up on wet grassland under towering waterfalls, chased horses and ate hot dogs in gas station parking lots.
We felt like the island was ours, occasionally. The glacial surroundings match a glacial pace that feels liberating and isolating in a great, prehistoric way.
One of our last nights, we pulled the van into a tucked-away nook caught between the chilly coast and a towering icecap. I snapped pictures of our plot and started to unload the car.
Within a minute, a ranger arrived in her Suburban.
“You’re trespassing on national park land and I could write you up for parking on endemic moss.”
Stern, perfect English. We looked around: tire track grooves led directly to our campground, no prohibitions were posted, and the van was parked inches from the road. We shrugged, looked out at the vast expanse of wilderness uninhabited and begging for a tent, and started to pack up.
She softened.
“Sorry, it’s just gotten busy in Iceland these last few years and now I have to go around kicking people out of our parks and cleaning up human feces. I want you to love this country, I just need you to do it elsewhere.”
Iceland’s Catch-22: an island too popular for its own beautiful emptiness.
Back in Reykjavik, we dropped the camper with Thor and asked him if crowds were spoiling the country.
“Couldn’t tell you.”
"Why?"
“I’m only here 4 months a year now renting out campers, then I take my kid with me to Spain.”
"Really?"
“Have you been? It’s lovely.”
—
FAROE ISLANDS
By Meredith’s count, she’s at 51.
I fight her on the 51st because she got out of the airport in Riga at 7 in the morning, walked the capital for 3 hours before the city opened its eyes, and decided she’d been to Latvia.
In any case, counting the countries we’ve visited is a strange exercise.
The tally is unweighted, for starters - a taxi ride through Riga counts the same as a month in Vietnam. Its applicability is also finite - visiting one country doesn’t necessarily make it easier to intuit another. And the youngest person to travel to every country on earth was 24 when he finished, which only means he’s a pro at separating his laptop and toothpaste in exotic airport security lines, not that he knows the world better than the rest of us.
Our number became interesting, though, when we found ourselves breaking into an Airbnb in the Faroe Islands.
The host wasn’t home, but no one locks their doors in the Faroes or even bothers taking their car keys out of the door, so we let ourselves in. The host’s teenage nephew arrived shortly afterward with his girlfriend in tow and seemed disappointed when he found us home.
We’d interrupted plans.
The four of us struck up a conversation and stumbled into a hot topic when Mere asked if the Faroe Islands counted on our country tally.
“Of course we’re a country.”
“But you swear allegiance to the King of Denmark. Technically, the Faroes are part of Denmark.”
“We have our own language. Our own flag. Our own money. Our own - Australia swears allegiance to the Queen but it is its own continent... certainly its own country.”
“What about a standing army?”
“What about a standing army.”
“Aren’t you protected by the Danish military?”
“We haven’t had a robbery here since 1985. No one cares.”
His tone was friendly and matter of fact. Like pointing to grass and calling it green more than defending his home turf.
Lost in the nationalistic exercises of world superpowers lately are the quiet territories in hundred year, five hundred year, battles to be recognized. Without a token for old imperial forces to fight over, the whole notion of nationalism takes on a quieter, longer-term outlook.
The pride we found in the Faroes was unflagging but firmly domestic. No violent push for secession or global demonstrations.
Our host came back that night and we got to chatting. She’s a hiker and a nurse, and was intrigued to hear about our trip to Nepal. I told her she should go. She demurred.
“Too many good mountains in the Faroes to worry about elsewhere.”
“The tallest being..."
"About 1,000 meters."
"Okay."
“I’ve climbed 300 of our 340 peaks. I won’t even think of another country until I’m done here.”
Two months ago, we didn’t know the Faroe Islands were on planet earth. Scrolling across Google Maps from Iceland to Denmark to see if ferries sailed between the two revealed a tiny, bright green archipelago the size of Rhode Island 500 miles north of Scotland.
50,000 people. 18 islands. Buried in the middle of the freezing Norwegian Sea. Locals get around via heavily-subsidized helicopter rides, export a staggering percentage of the world’s fish, and are almost all terrified of their little-known haven becoming popular.
“We don’t need anyone else,” is how one innkeeper put it.
A familiar refrain around the globe today.
The difference in the Faroes is that some islands have fewer residents than guests, and ecosystems that only function when most of the world doesn’t know you exist.
At one point we found ourselves on the westernmost isle of Mykines (“me-chin-ease”), which hosts just over 1 million puffins - the little, pretty, sad-face birds that make hobbit homes for themselves in grassy mountainsides and crash land into their homes in a method you think they’d have improved at some point.
As we walked by cliffs of puffin colonies, I stopped to tie my shoe and saw a little puffin head sticking out of its hole 6 inches away, staring me in the eyes. Waiting for me to pass so he could waddle out and go fishing.
Just too much traffic.
Which leads to a rare recommendation: if you’re going to visit the Faroes, now’s the time.
Plenty of destinations are famously disappearing - the sinking Maldives, gentrifying Cuba, melting Kilimanjaro - but few are preserved only by their obscurity.
At some point soon, the Faroes will get hot and probably stop paving trails through million-puffin colonies. Give up sodding their roofs with grass, put an immigration officer at arrivals to check your passport, or take their car keys out of the door.
But for now, it’s all there. A strange isolated little world, carrying on like it has for 1,000 years, crossing its fingers invaders don’t take interest.
Maybe a standing army does make sense.
The snowflake that is Meredith Blackwell has a similar-looking snowflake named Lindsey Blackwell for a sister, who joined us in Iceland. The car we lived in together for four days was no bigger than a chubby station wagon and could have led to space issues. Instead it led to glacier hikes, puffin stake-outs, bourbon and chocolate, new profile pictures, sheep wrangling and slack-jawed awe. Linz, thank you for reminding us how nice it is to have those closest to us out here. We can count the number of times we'll get to be in strange places with close family, and it's never enough. We're lucky people.
ITINERARY
These two aren't cheap countries. After $4-a-night rooms in Nepal and Uzbek group dinners costing less than a Starbucks Frappuccino, we'd gotten used to a lot for a little. Getting around the high prices became a surprisingly fun challenge anyway: sleeping in a campervan, hiking ourselves rather than taking a guide, eating gas station national staples. It was worth the effort, so holler for scrimping tips.
ICELAND
Reykjavik
A picturesque capital of brightly-colored, cookie-cutter box houses and shops happy to sell you pricey wool crafts. The price tag on a beer here will blow your mind and accommodations are far from affordable or charming, but it’s walkable, OCD clean, and has an unfair number of great restaurants.
Golden Circle
The popular tourist loop consisting of Thingvellir National Park, Gulfoss Waterfall and Geysir Hot Spring is worth the short drive from Reykjavik for the CliffsNotes version of Iceland. We pulled the camper van into a remote bit of bush near Thingvellir and set up camp next to a group of men in lopapeysa sweaters playing a game involving bricks of wood you toss at each other. It was freezing and idyllic.
Vik
The town is an attractive postcard, but the real attraction is the stretch of Highway 1 that runs from it in either direction. Plane wrecks on black sand beaches, waterfalls crashing behind quaint villages, and towering cliffs for bird-watching, photo-taking and palm-sweating. The number of times you say “whoa that’s incredible” is incredible.
Vatnajökull National Park
We visited to get even further from the action and climb part of a glacier. We wound up wearing crampons and wielding ice axes on Vatnajökull, which, when pronounced correctly, sounds extremely close to “fat yogurt.” Beyond posing for mind-bending photos and staring down 600-foot crevasses, we drove through a landscape that's staggering and beautiful. Get a playlist on the radio and don’t talk for 2 hours, and peace comes easy.
FAROE ISLANDS
Torshavn
Wooden ships pack the quiet port and Nordic fishing huts wedge themselves into the hillside in this capital city. Town, really. "City" belies the charm of big gardens, little libraries and even smaller cafes. We met a friendly woman with two dogs that lived in a cute grass-roofed house near parliament and talked to her about how great her life was. She didn’t disagree. If you go, Barbara Fish House was Nantucket in miniature and delicious, and the country’s first Michelin star restaurant - Koks - is reportedly a magical reinvention of local seafood.
Saksun
The most photographed hamlet in the Faroes for very good reason. There’s nothing going on and nowhere to stay, which seems to be the point. A dozen residents, more horses, grass-sod farmhouses on a hillside overlooking a striking inlet. A hike around town will fill up your camera’s memory card and introduce you to funny sheep.
Sandavagur
The Faroes are renown for a monthlong summer music festival we happened to arrive in the middle of. To celebrate, we bought a ticket for a “grotto concert,” which had us board an old wooden ship, sail to the mouth of a watery cave, and take zodiac boats inside to hear an experimental saxophonist wail for an hour to the crash of waves on rock. Rock on. Also, free local beer. So it's got that going for it. Which is nice.
Mykines
A very rocky ferry ride off the mainland, but the 10-person town on Mykines island delivers. Even in the rain. Hikes wind you through puffin colonies toward a foggy lighthouse; possibly the best fish soup in the world is $8 and inside one of the town’s two cafes; and accommodations can be up a creaky set of stairs in dusty attics. Weird and incredible.
And that’s it for the first half of our one year away.
We’re in America now. Appreciating the English language, subtext and familiar faces, drinkable water, hot showers and washing machines.
The next stops are lazy days in Connecticut; family, an eclipse and national parks in Wyoming; and a short stop home in California for a wedding of two close friends.
We’re excited to see what will become of these newsletters now that the territory is more familiar to everyone reading. If you have suggestions, pipe up. We’re open.
Lots and lots of love to you all.
-Mere & Pete
