We docked at Gravdal, near Leknes, in the Lofoten Islands. We are still above the Arctic Circle. Archaeologists have found Viking settlements here that are 1,500 years old.
We took an independent tour arranged by a fellow passenger. It had its ups and downs. In the future I am going to be taking fewer tours arranged by someone I don't know. We are either going to go off on our own, find a guide just for us, or take a Princess tour.
The last tender was at 5:00 so we wanted to be back at the tender dock by 4:30. Well, we DID meet that goal, but there was some anxiety at times during the day. We were expecting a guided trip, but apparently that was not part of the deal, so all we got was a driver. Therefore, a lot of information is missing. I have no idea how many of the islands we visited. There were a lot of tunnels, and at least one of them went underwater. We also went over one bridge.
The Lofoten Islands are home to numerous small fishing villages and a few sheep farms and cattle farms. Apparently the population increases in the winter when the fishing season occurs. The main fishery here seems to be cod. We passed thousands of cod drying out on racks. Some racks had just heads, some had the bodies. I don't know how they keep the birds away. There are a lot of seagulls.
All of the scenery was spectacular. These islands are wild and rugged. The mountains are almost as good as those around the Troll Wall. There are sandy beaches. There are beautiful vistas. The villages are neat and tidy and charming, for the most part. The ride alone was stunning.
The first stop was a charming fishing village called Nusfjord. This was one of those "outdoor museum" attractions. You pay to enter the village and then you wander around and then you go to the gift shop. Archeologists have found evidence of fishing cabins there from 400 CE.
You can rent cabins, kayaks, and bikes and eat in a restaurant there, if it is open. Some of the other activities there include diving lessons. Why learn to dive in Aruba when you can learn north of the Arctic Circle?
The main thing we saw there was an old (inactive) cod liver oil factory. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being extremely interesting, it was about a 2. But the village was very scenic and we saw some real fishing boats. Golly, wow!
The Nusford General Store:
Ost means cheese. Bacon means bacon.
We ccontinued on toward another small fishing village. This one was small it only had to have one letter in its name - Å. We were supposed to go to a fishing museum here. The price had been included in our tour and our tour organizer had a voucher for the admission tickets. We wandered around the place for a while but could not find where we needed to go to see the museum, desite asking at least 3 people who lived/worked there. The signage was confusing. Aftter wandering down a hill and through a tiny village we saw a building on the other side of the little harbor that looked like the fishing museum. When we got there there was a sign that said private and our leader was told by someone inside that this was not the museum.
I think the sign on that building says "Fishing Museum"
By this time we had been wandering around for over 20 minutes of our allotted hour. Unlike everyone else in our group, we had not smuggled food off the ship and we wanted to have time to buy something for lunch. We didn't have the patience to wander up another hill looking for the museum, and to tell the truth, we didn't care that much about a fishing museum. Not as much as we cared about lunch. So we detached ourselves from the group and went into a bakery that we had seen. It was either that or ice cream at the gift shop at the entrance to Å. Decisions, decisions. . .
This bakery was built in 1844 and still baked bread over a birch fire in a stone oven. They sold beautiful loaves of bread and kanelboller - cinnamon rolls. We didn't want loaves of bread for lunch, so we decided to have cinnamon rolls. They were large and very good. Here is the exact recipe that was on the bag.
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Kanelboller (Cinnamon Pastries)
10 kg flour
1,5 kg margarine
1,5 kg sugar
3 litres of water
3 litres of milk
4 tablespoons cardamom
6 packets of yeast
salt
Roll out the dough, grease with margarine-sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon
- roll out the dough into a long roll
- cut into suitably sized slices
- paint with egg og sprinkle with pearl sugar
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OK. So, just a few questions. Do you need to let the dough rise? What temperature do you bake it at? How long?
Å was at the end of the road, so we started heading back towards Gravdal. We made three or four photostops on the way, including the Flakstad Church, built in 1780.
How Norwegians go to the beach
Our third and final stop was the Lofotr Viking Museum. It was pretty cool, but unfortunately we didn't get enough time there and we arrived at a time that made it impractical to see their little movie and also see the exhibits. We skipped the movie and went outside to explore. The major attraction is a reconstructed chieftan's longhouse from around 800 CE. It was much longer than you would expect. Inside there were interactive exhibits in each room and several re-enactors. The Viking life was much more civilized than I would have expected. They had furniture, woven cloth, metal tools, artistic decorations, etc. They farmed and raised cattle, sheep, and pigs.
This was the actual site of a Viking settlement for some time. There are burial mounds and other remnants. They think the chieftain eventually went to Iceland and the settlement was abandoned.
There was also a boat house, a forge, and Viking ship. It was quite some distance away so we didn't walk to it, having already done the Viking ship thing.
Most of the ship's tours went to the same places we visited. The only thing we seem to have missed was the ice bar, and I'm totally okay with missing that. If I want to see one, I'll make one in the backyard next winter.
After dinner we went to see a comedian named Jo Little. We had been told she was a Canadian, but she turned out to be very British. Brritish humor just isn't funny to us. First, it isn't intrinsically funny. The Brits tend to like a more slapstick type of humor than we do. To us it is just corny. Second, there are a lot of cultural references that Americans don't get. We don't know their TV shows. We don't all know what the "Council" is. Third, they will sometimes tell jokes in a strong dialect and then you really can't understand them well enough to know if the joke is funny. So, after she lapsed into dialect about seven minutes in, we snuck out of the theater.
Another wonderful blog post and photos.
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