Somehow I knew that the train from Oxenholme to Glasgow would be late. It would not be an adventure if the British transport system was to disappoint us and be on time for once. The train was late and so that meant rather than catch the airport bus from George Square in Glasgow (fare £6) I had to take a taxi (fare £23 plus a substantial tip as the cabbie wasn’t having a very good day).

What I did not expect to find when I arrived in Lerwick on a hull-grey afternoon in early summer was a town where a declining fishing culture does not herald social problems, poverty or the degeneration of a community. This was not a town that was struggling, not by any stretch of the imagination. Let’s face it who cares about the white fishing when there’s black oil to be extracted from the fishes’ sleeping quarters! Now this is a prosperous town; that much is made perfectly obvious to all visitors. The place has good housing, the young people wear the latest fashions, the roads are excellent and there are no boarded up shops to annoy the eye on a lazy stroll along the shopping lanes. Yes, a 40-year marriage to the oil industry has been kind to the Shetlanders.

I was in Shetland for a particular reason: I was determined to visit Foula; very determined. Foula, from the Old Norse meaning ‘bird island’, lies far to the west of Shetland; it is home to the most isolated community in the UK. But my hopes of visiting this remarkable island were abandoned when I rang the local airline and was told that the Friday flight was already full. There’s only one other flight each week and that’s on a Tuesday and my schedule didn’t permit any extra days in Shetland. In addition to the pilot, the light aircraft can carry only seven passengers. Despite this, I remained determined to visit Foula.

So I checked out of my hotel in Lerwick on the Friday morning and drove to the tiny Tingwall Airport. I presented myself saying that I was hoping that perhaps there had been a cancellation or a no-show. But everyone who had booked had shown up. The flight was full. I felt despondent. In desperation I asked if it was a matter of weight rather than actual numbers. “Well, I suppose so,” said the uniformed lady in control. And that was it…I had found the chink… “Perhaps if you were to weigh all of us and our small backpacks…I mean my fellow passengers don’t mind, do you?” They looked at each other and replied, “Bah.”

Other staff members arrived, there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, soft whispers in tight huddles, furrowed brows and the calculator sizzled. I now felt very sure that I would be visiting Foula. Eventually the uniformed lady in control asked each passenger in turn to come forward and be weighed (on the same industrial scales as they weigh the bulky luggage, military hardware and crates containing governmental dispatches!) In truth no-one objected and after some further calculations and references being made to the official manuals, I was allowed to join the 1030 flight to Foula. My determination cost me £50 return.

The reason I wanted to visit Foula is simple: I wanted to photograph Da Kame, the island’s great seacliff. I have photographed other seacliffs such as Builacraig in Mingulay which is 213m high and Slieve League in Donegal, Ireland. Da Kame at 376m (1,233 feet) competes with Conachair in St Kilda as the highest sheer cliff in Britain. I collect seacliffs.

We landed on a gravel runway and without any hesitation I started climbing the hill aiming directly for Da Kame on the west coast of the island. It was a hard climb and the incessant attacks by great skuas and Arctic skuas (known here as ‘bonxies’or ‘Skootie Allens’) didn’t add much to the pleasure of climbing in 18 degree (and rising) temperatures. An hour-and-a-half later I was about a quarter of a mile from the cliff edge when a chilled seamist began trailing its sinewy, caterpillar-like body across the tops of the hills. I started to feel chilled and then I lost my bearings. Now before I left Sedbergh I had been seriously warned by persons close to me about going too near the edge of seacliffs. Those not so close to me would undoubtedly be happy to see me peer over a ledge that’s about to give way beneath me. I knew that my geographic knowledge of this island was not complete; I knew that there would be other sheer drops in the general area and not just the one that falls into the ocean. As I have said, I was determined to visit Foula; but I was also determined to return to the mainland. So I took a few photographs to show just how poor the visibility had become and how dangerous (and stupid) it would be to continue walking. I gave up…a wise move, but I was heartbroken.

Foula is five square miles of island. I know because for the rest of that day I walked the length and breadth of it photographing the landscapes, the bird life and one or two of the 25 people who live there today. The Foula folk still celebrate Christmas (Auld Yule to them) on 6th January and the Old Year a week later, according to the Julian calendar. The Old Norse language of the island was spoken up until the 18th century and the last person to speak Norn was Jeannie Ratter who died in 1926. In Foula today, however, you will hear several accents and languages: the Shetlandic/Norse dialect, a brag of Glaswegian and a hint of Suffolkese and South East Englandish. There is a primary school with three pupils and the good news is that there are four other children living in the island who are currently under school age. So the island has a future. And as I didn’t go to the extreme edge of the seacliff in the gathering mist, I too have a future.

Of course there’s always another way to photograph seacliffs other than clambering to the top of them and putting yourself in danger of falling over them. Just as the late afternoon flight back to Shetland was about to leave, I asked the pilot if he could fly us around the island’s west coast so that I could take photographs from the seaward side. “Oh well, y’know, it’s a…” Also, I asked if I could sit next to him in order to get the best shots. He raised his eyes to heaven, sighed noisily, muttered something about Atlantic turbulence, a dicey fuel tank, serious tailwinds and the likelihood of the death of all passengers. We’re doomed Captain Shetland, we’re doomed…!

But then he simply said “What the heck, we’ve got two planes,” and he flew his plane load of delighted though slightly airsick, passengers right around Foula to see the spectacular undulating rock formations of Da Kame.

Maybe he could hear in my voice that I was determined to visit Foula to capture a photograph of that outlandishly regal seacliff – ah the sequins of sea-queens.

Shetland’s salmon industry is flourishing these days and I met a man who is hoping that this rather alternative industry to the traditional sea fishing will bring him rewards. Jacob Bell fished for cod in what he and his mates are already calling ‘the sweet old days’. But on one expedition Jacob got his left hand caught in the boat’s winching machinery and he had to be airlifted by the RAF rescue helicopter when he and his crew were 45 miles out at sea on a rather foggy February day. Unfortunately Jacob’s hand had to be amputated and in the bar one night and he showed me the inventive mechanical substitute he now had. He doesn’t go sea fishing any more as he’s now having a go at the more lucrative smoked salmon business, though there’s tough competition around. In an effort to encourage him in his new venture, I did say that he had something of a head start on all of his competitors and perhaps he could capitalise on this. “Really,” he said, “What head start?” “Well,” I said “You could quite authentically advertise your smoked salmon as “untouched by human hand”!

Click here for Part II: Norway.

The flight from Shetland to Bergen takes around 45 minutes. So by the time you’ve had your cup of coffee and finger of over-sugared Scottish shortbread, the islands that protect Bergen from the blast of the North Sea are directly beneath you. An oil worker on the flight went so far as to tell me (in Norwegian mind you) that he could see his house below. Fortunately the Norwegian for ‘house’ is ‘huset’ and that sounds similar to ‘hoose’ in Scots; so, what with his downward finger-pointing, his babe-in-arms miming, his rather obvious happy smiles and the rapid fire ‘huset, huset, huset’ I pretty much got the meaning. You can tell I’m a man who’s good with language!

Bergen is a beautiful city; a beautiful, green city. Tourists gravitate towards an area next to the fish market called Bryggen, a 900-year old Hanseatic wharf. The leaning, off-centre buildings (now mainly gift shops and cafes) are constantly being photographed, painted or sketched by a flock of creative recorders. The addition of myself scrawling with coloured pencils and crawling around the buildings with a wide angle lens did not seem to disturb the scene.

Apart from Bryggen, the restrained colours of the steeply slanted roofs of other buildings, the unambiguous brilliance of the ubiquitous clusters of rhododendrons, the outstanding sense of design in almost every object and the sizzling energy of the young people all contrive to make Bergen a lively, attractive and fulfilling place to visit. Being a major sea port there’s an unspoken tension between the permanence of the locals and the coming and going of the visitors. If the extortionate prices are anything to go by I think the locals are winning hands down, and the visitors tend to have their hands up. Bergen is all about arriving and departing – and in a way that quite suits me on this particular trip. Ports are romantic places; if you are in a port, there’s always a sense of imminent escape.

The city thrives under the protection of seven mountains and the panoramic views from the top of Floyen courtesy of the Floibanen are truly magnificent. This highly modern mountain funicular railway whisks you 320 metres above sea level within six minutes offering a stunning vista of the busy sea port and the Lego-like cityscapes. Up here the whistling of the endless wind is matched only by the whirring of countless digital cameras.

I was lucky indeed to spend three days in the city accompanied by the warmth of a summer sun chastened by the chill of an evening wind blowing in from the Arctic. As you will have spotted in the photograph, even the Bergen Symphony Orchestra members had to dress accordingly.

It is from Bergen that the Hurtigruten ships leave for the long journey up the west coast of Norway. At precisely 8pm on the 4th June the ship hooted gruffly,
edged away from the quay and set sail northward. The 4th of June was my wife’s birthday…this is her birthday poem.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we are retarded.”

On the MS Midnatsol’s tannoy that’s Norwegian for “We’re running late.” I heard it only the once. For the rest of the six-day, six-night journey to the most northerly tip of Europe this superbly-appointed ferry was never behind schedule. I say ‘ferry’ but in truth she is more of a cruise ship than any cross-Channel or Caledonian MacBrayne ferry you may have travelled on. Certainly 90% of her passengers see this as a cruise. The other 10% are local people hopping on and off and simply catching the most convenient method of transport that will take them to the towns and villages along Norway’s raggedy-craggedy western coast.

Hurtigruten, the cruise company, markets the journey as ‘The Most Beautiful Voyage in the World’. From Bergen every evening at 8pm one of their ships issues three great blasts of its horn to announce that it is setting sail for Kirkenes, a journey of 2,465 kilometres that takes in Maloy, Alesund, Kristiansund, Trondheim, Rorvik, Bodo, Svolvaer in the Lofoten Islands, Harstad, Tromso, Hammerfest, Kjollefjord, and Nordkapp, Europe’s most northerly point overlooking the Barents Sea. At this point you are at precisely 71 degrees 10’ 21”N. Well beyond the Arctic Circle and on the same latitude as Amundsen Gulf and Barnes Icecap in the Innuit north of Canada and also at the same latitude as the East Siberian Sea in the extreme north of the Russian Federation. Nordkapp is a place you’d expect to be very cold: and I dared to go running at Nordkaap…and would you believe I ran in the same shorts and running vest I use here in Sedbergh. No leggings, no layers of Helly Hansens, no windproof jacket. It was warm and the hat and gloves and full winter weather gear stashed in my backpack stayed there. Even at Kirkenes, the ship’s final port of call before turning around and heading back to Bergen, and only six kilometres from the Russian border, the daytime temperature was around 18/20 degrees. I think I was rather lucky.

Geirangerfjord is a visual symphony: if there might be such a thing. It’s a work of landscape art created by that demon of sculpture Ms Mother Nature. This area of Norway is probably the most scenically outstanding in the entire country. The fjord’s crystalline rock walls rise to a height of 1,400 metres and dive 500 metres below sea level. The free flowing waterfalls cut through surrounding deciduous and coniferous forests whilst below the surface of the fjord lie submarine moraines and a host of marine mammals. At 9 miles long the fjord combines the fear and terror of sheer cliffs with the grace and serenity of still waters. Today the fjord is as flat as a runway, and is disturbed only by the cut of ship through giving waters. Geirangerfjord’s beauty, like its waters, is fairy-like and unfathomable. It is no wonder that in 2005 UNESCO added Geirangerfjord and its sister Naeroyfjord to its list of World Heritage Sites.

The bus left the village of Geirangerfjord and crawled gingerly up the twisty, zigzagging road to traverse the hefty shoulders of a great mountain. Some people snoozed, some people snapped, some people snuffled. For several miles we climbed steadily until we came to Trollstigen – the Troll Ladder road. On either side of the pass great pads of snow began to edge onto the road making it narrow and difficult to nudge past the seemingly endless caravan of oncoming tour buses. Within minutes the driver switched on the wipers as the snow began to land on the windscreen where it immediately started to huddle in silvery grey squadrons. The sky too became grey and the sun lost its strength to the impenetrable mountain mist. Trollstigen had become another of Norway’s several worlds; a cold, inhospitable place that was frequently made impassable by the weather and was therefore closed to tourists and locals. A place one would readily recognise as being occupied by the Huldufolk, the hidden people – more about those ghostly guys later!

A dozen chilled minutes and a dozen frozen photographs later we were back on board the bus chittering as we wiped the melting snow from camera lenses and dried misted-up spectacles with soggy tissues.

At the other end of the Trollstigen the road descended in much the same coiling way it had ascended…crawling in low gear from a great height down the twisting, zigzagging, now snowless, narrow road. This time, some people snoozed, some people snapped, some people screamed!

Something told me it was going to be a frightening descent: perhaps it was in the way the driver reached nervously into his jacket pocket and in an act of benign resignation hung from his rear-view mirror a set of purple rosary beads.

Now, for those of you who like an ordered life, here is an account of an average day in my life aboard the Midnatsol cruise ship:

• 7am: Get up, tidy cabin, open hatches on the portholes taking care not to open the actual portholes as my cabin is only 3 feet above the waterline! Go to the on-board gym, run 4 miles on the treadmill. Bid ‘Guten Morgen’ to the German guy who’s also a keen runner. We are the only two regulars in the gym.

• 7.30am: 20 minutes in the sauna, alone in the sauna. Watch the snowed-capped Norwegian mountains drift by.

• 8am: Scandinavian breakfast: muesli with yoghurt; fill a side plate with crispbread and slices of Jarlsberg cheese, add cucumber, slices of boiled egg, herring, more hard cheese, fruit juice, coffee and some more hard cheese for the extra crispbreads.

• 9am: About one-and-a-half to two hours working on the daily diary, running log, building a poem, unfortunately no email on board.

• 11am: Fill up coffee mug and go to top deck – weather has been fabulous, bright sunshine every day but tempered with a chilly north wind. Talk to some of the people I’ve met, read about our next port of call (Trondheim was Norway’s first capital when the country was unified and is a town of wooden buildings blah blah very musical blah blah two theatres and an opera house blah blah invaded by mercenaries blah blah devasted by the plague blah blah don’t even think about buying whisky here, it costs a fortune blah blah) – Trondheim turns out to be, let’s be gracious and say ‘unremarkable’.

• 12.30pm: Lunch: all kinds of soups, meats, seafood, salads, veggie stuff and a choice of dessert…mainly consisting of about 800 different cakes!

• 2pm: Excursions to watch sea eagles, or to enjoy a Viking Feast, explore Tromso’s art galleries and museums, walk on a glacier or slip on a glacier more likely, visit Europe’s most northerly point at Nordkapp or simply experience Finnmark’s pristine environment and multi-ethnic past and present – all from the comfort of a tour bus with a guide who’s been on a stand-up comedy course…a very short stand-up comedy course. “Ladies and gentlemen, they say that Japan is the most expensive tourist destination in the world, followed by Norway. Well, this year we are trying to be No.1!!!” Most folk choose to stay on board to sleep off lunch.

• 4pm: Coffee time on the top deck where there’s some soft rock music being played and a few people are wallowing in the Jacuzzi. On this part of the trip I have given up drinking beer. I drink just coffee. A small glass of lager costs £5.60, so can you imagine the price of a dram. Stick to coffee. When you board the ship you can buy a Hurtigruten mug and throughout the cruise you can fill it for free with tea or coffee at anytime, 24-hours a day. There’s a catch though: the mug costs £20. I bought one believing it would cost a fiver or so. I drank 47 cups of coffee in 6 days.

• 6pm: First sitting for dinner: waiter service at your designated table. I was at Table 35 with Sid and Heather who did some voluntary work at a school in West Sussex. Sid had just retired from a career in selling agricultural machinery. Also at our table were Nina and Heine from Denmark who spoke no English. Dinner was, shall I say, a rather one-sided, one voiced affair…they now all know more Scottish poems, stories and jokes than any other living Danes or English people. I must be honest and tell you that the food was extremely good, and there was plenty of it. Our evenings were spent mainly on deck in the bar (the rich Germans drinking wine and beers, the poor British with their mugs of free coffee). There was live music every evening from your very own Johnny Schandy, all the way here from over there! Johnny sang rather garbled singalong Abba songs (Can you hear the drums Fernando), Everly Brothers songs (Walk right back to me this minute), Elton John hits (I’m a Rochette Man) and a selection of Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch pop songs…every night was Eurovision Night.

• 11.45pm Passengers begin to gather on the top deck…the mountains are sentries to this watery kingdom. The thankful air has become more chilled as we sail ever further north. A few people are beginning to wear fleeces, hats and even gloves. Some are stamping their feet to keep warm; others have their complimentary tartan blanket draped over their shoulders. A tangible silence falls across the entire ship, prow to stern, port to starboard. It is midnight. Midnight and in the washed-out west the weakened sun is a ball of pale gold. We stare at it, giving thanks, giving praise. Through the troughs of a long day it has traversed the vibrant blueness of a cloudless sky and now, without rest, without sleep, without a breather, it has fallen as far as our tilting planet will allow. From this moment of midnight, our life-giver now commences its slow climb back to the high point of noon. We are in the area of the world that the sea possesses. We stand as statues in the celebrated light of the Midnight Sun: we Earthlings are being introduced to one of the universe’s great realm of natural wonders.

Nordkapp is Europe’s most northerly point. During the short summer season the local reindeer graze on the tundra’s thin grass for 2 – 3 hours then take short walks to digest the food. Then they feed for another few hours and take another stroll to aid the digestion. It’s a life not dissimilar to being on board a cruise ship!

That’s why I kept my running going. I even ran at Nordkapp. The tour buses spill their cargo of sheep into the tourist centre. But I do not follow them…I head with my small backpack back along the lonely cliff top road to a secluded spot well beyond the car parks and snack bars. I change into my running gear and stash my clothes behind a rock – hoping that the Huldufolk are not partial to a Bill Oddie jacket or a pair of Regatta cargo trousers! It’s a good run, not far because I don’t want to miss the bus but far enough to disappear behind a hill and feel free of human contact. It is a good feeling that: that loneliness of the long distance runner. I hate the loneliness. I love the loneliness. It’s a sporting conundrum, a tickler, a proper pancake.

The sea salt tingles in my nostrils, I breathe deep and rounded gulps of pure air, the cloud free sky, cobalt and clear, forces me to shield my eyes with my hand. There’s no one else around, my pace is good, I feel strong. In this silent, empty landscape my senses sharpen. A keen awareness comes over me. I see, smell, hear and feel the hugeness of being human. Skilfully I am eating the sky.

The Sami people have always worshiped the sun as a god and the earth as a mother. Today they worship the quad bike as passionately. Norway has 25,000 Sami. The men wear four cornered hats representing north and south, east and west. They say if you wear a four-cornered hat you will never be lost; you simply follow one of the four corners and you’re bound to end up somewhere!

It had taken six days and six nights to sail the length of Norway’s torn west coast. Today it took only two hours to fly from Kirkenes in the far north of Norway to the country’s capital Oslo in the deep south. The entire length of the country was under flattened cloud cover so there was nothing to see. Nearing Oslo, the aircraft descended below the clouds and we could then observe just how dramatic was the change in the landscape. Gone were the wild, bare mountains with their secret pockets of snow and the great gashes in the yielding landmass made by the incessant vigour of soft water on hard rock. Here, below us, was the comfort of pasture and soft-waved lakes.

Now so far on this trek I had not been in the position of having to physically carry the backpacks too far. The itinerary I had planned was proving to be a successful cunning plan. It collapsed in Oslo. I had not pre-booked an hotel in the city: this proved to be a serious mistake and a costly one at that! Lugging two backpacks and the camera bag around a bustling city centre you are not familiar with, searching for a hotel was not the best introduction to Oslo. My general annoyance at not having thought of this in advance and the general stress of aimlessly trudging through the city was beginning to take its toll. In something resembling a foul temper I marched into the SAS Radisson Hotel…a 37-floor skyscraper that dominates the city skyline. I had an inkling that it might be pricey, judging from the Mercs, Ferraris and BMWs pulling up and the drivers handing over their keys so that someone else can park their cars. Another sign that this was an expensive hotel was the number of vagrants, hanging around the entrance begging.

Now Oslo has more than its fair share of beggars, arsonists, law-breakers, beer-brewers, slaves, swan-killers, thugs, vagabonds, underhanded gangs of traitors, hen-thieves, bandits, heavies, gangster-rappers, knock-kneed chicken kissers, down-and-outs, arm-wrestlers, disgraced supreme court judges, pirates, wigmakers, skulkers, eider duck lovers, desperadoes and archpriests (sorry I got carried away there, thought I was describing Glasgow for a moment); some of the individual cases looked shamefully sad. But even though my stay in the city was short, I spotted what were very obvious drug deals and drug stashes being made. One of these was at 4.30am (my sleep patterns during this trip were erratic due to the light nights) when from my window on the sixth floor I could see two youths picking up packets from under a rubbish bin. Oslo is a fine city, it takes pride in itself as a community and it treats its guests exceptionally well. Its underbelly though, is as scarred and scratched as that of New York or London.

Almost as if to compete with Sydney, Oslo has recently constructed a fabulous building in which to present opera and ballet of an international standard. The Operahuset, opened in 2008, was designed by the Norwegian firm of Snohetta and it resembles the agreeable geometry of Arctic Terns with slopes, inclines, slants, angles and diagonals that are so gratifying to photographers. The building won the 2009 Mies van der Rohe Award, the highly prestigious European Prize for contemporary architecture. I overdosed on photographs of this standoffish, impersonal yet visually satisfying building. Yet it was not as snooty as it appeared to be, local people and visitors adore its dual attitude of superiority and friendliness: indeed at one point I found myself edging into a sharp edged right angle to photograph a most personal episode when I spotted a gentleman proposing, in time honoured fashion, on bended knee, to his sweetheart. So the operahuset appears to be fulfilling its role of international culture house and local community attraction.

Click here for Part III: Iceland.

Ask me about Icelandic cuisine. Go on, ask me. Say, “Tell us John, do you know anything about Icelandic cuisine?” Funny you should ask that:

Well one of that country’s specialities is ‘Hrutspungar’: ram’s testicles pressed in blocks, then boiled and cured in lactic acid. Well you asked!

Many Icelanders eat ‘Hrutspungar’ at their annual feast called ‘Porrablot’. I didn’t actually try them myself but some say the taste is not particularly distinct. Others say the testicles taste sour due to the lactic acid. Now you certainly wouldn’t get the Scots eating something like that…for a start we’d boil the bollocks in whisky first!

When the 757 jet landed at Keflavik, Iceland’s airport, the late evening sun was the colour of marmalade spread upon little toasted houses. In the distance the lava fields were browny black, the colour of a racehorse’s rump, the hills were the blue of a policeman’s summer shirt. It was a colourful place!
Keflavik proved to be a relaxed introduction to Iceland. It is a quiet town, a very quiet town. After a good night’s rest I took a stroll down Keflavik’s main street, the very quiet main street. On this bright but cloudy Saturday morning I expected to see florists placing plants on the pavement in front of their shops, van drivers unloading extra stock or shop fronts being hastily swept and windows washed. But no, there was not a mortal soul to be seen, and those mortal souls that were to be seen were all but invisible! Keflavik was deadlavik!

The town looks somewhat like commercial America; restaurants, filling stations, out of town shops all sprawling out from a main drag. And then it takes on the appearance of a brutal Russian outpost town with dreary blocks of flats fronted by overfilled car parks!

When the time came for me to move on to Reykjavik, I asked of the hotel receptionist, “Can you tell me the way to the bus station please?”
“Yes, you go along the main street until you see a boat on land. Then you go to the roundabout. It has five exits, you take one of these and go to where there is a space rocket outside the building and the bus station is opposite that space rocket. There are no signs for the bus station and there are no buses there but it is next to the candle making workshop. You will find it.”

This jumble of images…all delivered with an emphatically honest nonchalance and childlike innocence made me realise I needed to get out of that town, and quickly. I heaved the backpacks over my shoulder and walked briskly along the main street. The space rocket was not hard to find…space rockets are not hard to find in any town. I was at the bus station an hour before lift-off!

Some say that it’s a weird country, Iceland – and certainly it takes a certain pride in its peculiarities. Let me give you an example: Iceland’s oldest brewery is named after a legendary Viking called Egill Skallagrimsson who wrote poems when he was just three years old. Maybe he was a sort of underage Dylan Thomas or Brendan Behan. Anyway, a couple of years later he killed a man in a fight. Lesson to be learnt: never mix poems with pints and never criticise a 5- year-old’s poems! Nowadays the brewery produces a light lager called Polar Beer…a nice play on words.

On the subject of words, there are dozens of writers in Iceland and a huge number of books are published there each year, both in Icelandic and in English. Literature is one of the mainstays of Icelandic culture. Iceland’s best known writers are Snorri Sturlusson who notated the great sagas way back in the 13th century and Halldor Laxness who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. He died in 1998 aged 96. It would be safe to say that Icelandic literature is progressing well. They’ve been creating prose and poetry for at least ten centuries, and they now have two good writers.

The name Reykjavik comes from the two Norse words: ‘vik’ meaning bay, and ‘reyk’ meaning smoke. As in countless other areas of Iceland, steam issues forth from the ground wherever there is a fault in the earth. Sometimes it feels like you’re walking across a cooker.

The city centre of Reykjavik is renowned throughout Europe as one of the greatest nightspots. Thanks to its mushrooming music scene and its clubs it has earned itself the reputation as a thrilling attraction for thousands of young people on a Friday or Saturday night. Today is Friday, it’s 6pm and I’ve just returned from Laugavegur, the city centre’s main street, where crowds of young people of all nationalities have already started gathering for a night on the town. They’re here to listen to Iceland’s DJs like Jon Atli, DJ KGB or the 60-year old DJ Andrea Jonsdottir affectionately known as the Rock’n’Roll Grandmother. And it’s all so good-natured and easy-going; these young people are simply out for a good time. There’s no trouble, and there’s not one policeman or woman to be seen. I even saw one young man put his empty lager can in a bin.

That was yesterday evening; today is Saturday and as the Icelanders value their weekends off, everywhere is closed and there’s very little to do. I’m in my hotel room overlooking the city’s commercial and industrial area. It’s an unenticing 40-mintue walk into the city along the dreary main road and it has been raining all afternoon. I have a sandwich, a yoghurt, fruit and water for dinner. There are 16 swimming pools in Reykjavik; I could go to one of them but I don’t. So I am fed up.

Travel can be great fun but there are times when you have to ask yourself why you’re doing this. At the moment I feel rather lonely. I haven’t spoken to anyone today except to ask directions or to buy postcards. Tomorrow is Sunday, another very quiet day. The weather forecast isn’t good and I have nothing planned except an early morning run. So what am I doing here? Why exactly am I doing this trek? What’s the point of this journey? And how come the time passes so slowly?

I ask myself all these pathetic questions and then I hit upon to the real question I need to ask myself: why am I so far away from the woman I love? Why have I removed myself in this way? How long will it be before I get back to her?

I stare out of the hotel window at the blankness of the closed lawn mower showroom and the empty Securitas offices opposite. There’s no-one in the street. The traffic lights at the junction turn to green and a solitary car inches forward into what passes for night in Iceland. The half-eaten sandwich sits on the window sill.

I pick up the mobile…

Some statistics: in his book ‘Blood of the Isles’, Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford University, notes that in Iceland the male Y-chromosome shows 75% of the men to be of Scandinavian extraction, and the other 25% of Irish/Scottish extraction. Those numbers are reversed when it comes to the mitochondrial female DNA: 75% of the females in Iceland are of Irish/Scottish descent and only 25% are of Scandinavian descent.

The tour bus comes to a halt in Thingvellir by Oxara – a protected national park and a UNESCO world heritage site. Thingvellir is the centre of Icelandic culture as it reflects the social and political history of the people. This is where the Althingi, or government structure, came together for the first time in 930 AD. The national park lies within a belt of volcanic activity where fissures cut cross Iceland forming the junction of the American and Eurasian tectonic plates. Things are on the move…west of the gorge the land is edging westward and east of the gorge it is moving eastward, at a rate of 3mm per year. Thus does Iceland straddle two continents. The tour bus stops: once again I buck the tourist route and head off in the opposite direction of the tourists bah-bahing their way to the souvenir shop. I frog-march for five minutes, far enough for the sounds of the buses’ idling engines to disappear and close enough to nature to hear a well-camouflaged Golden Plover’s plaintive call topple over the rough tundra as delicately as would a butterfly dart over a summer meadow.

The geyser Strokkur lies within the geothermal field at Haukadalur. This is where the original ‘geysir’ is also to be found. Geysir gave its name to all erupting springs but sadly it is now inactive. However, since a major earthquake in 2000, Geysir has erupted very occasionally…surprising unwary visitors with a hot shower! Strokkur, on the other hand, is a fountain geyser that erupts several times each hour sending a shower of water 20 metres into the air. And when it erupted the Viking re-enactors cheered and celebrated by showering each other with lager, occasionally managing to swallow some of it!

In South Uist in the Hebrides there is a mountain called Hecla. I always knew that was a Viking name. A large proportion of the place names in the The Western Isles are from Old Norse and indeed the same can be said for certain place names and street names in Cumbria. When I saw Iceland’s largest active volcano, also called Hekla, I asked a local historian the origin of the name. He told me the story: in the Middle Ages Hekla the volcano was thought to be the gateway to hell. The way it pumped out fire and spat out flame, its sulphuric stink and its deep, resounding voice thundering across the island. It was no surprise that people thought it was the entry into hell. In 1785 two Icelanders were the first to climb Hekla and when they came back down the people said, “Tell us, is it really the gateway to Hell? Tell us like a true man. Is Hekla the gateway to Hell?”

Now at that time Iceland was, very reluctantly, a colony belonging to Denmark. The Danes disliked the Icelanders; indeed they subdued and mistreated the Icelanders. An Icelander would likely have ripped out the heart of a Dane and slapped him across the face with it. The Danes, on the other hand, were of the opinion that the Icelanders were worthless and that they’d live in your ear and feed off the wax. So the senior of the two Icelandic climbers looked at each other and announced to their countrymen and countrywomen, “Yes, it is the gateway to hell, and believe this as the truth my countryfolk, they speak Danish down there.”

In fact the word ‘hekla’ means an item of sleeveless clothing worn by women; a sort of stole that is draped over the shoulders. In the way clouds fold over the top of a mountain.

The cloud says “I want to marry the earth.”
The earth has nothing to say about this,
but the rivers run away and Hekla says,
“You can kiss me but I won’t marry you.”

And speaking of fairies, let me introduce you to our unseen guests here tonight, The Huldufolk of the North Atlantic, the Hidden People who live in the rocks in the mountains, for they are here, just as you are there and I am here and the insatiable spirits of the seabirds are here also. Is that not so? Quack.

Just as the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the English have their fairies, the people of the north Atlantic have the Huldufolk. But there is a difference between the cultures. The urbane English think fairies and elves make pleasant little ornaments for a child’s bedroom; the Welsh think fairies are the stuff of legend and have no bearing on rugby whatsoever; the ecumenical Irish include them in their poems and songs and do a roaring trade in tourism thanks to some clever marketing of Leprechauns playing whistles; the Scots no longer believe in fairies – but they know they’re out there. The peoples of the North Atlantic believe with a packet of passion in the Huldufolk and the Trolls. I have evidence: they build little houses for them. Yes, little houses, like dolls houses to you and me. And they furnish them. Little tables, little chairs, little beds, little toilets. Also, if a new road or airport or tunnel is being built, the government, local authority and contractors must consult with local people about where the local Huldufolk are to be found along the proposed route. If they happen to live in a rock or a great boulder that is in the way of the planned road, the contractors must divert that road around the Hidden Folk’s home. Simple. This is perfectly true. If it’s a lie I am telling, it’s a lie I was told. Sometimes though, the local authority or contractor will say they can’t go around that rock for geographic reasons or because of seismic activity, or even for financial reasons. That’s when the trouble flares up. On the one side the local people get steamed up about protecting the Huldufolk’s homes, not wanting to cause dismay to the gentle ones, and on the other hand the authorities harp on about finite resources, lack of manpower or delays to time schedules. The result is stalemate.

That is when a third party is called in: the Elf Negotiator.

…and so, once upon a time…or as they say in the Faroes…Einaferth var tath, the Huldufolk, the Hidden folk, the grey ones, lived in Paradise….

After my walk on the glacier, did I tell you about that…well I did…I went on an adventure to walk on the black, grit-strewn glacier. It was a bit scary. Anyway, I emailed family members to tell them how exciting it had been edging slowly up the tongue of the great glacier and digging my crampons into the grey-black ice surrounding 50 metre deep crevasses. Each of them wrote back with dire warnings about how I should be taking good care of myself and watching out because ice can be dangerous and slippery and another thing, stop going so close to the edge of the sea cliffs! My son in the USA had no such admonishments: after all he himself was just about to head out to Nevada’s Death Valley to do some extreme running in temperatures of over 120 degrees. All he said in his email reply was that the soccer team he plays for in Colorado is called ‘Glacier United’. I emailed back saying, that’s an odd name for a football team, especially for one based in an American state that can be extremely hot.

Well, he said, we’re called Glacier United because all the players are over the hill and move very slowly.

Click here for Part IV: The Faroe Isles.

The flight from Reykjavik to Faroe Islands covers a distance of about 500 miles in 1 hour, 15 minutes. Below, the North Atlantic is a silver blue, the kind of blue you’d associate with Google maps. Today there are few wave-inspired white flecks as the ocean is calm. It is a pleasant flight…until the Avroliner RJ100 banks steeply to allow its port wing to kiss Mykinesholmur, the great lighthouse-tipped seacliff that introduces us to the uproarious, tumultuous, unabashed drama that is Foroyar, The Faroes.

Rust-red earth-topped houses squat precariously beneath Ascot-green glacier-scoured mountains. Red-faced women and thick-haired men squat precariously beneath the rust-red earth-topped houses. The rust-red houses are Nordic, the Ascot-green glacier scoured mountains are Himalayan, the thick-haired men are Scandinavian, the red-faced women are Celtic. That is no lie: for here, again according to their DNA, 87% of the men are of Scandinavian extraction and 84% of the women are of Irish/Scottish extraction, that’s 84%. Just as young men today might drop in at the off-licence to pick up a couple of lagers for the match on telly tonight, so the Vikings on their way to skelp the Icelanders and The Faroese dropped in on Scotland and picked up a few women!

The Faroese people are extremely generous; they even loaned Iceland $52m during the economic collapse. Now there’s a financial fable for the future.

I had hired a car and booked a room at the Streym Hotel in Torshavn, which is the capital of the Faroes: indeed it is the smallest capital city in the world with a population of 19,000. I had also arranged to spend a few nights at other hotels in order to visit different locations in this 18-island country. And although The Faroes prides itself on a superb public transport network with buses and ferries providing the most remarkable joined-up service for both locals and tourists, having a hire car allowed me the benefit of being able to stop at the hundreds of viewpoints to take hundreds of photographs.

My view from my Torshavn hotel was a 100% improvement on that in Iceland. No bland, nondescript, commercial district emptiness here, the view took in a stretch of unruffled water that carried the eye to the island of Nolsoy. And with that view came daffodil sunrises, white seamists, computer-grey fogbanks, the hollow gold of the sun setting on a green island, a variety of weathers and wonders.

After a few days in Torshavn, I moved camp to the Northern Isles and the town of Klaksvik on the island of Bordoy. Klaksvik hugs the two shores at the head of the Nordoyarvik fjord and has about 5,000 inhabitants. The town accounts for 30% of the country’s total fish exports. In recent years the Faroese have been building a series of underground and undersea tunnels to connect the 18 islands. These tunnels can be several miles long and as they are not lined – they just have bare rock – and have minimal lighting, they do take a bit of getting used to, especially the single lane tunnels!

These northern islands are lofty places and the country’s most vertiginous peaks are to be found here; 10 of them are over 800m high. Now you will remember that earlier I told you about just how determined I was to visit the great Shetland seacliff Da Kame…now I shall tell you about the great Faroese seacliff called Enniberg which I needed for my collection. You’ll remember of course that I collect seacliffs in the way small boys collect cards with footballers on them.

Enniberg is a sovereign among seacliffs. It features a ridgeless sheer vertical wall of rock that rises from the ocean to a height of 754m. It is believed to be the highest promontory in the world. I had to visit and photograph Enniberg.

I booked a trip on the Alpha Pilot which would take me around the island of Vidoy to its north-east coast where the seacliffs lined up in order of height: high, higher, highest and further until we came to the tip of the island where Enniberg soared to the skies like a Saturn rocket on its way to launch yet another Sky Television satellite!

During a Monday morning rush hour (I passed at least six cars) I drove through two of those scary tunnels to arrive at Hvannasund (Kwannsund) early enough to enjoy the morning sunshine and to realise what a perfectly wonderful place this village was, surrounded by pointy glacier-gouged mountains and nourished by a perfectly calm fjord. The playful laughter and chuckles from the children’s play area painted colourful notes on the morning’s canvas. Ah…this was an idyll. All was tranquil, all was restful, all was serene – it could, quite rightly, be said the place had a very pleasant ambulance.

Until, that is, a bus-load of boisterous secondary school students turned up shouting and cracking jokes and laughing and play-fighting and singing and giggling like nervous chickens auditioning for Strictly. I climbed aboard Alpha Pilot…the students pushed and pulled, bellowed and belched as they too boarded the boat.

We sailed for an hour to Enniberg which as I’ve mentioned is the world’s highest promontory at 754 metres…straight up! The seacliffs leading up to this marvel of the northern islands were marvellous in themselves and riding the choppy waters of the High Atlantic we sailed into and through darkened caves, great arches and magical sea grottoes. We fed the fulmars, woke the Kittiwakes, played with the puffins, guffawed with the guillemots, didn’t go anywhere near the shags…

But as we sailed closer and closer to the hefty, thickset mass of granite that was Enniberg, all we could do was gasp. There it stood, a soaring, towering slab of pure power standing fierce and unyielding against the savagery and might of an obstinate ocean. Oh it was spine-tingling and oh it was hair-raising and oh it was eye-thrilling. So eye-thrilling that even some of the teenagers said ‘Wow!’

It was so rewarding to see such a busy seabird city as well…thousands of birds including fulmar, kittiwakes, guillemots, arctic skua and of course terna, sula, lundi and tjaldur (the Faroese names for Arctic tern, gannet, puffin and oystercatcher – the country’s national bird). By this time I had knew the students well and as we ploughed through the green waters surrounding the headland, we had a good laugh getting wet and sliding around on the slippery deck. They turned out to be a really friendly group of kids. One of the lads offered me part of his packed lunch, a slice of pilot whale meat and blubber, called ‘grind og spik’ in Faroese. It was a thin, circular wafer of fishy, rubbery, black and red meat. You probably know that the Faroese maintain their tradition of hunting whales. Over 900 pilot whales are killed each year for food. There is worldwide objection to this but the Faroese claim they can justify this as they have been harvesting the sea for well over a thousand years: their claim is that they do not have an ‘agriculture’ but an ‘aquaculture’. This is not the time or the place to enter into a debate about whaling. But you can read more about the Faroese attitude to, and methods of whaling and have your say by going to the joint website of the Faroese Ministry of Fisheries & the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; it’s a simple and thus memorable address www.whaling.fo

After the boat trip I remained in Hvannasund for a while just soaking up the atmosphere of this glorious little townland. I did a drawing and took a lot of photos. It was sunny and warm – how I wished others had been with me on this particular sea trip.

And if I say nothing else about this visit to view the majestic Enniberg let me say this; the experience will stay burned in my memory forever. It was a colossal seacliff – up, up not just dizzying, but frighteningly treacherous! Down, down not just awe-inspiring but devastatingly humbling!

To complete my journey through The Faroes I drove up the twisty, Alpine-like road to Gjogv (jek-v), The Faroes Islands’ very own chocolate box village complete with a duck pond, a tar-painted wooden church overlooking the harbour and a dainty, shallow stream winding its trickly way through a scattering of colourful, jewellery box houses. The village has its own small jetty tucked into a cleft in the hillside.

My overnight accommodation in Gjogv (jek-v) was at the turf-roofed Gjaargardur hostel which resembles an overgrown Swiss Chalet.  It was basic but comfortable and next morning, before breakfast, I ran up the long road to the top of the encircling mountains. Hard enough work at the best of times but especially difficult and indeed infuriating as I was being persistently buzzed and bombed by savage packs of oystercatchers. When I say ‘savage’, I suppose I mean only slightly angry, and when I say packs, I really mean there only two or three. But they do squeal a lot!

After breakfast I climbed the western hill to visit the local sea cliffs. Lovable puffins abound on the surrounding cliffs. Their Faroese name is lundi which is where we get our own Lundy Island from.

On the last day of my trek I flew from The Faroes to London Stansted and landed at just after 3pm. I had booked a ticket on the 6.15pm train from London Euston to Oxenholme. Clare would be there to pick me up. I had left three hours for the trip across London. Better safe than sorry, or so I foolishly believed.

There were no trains from Stansted to London that day. A trackside fire was the reason. The airport was in chaos. Thousands of passengers were manhandling their bulky luggage up and down stairs, not knowing where the heck to go and when they got there they were impolitely told they could not travel to London by train.  Many were attempting to climb aboard the London-bound buses. All three of them, even though they were already full. Ah, wasn’t it just so good to return to good old British turmoil, bedlam, unruliness, pandemonium and anarchy!

After a month of prolonged travel; island-hopping in the Shetlands, edging up Norway’s frayed coastline, inching up glaciers in Iceland and creeping along cliff tops in The Faroe islands, I had encountered no difficulty, no fuss and no bother when it came to travel by bus, boat, plane or land rover.

Yet back in the UK I somehow knew that taking the train from Stansted to London would not be as simple as it sounds. It would not be an adventure if the British transport system were to disappoint us and take us where we wanted to go.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I end my Atlantic Arc trek with a poem. On this fascinating trip I had expected to write many poems about the merciless seascapes, the sweeping landscapes, and the thrilling seacliffs of the north Atlantic islands. But all that emerged from the heart-store was a batch of what are essentially love poems…but that’s the gawkiness of art, the oafishness of writing, the ticklishness of poetry…like I said about Shetland, you may set out to look for wildlife but find something other than otters.