Faroe Islands: Wild Atlantic Expedition

Day by day

1. Day 1Arrival and Vagar Island1 hr 25 flight · Easy walking · Briefing

   Atlantic Airways fly direct from Edinburgh to Vagar in about an hour and twenty five minutes, and the landing is part of the trip: the runway sits in a narrow valley two kilometres east of Sorvagur, with the mountains close on both sides. Your leader meets the group in arrivals.

   We do not waste the afternoon. A single-lane tunnel of roughly 1.4 kilometres runs through the mountain to Gasadalur, a village of about a dozen people that had no road at all until the mid 2000s. Before the tunnel, the postman walked over a pass of more than four hundred metres with the mail on his back, three times a week. Five minutes from the car park is the viewpoint over Mulafossur, where the village stream leaves the cliff and drops into the open Atlantic with nothing underneath it.

   On the way back we stop at Bour, turf roofs and black timber above the fjord, looking west to the silhouette of Tindholmur with its five peaks and, beyond it, the sea stacks of Drangarnir. In the evening we eat together and run the full expedition briefing: how the week works, the kayaking plan, the kit check and the weather.

2. Day 2North to Klaksvik, and the first day on the water2 hrs driving · First paddle · Camp by the sea

   After breakfast we drive north, and the drive is a small event in itself. The Vagatunnilin runs 4.9 kilometres and 105 metres below the sea to get us off Vagar. The Eysturoyartunnilin is 11.2 kilometres long and contains the world's first undersea roundabout, 73 metres down, lit by an eighty metre steel and light sculpture by the Faroese artist Trondur Patursson. Then the Nordoyatunnilin, 6.2 kilometres from Leirvik under the sound to Klaksvik.

   Klaksvik is the second town in the Faroes, about five thousand people wrapped around a fishing harbour with mountains standing over it on every side. This is where the kayaking starts. Our local guides run the safety brief, fit everyone to a boat, and we launch into the sound and paddle north towards Kalsoy, the long thin island the Faroese nicknamed the flute because it is drilled through with tunnels.

   We land near Sydradalur and make camp beside the sea. It is mid June, so the light does not go: dinner is eaten at ten at night in what still looks like early evening, with fulmars going past at eye level and the water flat and grey-green in the sound.

3. Day 3Under the cliffs of KalsoyFull day paddling · Seabirds · White nights

   The best day on the water. We work north along the Kalsoy coast, and the scale takes a while to adjust to: basalt cliffs going up out of the sea in horizontal layers like stacked bookshelves, streams coming off the top of them and blowing back up in the wind before they land. We nose into sea caves and rocky inlets where the swell allows, and land where there is somewhere to land, to stretch legs and eat something hot.

   This is seabird country at the right time of year. Puffins are ashore from mid May until the end of August and mid June is the heart of it, so expect them on the grassy ledges above and rafted on the water in front of the boats. Guillemots and razorbills come past low and fast, fulmars hang on the updraught off the cliff and barely move a wing, and kittiwakes make the noise.

   We camp again on a headland. In the third week of June there are close to twenty hours of daylight and no real darkness at all, so the evening simply goes on: the light turns from white to gold to a long, slow, pink dusk that has not finished by the time everyone gives up and goes to bed.

4. Day 4Back through the fjords to Klaksvik3 to 4 hrs paddling · Marine wildlife · Hot shower

   The final kayaking day, and often the calmest. We paddle south through the sound towards Klaksvik with the mountains reflected in the water on a still morning. Harbour seals are common along the fjord edges and will follow the boats at a distance, and white-beaked and white-sided dolphins are seen in these waters, though never on demand.

   We land at Klaksvik in the afternoon, hand back the boats and the kit, and check into the hotel. After three days on the water and two nights under canvas, a hot shower and a bed with sheets on it lands extremely well. In the evening we eat together in town and mark the end of the kayaking properly.

5. Day 5The ridge to Kallur Lighthouse2.4 km each way · 20 min ferry · Exposure

   The twenty minute ferry from Klaksvik to Sydradalur takes the little M/F Sam across the sound, and then we drive the length of Kalsoy on a road that is more tunnel than road: four unlit single-lane bores with passing bays, the longest of them the 2,250 metre Trollanestunnilin, cold and dripping and entirely dark. We pass Mikladalur, where the bronze Kopakonan, the seal woman of the old story, stands in the sea below the village.

   From Trollanes the walk begins. It is roughly 2.4 kilometres each way with about two hundred metres of ascent, on grass and sheep tracks rather than a made path, and it takes most people forty to forty five minutes to reach the lighthouse. It is not a hard walk. It is, however, an exposed one: the ground falls away steeply on both sides near the top and there is nothing between you and the sea. From the lighthouse you look east across Kunoy, Bordoy and Vidoy, and north to nothing but water.

   In the afternoon we drive south to Torshavn, which at fourteen thousand people is a capital city with the footprint of a market town. We are here for three nights, so unpack properly.

6. Day 6Torshavn, Tinganes and the Viking farm at KirkjubourCulture day · 1,000 years · Since 1550

   A day off the water and off the hill. We start in Torshavn on Tinganes, the low rock peninsula between the two harbours where the Ting has met since the Viking age. The Faroese parliament, the Logting, is already described as long established when it turns up in the Faereyinga saga in the mid 900s, which puts it among the oldest surviving assemblies anywhere. The government still works out of the same red timber buildings with grass on their roofs; Munkastovan and Leigubudin survived the fire of 1673 and are the oldest of them.

   After lunch we drive twenty minutes south-west to Kirkjubour, which was the bishop's seat and the cultural centre of the islands for four hundred years. Three things stand within a hundred metres of each other. The Magnus Cathedral, begun around 1300 and the largest medieval building in the Faroes, now roofless. St Olav's Church, built before 1200 and the oldest church in the country. And Kirkjubourgardur, whose smoke room dates to the 11th century and which is very probably one of the oldest inhabited wooden houses in the world: the Patursson family have lived in it since 1550 and the seventeenth generation is there now.

   We eat together in Torshavn in the evening. The town punches far above its size for food, and this is the night to try something you would not order at home.

7. Day 7Puffins and seabird cliffs on Mykines45 min ferry · 125,000 pairs · Guided only

   Mykines is the far west of the archipelago and the best seabird island in the country. The ferry M/F Josup runs from Sorvagur and takes about forty five minutes; there are three sailings a day through the summer season and boarding involves a small step across, which is worth knowing in advance. The island holds nine permanent residents and something in the order of 250,000 breeding seabirds across fifteen species.

   The whole outfield is protected and can only be walked with a licensed Faroese guide, with a cap of two hundred visitors a day and access between 10:00 and 17:00. We walk out from the village along the cliff edge to the viewpoint at a Rogvu, which looks down over the largest puffin colony in the islands, roughly 125,000 pairs of them. In mid June they are ashore and busy, standing about outside their burrows in a way that makes it very hard to leave. Kittiwakes and fulmars work the cliffs below, and out on Mykinesholmur beyond the footbridge is the only northern gannet colony in the Faroe Islands.

   One honest note. The path across the footbridge to Mykinesholmur and the lighthouse is closed through the summer months to protect the recovering puffin population, and the ground beyond a Rogvu is also shut because of landslide risk. You will see the bridge and the holm; you will not walk to them in June. What you get instead is several hours above one of the great seabird colonies of the North Atlantic. We are back on the afternoon boat and eat our farewell dinner in Torshavn.

8. Day 8Saksun and the flight homeTide dependent · 1 hr transfer · Working farm

   We check out and drive north-west to Saksun, which is eleven people, a working sheep farm and a church of 1858 that was taken down in Tjornuvik and carried over the mountains piece by piece. It sits in a natural amphitheatre of cliffs at the head of a valley, and the sight of it stops conversation in the vehicle.

   Below the village is Pollurin, which used to be a natural harbour until a storm filled its entrance with sand. It is now a tidal lagoon: full and mirror-flat at high water, and at low tide a wide beach you can walk out along, around the headland, to where it opens to the sea. We go only if the tide allows, we keep to the marked paths, and we remember that all of this is somebody's farm.

   There is time for a coffee looking down the valley before we drive back to Vagar, about an hour away, for the flight to Edinburgh. Eight days, three of them on the water, one of the best seabird colonies in the North Atlantic, and a set of photographs that nobody at home will quite believe.