Fit for the Faroes

From the mountaintop road above Kvivik, green slopes fell steeply away to the sea, drawing my eyes outward, over the village, to the soft shapes of other islands drifting in the pale blue distance. More than a thousand years of Faroe Islands history lay in that view. It was like looking at a map of time itself.

Kvivik is a Viking village -- the real thing, not a restoration -- perched exactly where its ancient founders wanted it, deep in a narrow fiord where the sea was calm. On a beach, where boats could be drawn up and driftwood gathered. At the mouth of a stream, for fresh water. Among grassy hillsides, where sheep and a cow or two might graze.

The town is bigger now, of course, but not much, and it boasts electricity, television and a few e-mail addresses. All the same, if its original settlers were to pull their longboats up on this beach in the ultra-north Atlantic, they would feel right at home. They could even stay with relatives.

Two friends and I were doing almost that in September, though we couldn’t claim longboats or Faroese blood. We were renting a farmhouse in a seaside village over the mountain from Kvivik. Our landlord was a fisherman who raised sheep when he wasn’t at sea -- just as his ancestors did.

I’d have come to the Faroes for the light alone -- the clear light and those sweeping views. But I had trouble explaining it to folks back home. Why the Faroes? Because they were so far away. Because I knew almost nothing about them. Because, thanks to an old travel book I’d come across, they sounded interesting.

The author was a Victorian lady adventurer named Elizabeth Taylor, a Minnesota writer who hated cold weather but loved the far north and spent years in the Faroes, including all of World War I. She’s virtually unknown in the States but famous here for, among other things, documenting village life and giving art lessons to the islands’ first painters.

Art would have been inevitable, I think, even without her. The Faroes are a painter’s landscape, ready-made for abstraction. Wind and weather keep details at bay, reducing geography to its essence. Land. Sea. Sky. Nothing more.

There is no softness here, no luxury except the intense color of the grass that covers the islands’ harsh bones like an apple-green pelt. When it rains, the mountains look enameled.

There are no trees. No native land animals. No predators, unless you count people, and there aren’t many of them either. The population is about 48,000, not quite half of them in the bright-roofed harbor-side town of Torshavn, the Faroese capital.

An unexpected place

Technically, the Faroes aren’t an independent country; they’re a Danish possession with home rule. But they feel like their own country. And they’re certainly separate from everything.

They are the crests of underwater mountains -- 18 shards of dark-gray basalt jutting abruptly out of the sea, distantly surrounded by Iceland, Scotland, Norway and, even more distant, Norway’s Spitsbergen island. The islands are mostly long and skinny, with so many lobes and inlets that you’re never more than three miles from the sea.

I expected the climate to be cold so far north, but it wasn’t: This is where the Gulf Stream ends, and temperatures range from 37 degrees in winter to 52 degrees in summer. In late September, I needed gloves only once, but a rain jacket every day.

Change and permanence

The weather changed so often, and so fast, that each day felt like many days. One morning, I kept track: splinters of sun, a calm moment of warmth, then wind so fierce it thrashed the shrubs and grabbed at my clothes, then a blast of stinging rain as sharp as cold sand, then sun again -- and that was just before breakfast.

But my friends and I were lucky: This is a place that measures its annual sunshine not in days, but in hours. Torshavn gets 840 hours a year, on average. Even with near-daily rain, we had more than our share.

Summer tourists do better, and there are plenty of them to enjoy it. In June, July and August, nearly 50,000 visitors flood in, largely from Iceland and other Scandinavian countries.

If we’d been here in summer, the bird cliffs on Mykines would have been thick with nesting puffins -- the little yellow-beaked cuties that have become a Faroese symbol. Tour boats would have been cruising past the sea caves near Vestmanna. There would have been festivals in the villages, and everywhere the renowned dancing societies would have been performing, accompanying their age-old circle dances with nothing more than sung ballads and stamping feet.

But by mid-September, the puffins were gone, and so were the tourists. Museums had switched to winter hours, and even then we were sometimes the only visitors. Tour boats weren’t running -- bad weather, too few passengers. The dancing societies were taking a break, and the whole place seemed to be exhaling. Even the manager of the Torshavn tourist office was about to go to England with her hiking club to walk Hadrian’s Wall.

Taylor would have approved: “To really get the best out of a place,” she wrote, “you should see it out of the so-called proper season.” I agreed.

I hadn’t intended to follow in her footsteps, but I couldn’t help it: She’d been everywhere, reporting on evil spirits (the huldufolk), the first songs babies learn (“The puffin says Ur-r, Ur-r.”) and the details of the traditional Faroese whale hunt (the grindadrap, still carried out periodically on local beaches).

Although many things had changed -- the population had tripled, the standard of living had skyrocketed -- much of the culture Taylor knew was still alive.

Language, for one thing: Faroese is an offshoot of Old Norse, related to Icelandic and Norwegian. But it wasn’t written down until the middle of the 19th century, and I had trouble matching the spellings with the sounds.

Kollafjordur, for example, our temporary hometown, was pronounced more like “KUT-la-fyor-rur.” And when we drove south on Streymoy to see what may be the oldest inhabited farmstead in Europe, we weren’t going to Kirkjubour, we were going to “Chi-chi-ber.”

The big farmhouse there was made of blackened logs floated in from Norway, and it’s still in the hands of its original family, the tourist office manager told me. How far back does it go, I wondered. “Seventeen generations,” she said, counting off the names on her fingers to be sure.

Sticking together

All the towns, big and small, followed the old Viking pattern, with houses clustered tightly at the foot of a mountain just where it met the sea. Any vista held at least one community, and when there were several, they looked like trim on the hems of long green skirts.

A network of paved roads, bridges, undersea tunnels and ferryboats now links all 17 inhabited islands. This makes Faroese society so cohesive, I learned, that the island communities shouldn’t be thought of as separate entities but more like neighborhoods of a single dispersed city.

In Taylor’s time, Faroese who needed to get from island to island had to rely on long wooden rowboats -- Viking-style, of course -- and it was risky. Bad weather could isolate a village for weeks or months, and sudden storms and squalls could make any journey life-threatening.

(Taylor once spent 16 days pinned down by storms on tiny Stora Dimun, still one of the hardest islands to get to -- a helicopter is recommended -- with two dozen people crammed into the island’s only house. They lived on cooked puffins, which tasted, she wrote, like “unrefined cod-liver oil.”)

We spent most of our days exploring by car. We got as far east as Klaksvik, the second-largest city, and as far north as Vidareidi, on Vidoy in the Northern Isles, and Eidi, on Eysturoy, the island next door to ours. Eidi was where Taylor lodged with a family during the Great War; the views were even more spectacular than usual.

Friendly Faroese

We didn’t meet many Faroese -- kids were in school, people were at work -- but those we did meet were pleasant, though reserved. “The stranger is expected to make all advances,” Taylor had advised; when I did, people opened up.

Shopping in Torshavn one afternoon, I chatted with a clerk who talked about how safe and friendly the islands were. If anyone invited me home for a visit, she said, I should go, because they meant it: “We say come any time. If we’re busy, we’ll say, come back another time.”

No one said that, as it turned out, but we didn’t mind: We had our farmhouse, though it didn’t look the part. It was a 1950s rambler, painted dark blue and tucked into the side of a hill just below the road into Kollafjordur, about 20 minutes north of Torshavn.

There was also a barn, tucked under the house where we expected a basement. One morning, the farmer gave me a tour. It held mangers for his nine sheep, a winter stockpile of miniature hay bales no bigger than living room hassocks, and a red hen fiercely guarding her single chick. Wild birds had taken the others, the farmer said.

This barn tour, I realized later, summed up all the main components of modern Faroese economy -- fishing, wool, tourism, even technology, because I’d found the house online.

The Faroese wool component ranged everywhere, wandering freely wherever there was grass; we even saw sheep in Torshavn. As twilight came on, they looked more and more like boulders. They got harder to see if it was raining, and after dark, they were flat-out road hazards. Darkness falls early at 62 degrees north latitude.

Each evening, after we’d survived the gantlet of damp sheep and slick roads and returned safely to Kollafjordur, it really did feel like coming home.

Our farmhouse hunkered snug and warm against its hill, and I loved falling asleep to the sound of wild winds buffeting the rose bushes outside my window. I even loved the rainiest days, when we stayed home to read or draw or play cards, cooked our own food, talked, laughed, pretending, in other words, that we lived here.

The blue house was part of why I liked the Faroes so much. Staying in a hotel or a guesthouse, of which there are many, wouldn’t have been as good. It helped me understand how Elizabeth Taylor could spend so many years in these islands and not be bored. By week’s end, I could have done the same.

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travel@latimes.com

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If you go

THE BEST WAY TO THE FAROE ISLANDS

From LAX: American, Air New Zealand, British, Continental, United and Virgin Atlantic fly nonstop to London, Heathrow and Gatwick airports. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $741. Atlantic Airways, the Faroes’ national airline, flies twice a week to the islands from London Stansted. (There are frequent bad-weather delays.) Round-trip fares begin at $2,157. Atlantic Air also runs helicopter flights within the Faroe Islands.

WHERE TO STAY

GreenGate Incoming, one of several all-purpose travel companies in the Faroes, lists houses and cottages for rent at www.greengate.fo/eng/om-greengate -incoming. Click on Accommodation, then Sommerhouses & apartments. GreenGate can also arrange car rentals.

WHERE TO EAT

Torshavn has the most dining choices, including Burger King in its small shopping center and $50-a-plate fine dining in its four-star hotels. Traditional Faroese foods, such as puffin and pilot whale meat, aren’t on restaurant menus, though summer visitors can sample them at “Faroese Evenings,” where traditional crafts and dancing are on display. Local tourist offices can make arrangements.6

TO LEARN MORE

For a Faroe Islands overview, the English-language site www.faroeislands.com is a good place to start. The Faroes are divided into districts, each with its own tourism office that can provide specifics on special events and activities.