Index
Days 0 and 1 - London
Day 2 - Traelanipa
Day 3 - Mulafossur
Day 4 - Vestmanna Sea Cliffs
Day 5 - Drangarnir
Day 6 - Klaksvik
Day 7 - Northern villages
Day 8 - Mykines
Day 9 - Vidoy and Kunoy
Day 10 - Return
Faroe Islands
The mandatory guide to Drangarnir ended up leading eight or so tourists this morning. It's another mostly easy hike, with some moderately difficult sections, more to uneven ground and mud traversing the hillsides than anything technical. With a short detour up to a pseudo-cave, and then hiking all the way down to the rocks at the water's edge, it's not quite 4 miles/6 kilometers one-way, maybe closer to 3.5 miles/5.5km.
It's well worth the effort, even for the casual hiker. You get up close and personal on the final descent, looking down at the 230 foot tall Drangarnir, then descend for a head-on view of the magnificent arch, and finally to the water's edge. Sadly I lost the sunlight I had on the final descent, and the photos taken at the water's edge didn't turn out quite as well as the ones taken a few minutes earlier in the sun. Making it out all the way to the second-to-last outcrop of rocks at low tide still felt like it completed the experience, sun or not.
I'm unsure how random it was, or if the guide was just tired of hiking, but the guide managed to arrange a boat pickup instead of having to hike back. On a boat you can get even closer to Drangarnir, and critically, you can cruise around the whole perimeter, enabling views impossible from land, including a solo ones of the seaward side of Tindholmur. The truly prepared can snag a photo of Tindholmur as viewed through the arch of Drangarnir, but I was not that on my game (oops!).
The transportation marvel that is Eysturoyartunnilin, the world's first undersea roundabout, was next. Just shy of 7 miles long (6.98 miles/11.2 kilometers) of tunnel, with not just the customary RGB lightning, but actual artwork around the center of the roundabout. Way cool-- kind of like Drangarnir, never seen anything quite like it.
Moved in to the second AirBnB that evening. Klaksvik is the second largest city in the Faroe Islands, and even though my AirBnB was aaaaalllllllllllll the way at the northwestern end of the city with a view of unblemished mountains to the north, the vibe was still very different than the first AirBnB in Bour. Very contemporary, minimalist-yet-not in the Nordic way, complete with not one but two rainbows over the water during my stay. Something about snow-capped mountains drew me to this one, although obviously snow is a winter thing and not a summer thing...