Beauty?
Oooohhh
Nólsoy
is so pretty
they say
every day
because they have
nothing else
to look at.
…Oddfríður Marni
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Visit a nomadic family’s yurt out on the Mongolian steppes, you’ll almost certainly be offered cheese with bread or biscuits and tea. Forget about brie or cheddar; the Mongolian stuff is as hard as the people who survive on it.
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Sadness pervades the whole story of Skarð. A hundred years ago, 1913 to be precise, it was a hard-scrabble fishing village like so many on the Faroes. No roads linked it to larger settlements, just a dangerous walk over the rocky mountain ridge to Kunoy on the other side, or a path down the fjord to Haraldssund several miles south. The land scarcely supports the grass the sheep graze on, so fishing was the villagers’ main source of food and income. Just 23 souls lived here, and only seven were fishermen.
Two days before Christmas that year, the seven set out in their boats as usual. In those days of course, fishing boats were sailed or rowed. There was no radio, radar, GPS or EPIRB. Just a man, his wits, and his raw strength stacked against what Shackleton called “the ocean that is open to all and merciful to none, that threatens even when it seems to yield, and that is pitiless always to weakness”.
They never returned. Lost with all hands.
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It’s a little known fact that Yon once lived in Japan, spoke Japanese fluently and was pretty damn good at Karate. I have certainly been glad of the precision she was taught, as it has saved me serious injuries on several occasions when she’s popped off a few show-off kicks (well, except that one time when she overcooked a fake punch and very nearly broke my nose, much to the amusement of the kids in a Bolivian bus station). She took me to Japan on our way to London in 2005. My first real memory is of us walking down a tiny, deserted lane at night, and poking our head into a small restaurant. Yon called out “hello” and a wooden panel snapped open. A little man, dressed all in white, with a matching white hat, yelled “Hai!” in the Japanese way of saying “Yes, at your service!” It was straight out of “Spirited Away“. I thought this was the coolest thing ever, and I was hooked.
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For me, said my wife afterwards, the Faroes isn’t so much a place to do things as it is a place to feel. “I just enjoyed the different soundscape – the sound of the wind, the sea, the birds. The rain, the roar of the sea. Breathing the sweetness of the fresh air. Drinking live water, straight from the earth. It seems like there’s not much going on, but there’s actually a lot going on if you just open your senses. What’s going on in Tórshavn? Not bars and cafes or any of that, but the smells of nature. Constant movement in the weather. The walk back to the hotel past that little brook”.
She’s right. Fog, wind, rain and lush green mountains with so many waterfalls they don’t even bother to name the big ones. You feel alive, part of nature instead of separated from it by seven ring roads. And that’s how it felt nearly the whole time we were there – to be alive in a place that was alive.
Welcome to Føroyar – the Faroe Islands.
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“Don’t worry”, said the old lady, “just relax, it will all be fine”.
That was the best advice we heard about giving birth. Simple, straightforward, and spot on. It didn’t come from a doctor, a midwife, or the author of any of the veritable library of pregnancy books around our place or any of the generous friends who’d shared them along with their own stories. Instead, it came from the woman in the blue apron in the photo above, a mother of two from a small rural village in China who, doubtless, had given birth in what most of us would consider spartan conditions. The lady spoke quietly, gently and wisely, but more than what she said, it was how she said it. Yon, by then more than eight months along, smiled, and relaxed. As the uncertain father-to-be, I felt the anticipation ease as well. It was almost the first time I really thought “we can do this”.
Continue readingThe fastest wind speed ever recorded at Tarfala was over 180 kilometers per hour. As I leaned into it, unable to move forwards, and barely able to stand, I thought it must not be too far short of that record. Strangely, there was no howl; there was nothing for the wind to hit except me, our daughter in my pack, and Yon about twenty paces behind. No howl, just a sudden horrendous flapping as the red sheet protecting my child flew loose at one corner.
“Are you scared, baby?”, I yelled. “No”, she said. “Well just a little bit”.
We were 26 kilometers into this hike; even for Arctic Sweden it was getting dark by now, nearly ten hours since we set off at noon. I was wet through, and, as Hicks and Hudson classically exchanged, either my motion detector GPS was reading wrong, or I was reading it wrong.
Where was the damn hut?
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↑ Choquequirao
Unlike Sheeta, Yonnie didn’t fall magically from a dirigible to meet me. And there weren’t evil sky-pirates out to capture us. But in many other ways, our 2010 trek to the high, lonely, lost Incan city of Choquequirao reminded me of Laputa of the Miyazaki film “Castle in the Sky”, with its dignified ruins and green lawns hidden in the soaring peaks of the Andes. It was a very special place.
I’m a mountain guy, I decided, after just a few hours in the outskirts of the Gobi desert. It was hot, and blowy, the Great Wall we were following was practically impossible to see, and the ground beneath us was parched and covered in huge salt pans. Give me a goat track, I thought. A ridge ripped by a cold wind from Siberia, and a Ming wall I can actually see. But my friend Chinoook is made of sterner stuff (though I give him a run for his money on my home turf). Out ahead, he led the way through the salt pans towards a brown smudge on the horizon. “There’s the wall”, he promised. I squinted. “Sure it is”, I thought skeptically. But he was right. Just meters off a salt pan they could have used as a set for Mordor in the Lord of the Rings, stood an enormous, multi-tiered wall – a giant layer cake two thousand years old.
This is a story about the Great Wall, but even more than that it’s a story about a guy I know who’s really, really into the Great Wall. Yes, I know I’m into the Wall; but I am nothing more than a young, naive Luke Skywalker to this guy’s Yoda. In May 2013 I joined him on an expedition to explore obscure, remote parts of the wall out in Gansu Province, as far west as historical China extended during the Han and Ming dynasties. In a week with Yoda, I would climb a rockface, navigate by night, gather Han potsherds, thumb rides by the side of the freeway, and eat stir fried gizzards. I also learned a lot about the Great Wall, and made a good friend.
