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| The island’s hotel and restaurant – Vega Havhotell |
Whenever we’ve visited Matthew in
Norway I always find the language incomprehensible. With most European languages there are often
many words that are similar to English ones but it never feels like it with Norwegian. This visit has slightly changed that as some
of the old Viking geographical words we are coming across are similar such as
dal for valley (dale) and fjellet for mountains (fells).
Saturday saw us heading off for Gullsvågfjellet,
Vega’s second highest mountain at just over 2,400’. It is the mountain in the background of the picture
of the restaurant above. We set off in
sunny weather but with clouds covering the tops, but we hoped it would clear
during the climb. As it happened, the
clouds were persistent, so we didn’t get the decent views we were hoping for at
the top.
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| Gullsvågfjellet from Matthew’s house on Friday when there was no low cloud cover |
The start of the walk was a steep
scramble up a scree slope but soon eased off as the path followed ridges and circled
round the mountain.
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| Looking down on Vega and across to the mainland before we reached the cloud cover |
We were lucky in that the cloud cover
was just that and didn’t turn to rain until we reached the summit. As with other paths, the route was marked
with red paint spots on boulders and also metal poles topped with red cylinders.
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| Our summit selfie – moh stands for meter over havet (metres above sea level |
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| The summit cairn |
The red containers in the cairn hold
the exercise books for people to record their climb. I mentioned in yesterday’s blog entry that
these containers are placed every mile or so along footpaths in Norway for
people to record their adventures, feelings, weather conditions etc.
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| Matt completing our entry |
The rain started as we set off back
down again. We were going to take a
small detour to a cabin built by the locals as it would be a dry place to have
our lunch and was about a 1/3rd of the way down.
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| The view from the top ☹ |
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| The welcome sight of the Tindbu |
Tindbu translates to cabin on the
mountain and, confusingly, we have seen it spelt four different way whilst we
have been here: tinbu, tindbu, tindbue and tindebue.
It didn’t take long before the stove
was roaring away and we could start warming up and having lunch. It was so cosy and toasty that we stayed for
an hour and could easily understand how people stay the night – there are
several bunks provided.
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| The cabin even had an outside loo! |
On the table was the traditional
visitor book and Karen took her turn at making the entry:
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You can’t quite read it but she signed
it as Karen & Neil Payne from the UK and Matthew, Dr for the island.
It was worth staying for an hour as the
rain had stopped by the time we set off.
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| It was obviously still raining in the distance |
When we finished our walk, Matt showed
us around his surgery. We also popped into
the shop and it seemed that everyone we bumped into in the aisles knew
Matt. With only 1,200 inhabitants on the
island he knows most of them, well, the sick ones anyway 😉
Just before we got back we saw a
white-tailed eagle gorging on quite a large bird. As we drove past, the car frightened it and
it flew off, dropping the kill on the way.
We could see crows flocking down to the dead bird as we drove on.
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| They really are massive birds and the white tail can just be made out on this shot of the eagle flying off |
In the evening we walked to the Vega
Havhotell where Matthew treated us to a really good meal. As can be seen in the picture at the top, the
roof of the hotel is traditional in that it is covered in earth and grass. In the days when houses were made of logs,
the weight of the grass (or sod) roofs would compress the logs thus making them
airtight.
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