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Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Faroes - last day


This is going to be one of those dragged out blog posts - if it ever finishes, so I am starting at the end. On our last day we decided to walk down to the centre of Thorshavn, a little later than planned, as I had slept in. Not my fault ofcourse, never is.... had a few drinks the night before and was in bed at around 3am and woke up at 10.30 - too late for breakfast but we still had time to check out the town before our bus trip to the airport at 2pm

On the way we met this Icelander, sitting in the one flat spot in his garden in the suburbs of Thorshavn, seemed a tad sad, but looked healthy enough and he still had grass to graze on...


this is the flight in to Faroes, yes it was our last day and yes we were supposed to be flying to Iceland, not back to the Faroes, what happened was that after our bus to the airport boiled over (someone forgot to check the water in the radiator) we got on the plane and took off... then 20 minutes later we were advised that due to electrical problems (the main AC power supply had died) the pilots decided to turn back to the Faroes and check out the problem there rather than fly to Reykjavik and perhaps be stuck there for however long it would take to fix the problem... Now I never got a photo of the airstrip at Vaga - but believe me, it is very short, built during WWII by the Brits for their planes (ie not current type transport jets), it sits atop a mountain and hence the landing strip has big drops on both sides... not fun, it also requires the airplanes to do 180´s around mountain tops to get a straight bearing on the strip.. Not recommended for those not happy in small planes in tight places. We made it down and made it back to Iceland (duh.. since I am writing this from home) Nevertheless, this flight has made me think twice about further air travel... yet another reason why my next trip to aus will be many many years from now.

3 comments:

Maja said...

So because the little planes in the north have problems and land on scary airstrips, you can't come to Australia on a big plane with a massive airstrip to land on.

I think it's just an excuse...

The Faroe Islands look windy!

Northern musings said...

In my mind it is a good excuse!
Big planes means bigger crashes! Call me unrational...

Northern musings said...

irrational even