Day 1. Arrival.
After imagining reaching such remote place, the 2 1/2 hour flight in a fairly standard commercial plane felt almost too easy, and the morning of 8 August we landed at the international (and only) airport of Vagár in the island of the same name, near the town of Sørvágur. The approach to the airport was an interesting sight, as we closed into these green islands in the middle of the dark blue sea, you could appreciate how the land appeared to suddenly break and drop into the water, sometimes accompanied by a waterfall. Large circles on the water surface, which are “pens” holding the farmed salmon dotted the sea below us, and a few bright-coloured buildings started to appear at the end of the fjord were the landing strip was waiting for us.
At the airport we picked up a hire car, a black and relatively old 4×4 SUV, and set off on our little adventure. Our first island crossing (and in this archipelago there are plenty of those), was through between Vagar and Streymoy, through a tunnel under the sea bed that connected both islands.
We stopped in Vestmanna on the Island of Streymoy . We parked an took a leisurely walk in the quite town. It was about midday but few people were outside despite the mild weather.
Half looking for food, half for plants, we stumbled onto a small stream running among houses in the town, and from the street bridge crossing the stream we spotted our first monkeflower! [Map] Just as in the picture I had seen a few years back on Flickr, the flowers were a stunning tone of orange. It didn’t take me long to decide that this was not M. cupreus, but more probably a cupreus-guttatus hybrid. This hybrid is mostly pollen and seed sterile, and the plants we had found were likely to be sterile too as I couldn’t find any pollen or seeds.
After the successful first encounter of the Faroese monkey flower, we headed down to the pub, which was unfortunately closed. On an empty stomach, we headed towards the capital Tórshavn where we would be setting up base camp for the next week.
Tórshavn