There are no trees. No native land animals. No predators, unless you count people, and there aren't many of them either. The population is about 48,000, not quite half of them in the bright-roofed harbor-side town of Torshavn, the Faroese capital.
An unexpected place
Technically, the Faroes aren't an independent country; they're a Danish possession with home rule. But they feel like their own country. And they're certainly separate from everything.
They are the crests of underwater mountains -- 18 shards of dark-gray basalt jutting abruptly out of the sea, distantly surrounded by Iceland, Scotland, Norway and, even more distant, Norway's Spitsbergen island. The islands are mostly long and skinny, with so many lobes and inlets that you're never more than three miles from the sea.
I expected the climate to be cold so far north, but it wasn't: This is where the Gulf Stream ends, and temperatures range from 37 degrees in winter to 52 degrees in summer. In late September, I needed gloves only once, but a rain jacket every day.
Change and permanence
The weather changed so often, and so fast, that each day felt like many days. One morning, I kept track: splinters of sun, a calm moment of warmth, then wind so fierce it thrashed the shrubs and grabbed at my clothes, then a blast of stinging rain as sharp as cold sand, then sun again -- and that was just before breakfast.
But my friends and I were lucky: This is a place that measures its annual sunshine not in days, but in hours. Torshavn gets 840 hours a year, on average. Even with near-daily rain, we had more than our share.
Summer tourists do better, and there are plenty of them to enjoy it. In June, July and August, nearly 50,000 visitors flood in, largely from Iceland and other Scandinavian countries.
If we'd been here in summer, the bird cliffs on Mykines would have been thick with nesting puffins -- the little yellow-beaked cuties that have become a Faroese symbol. Tour boats would have been cruising past the sea caves near Vestmanna. There would have been festivals in the villages, and everywhere the renowned dancing societies would have been performing, accompanying their age-old circle dances with nothing more than sung ballads and stamping feet.
