Tag: fishing port

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Lofoten – from Ã… to Bø

North Norway’s Lofoten Islands are famous for their beauty. Not for nothing have these islands been sometimes described as the most beautiful in the world. Even on the dullest of days, the landscape here is breathtaking. Vertiginous ridges of ancient granite and gneiss emerge almost directly from the sea like sharpened teeth and, in those rare places where the land is flat enough to have allowed a thin layer of soil to develop, a velvety carpet of grass clings like green baize. Around the islands’ coastline, homely clusters of rorbuer – wooden fishermen’s cottages painted the colour of ox blood – project over the sea on platforms.

It may seem counter intuitive given the rawness of nature here but this has long been a peopled landscape, its folk drawn by the bounty of cod fishing grounds that lie not so very far offshore. Cod remains an industry here, although these days it is less the catching of the fish as much as the processing of them. As evidence, each village displays an array of the fish drying racks that are used in winter to salt and dry the cod in order to produce the bacalao much loved by the Portuguese, Spanish and Italians.

One of Lofoten’s most iconic locations lies at the far southern end of the archipelago, a fishing hamlet whose name is spelled using just a single Norwegian letter: Å. Travelling by bus south to Å from the Lofoten capital Svolvær, you might also catch a glimpse of a road sign that points away from the main road to a village called Bø. So, perhaps only in Lofoten is it possible to literally travel from A (or rather, Å) to B(ø)?

Å may sound like a disappointment (the Norwegian letter is pronounced ‘oh!’) but the village is anything but, even though on the very wet end-of-season day that we visit we find everything closed apart from the museum. In Å, ‘everything’ simply refers to a bakery, restaurant and gift shop – the village is a quiet place at the best of times, apart from in peak season when the occasional coach-load of tourists descends on the village to visit the museum and take a few snaps before sampling salt cod for lunch.

Ã… may be Lofoten’s poster girl but there are ravishing villages around every turn; like Reine, where we stayed for a couple of nights, and Henningsvær at the end of a rocky isthmus close to Svolvær. Other settlements like Hamnøy, Ramberg and KabelvÃ¥g, passed through swiftly on our bus journeys in the islands, looked to be equally alluring from the mind’s eye snapshot that a window view affords.

Such is the numinous splendour of the Lofoten landscape that accidently stumbling on the quotidian comes almost as a relief, a chance to draw breath and rest weary eyes from  relentless beauty. Passing through Leknes, a refreshingly ordinary market town, the place was busy with its annual Western festival – a chance for townsfolk to dress up in cowboy hats, drink plenty of Norwegian beer (which must be brewed from unicorn tears given its price) and survey the classic American cars that had mysteriously assembled on its streets overnight. Elsewhere, the small port of Stamsund seemed just a little less prosperous than its neighbours, with just the slightest hint of decay – the perfect place to take our leave of the islands by catching the Hurtigruten ferry service north.

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Ghosts of the Aral Sea

To continue from the earlier post about a hotel that thought itself a ship, here are some more landlocked boats. These, though, are real ones – the rusting remains of what was once a large fishing fleet on the Aral Sea in central Asia. The Aral Sea, which at one time was the world’s third largest inland sea, has shores in both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Or rather it did have – it has now almost completely dried up (you might want to check it out on Google Earth).

It is a depressingly familiar story – large scale environmental damage thanks to government incompetence. In this case, the government was that of the Soviet Union, which diverted a vast volume of fresh water from the Aral Sea in order to grow huge expanses of cotton in Uzbekistan – a very thirsty crop in a very hot country. The fishing fleet used to catch several species of fish here, and much of the haul was transported an awful long way by train to the Baltic coast for canning. The main fishing port on the southern shore was Moynaq. Now the boats lie stranded just off the former shoreline. The water, such that remains – saturated with pollutants and virtually devoid of fish – lies hundreds of kilometres to the north.

Given mass employment, isolation, heavy metal pollution and an uncaring post-Soviet government in far off Tashkent, Moynaq is not a happy place.

I visited Moynaq by taxi from Nukus to the south. It was certainly the longest taxi ride I have ever taken – 220 kilometres each way – but even so I managed to bargain a return fare of just $60 (petrol is cheap in Uzbekistan, so is time). The road was surprisingly good, and we speeded north through Karakalpakstan (an autonomous republic within Uzbekistan that translates literally as ‘the land of the black hats’), through a flat landscape of cotton fields, reed beds and poplars yellowing with the arrival of autumn. The driver put his foot down and it took just a little over two hours to arrive at the erstwhile port.

In Moynaq, the scene from the ‘shore’ was both poignant and surreal: scrubby vegetation, sand and rotting boat hulks as far as the eye could see, everything shimmering slightly in a heat haze – the unwordly setting for a Sergio Leone Western that would never be made. My journal records it as ‘a sort of post-apolcayptic Wells-next-the-Sea where the tide never comes in’, and that seems reasonable enough. Away from the absent sea, the town itself, with its depressed air, street corner groups of listless youths and tangible taint of pollution, simply gave the impression that even with full employment, fishing and fresh water it would still be a dump. Now Moynaq was just a neglected and forgotten backwater… without the water.

(For another tale about another former Soviet fishing port now fallen on hard times you can read this about Balykchy, a threadbare port on Kyrgyzstan’s Lake Issyk-Kul.)

Nukus, where I had based myself for the dash to the rusting Aral fleet, was marginally better, although it had none of the Silk Road allure of other cities in Uzbekistan like Bokhara, Samarkand and Khiva, which despite heavy-handed reconstruction still hold  romantic appeal. Oddly enough, what Nukus does have is an incredible art collection. The Karakalpak Museum of Arts has a fantastic display of modernist work from the 1920s and 1930s that was collected by the artist Igor Savitsky (1915-84) and safely squirrelled away here in this distant corner of the former USSR. Here, far from Moscow, supposedly counter-revolutionary work such as that of the Russian avant garde managed not only to survive but also to go on display alongside ‘approved’ works of Soviet realism. There are even some who say that, in terms of Russian and Soviet art, the Nukus gallery is second only to the far more famous collection in St Petersburg’s Hermitage.