Cod & Snow Angels

In Winter, every self-respecting Cod Fish in the world heads for the Lofoten Islands (that’s where we are now). If you’re a Cod-About-Town, there’s only one place to be seen and you’re nothing if you’re not there. Without Cod, humans wouldn’t live on these islands and that’s not an exaggeration. Todays’s strange (and vaguely disturbing) fact is that the mating call of a randy mail cod is loud enough to disrupt the sonar of a passing submarine… no, me neither.

In order to learn more about Cod (Just roll with me on this one for a moment) our Local Guide Craig took us to the heritage fishing village of Nusfjord. This tiny village of 18 people has been preserved and renovated from times gone by.

The Cod caught in Lofoten are air dried, not salted; the weather conditions are prefect for air drying the cod and in late March the islands are festooned with hanging fish fillets. This looks fascinating, and tastes fantastic but at the time makes the islands rather smelly for the inhabitants who find themselves sitting out on a pleasant afternoon enjoying a G&T in a thick fog of drying Cod waft. As you do…

By now, stuffed to the gills with knowledge about Cod, we needed a change and so decided that we should spend some time on the beach – Yes they have one and it’s very pretty.

We stopped at a tiny wooden church and I decided it was time to run the world Snow Angel championship, because, thats’ what you do in the snow. The results weren’t memorable but we got 5 points from the Italian judge.

Just out of random passing interest, it’s interesting to wonder how they can drive coaches around quite comfortably and quickly on roads that look like this…

And the answer is special tyres with stud spikes that look like this…

Travel day to Narvik tomorrow so I’ll take a day off from blogging. Next big things is the train from Narvik to Kiruna in Sweden on the most Northerly Rail Line in Europe that you can actually travel on. How about that?