Day 485: Vega Archipelago

Today's world heritage site was the Vega Archipelago, a large group of islands off the coast of Norway. It's a "cultural landscape" which usually just means "people farmed here for a long time, maybe there was something unique about it that is now hard to find" - we have been generally pretty unimpressed by this type of site, but maybe this would be different?

We took the car ferry over at about 10am, which lasted about an hour. The main island we could drive on is only a few km across, so we'd driven most of the roads pretty quickly. It was raining fairly solidly which wasn't great, but we managed to see a few things and get a bit of filming done during breaks in the rain.

The main attraction here is eider ducks - the locals had a symbiotic relationship where they would build nesting houses for the ducks during nesting season. Once the chicks had hatched, the locals would gather up all the eider feathers left over in the nest, clean it and stuff it into quilts. If you've ever heard of eider down - this is where it was developed.

There was a small museum dedicated to the practice so we had a look around, lacking much else to see, and it was actually interesting! The pile of eider they had was extremely light but very warm, and it sticks to itself like velcro which I found fascinating. The duvets made from actual eider are colossally expensive though - about 5,000 euro for a single!

Finishing up filming and the museum, we got the 2pm ferry back to the mainland and retreated to our cabin for the rest of the day. Though I did stock up on beer and watch the start of the World Cup! Shandos is really looking forward to the next month.Read more