Smelly Skagen & Land's End!

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Copenhagen - Skagen

Thursday 11th September (Day 17)

Today we said goodbye to the nice people at the B&B, & headed into the main city train station for our trip north. We had decided to get a rail pass to travel around Denmark as it was relatively cheap, and also easier, since we didn’t really have any idea where we were going (as usual). Denmark is actually made up of three main islands - Zeeland (where we currently were in Copenhagen), Funen (in the middle) and Jutland (the biggest and northernmost island). Today we were heading for Skagen, at the northernmost tip of Denmark. We had chosen to visit here to see more ‘natural’ Viking territories, and the place where the two seas collide - the North Sea on one side and the Baltic Sea on the other.

We arrived at the train station with plenty of time, and found the correct platform. As we waited, I suddenly remembered from our previous train journeys in Europe, that you have to get your passes validated before you get on the train. Not only that, but they are meant to be validated the day before you intend to travel - whoops! Vaughan grabbed the tickets and sprinted to the ticket counter - there was about 5 minutes left before we were due to leave. The correct train had arrived at our platform and people were getting on board. I was left waiting with the bags (all four of them) while Vaughan was sorting out the tickets - he was on another level in the building and I couldn’t see him. Apparently he waited in the line, got to the front and found he was at the wrong kind of counter. Then he ran to the other end of the station, got in the correct line, decided he had to push his way to the front, and managed to get service from a kind lady, who validated our tickets for us, despite the fact that Vaughan didn’t have my passport on him at the time, which they are meant to stamp as well. Meanwhile, I was still down by the train, standing half in the doorway so the door couldn’t shut and the train couldn’t leave without us. The train conductor offered to help me with the bags, but I pulled all of them onto the train myself so that it would take longer because I didn’t know where Vaughan was. The whistles were blowing for the last call for the train, and all the doors started closing. I was still standing in the doorway so the door couldn’t shut on that carriage. I was getting ready to grab the bags and push them back off the train if Vaughan wasn’t going to make it. Suddenly I saw him sprinting down the escalator about 6 steps at a time! He bolted up to the train and jumped on. The doors closed behind us and about 10 seconds later, the train was off! Just in time! We found our seats slowly, already shattered by the action-packed morning, but at least we had made it and were successfully on our way. Phew!

The ride north was beautiful, and began with a long trip over a huge bridge between the islands of Zealand and Funen. The native bush was really lush and green, and the landscape was also quite flat, so you could see for miles. The small towns (and larger cities) that we passed through were quite nice as well. It looked as if Denmark was a very well-kept country. The journey went quite quickly, and we passed through several main centres as well as the beautiful Lake District, changing to a local train in Aalborg. We didn’t have reserved seats on this train, and we shared it with a lot of local kids who were on their way home for the day. The landscape between Aalborg and Skagen was impressive - sand dunes on both sides, covered with the occasional Viking gravestone as well as beautiful purple-flowering ground cover plants of some type. It was funny to see a train track bowling through the centre of it all!

We arrived in Skagen without any further dramas and headed for our B&B. Mistakenly on the map, Vaughan had thought it was about 300m away, but it in fact turned out to be about 2km, which is fine if you’re just walking, but we were lugging packs & all kinds of things, which made it a bit awkward. The accommodation was a bit out of the way but it was quite nice - even if it did take us longer to get there than we had anticipated. The lady at the B&B was very grumpy and unhelpful towards us, and we started to doubt the whole “Denmark is the happiest country on earth” thing. After getting ourselves sorted out, we went for a stroll back into the town. We knew that Skagen was a summer town and crawled with tourists in the warmer seasons. As we were there at the end of summer we had expected quite a few people to still be around, but as it turned out, Skagen was completely dead. There were also a lot of fish factories in the vicinity (due to the fishing history of Denmark in general), so the place smelled pretty fishy, and the weather was quite dull, with a howling wind coming in off the ocean. It wasn’t unpleasant however, and it gave us a good opportunity to wander the town without fighting through any crowds. All the buildings were yellow for some reason, and the harbour (well, the scenic part) had some nice restaurants and BBQ tables right at the water front. We stopped off in an ice cream parlour where a very friendly lady chatted to us for a while, before we discovered the local supermarket nearby, and grabbed a bunch of supplies for the next day. As the B&B had a self-contained kitchen (and as the B&B was a bit of a distance from all the shops, etc), we decided that we would cook for ourselves most of the time we were there. Before going back, we stopped in at a cheap restaurant where I made sure to have some local kind of food (seafood of course), which was excellent. It was good to have a hot meal with the cold wind howling outside. It seemed to get dark really early so we grabbed our supermarket supplies and headed back towards the B&B, stopping off to take a few photos on the way. Not a bad day.


Skagen

Friday 12th September (Day 18)

The next morning we woke up and decided to have a bit of a laze around - we managed to steal someone else’s wireless internet connection for a while so we caught up on some emails, and some washing, as well as cooking up a storm for breakfast and generally taking things easy. Just after lunch we wandered back towards the town and waterfront area, and stopped off at the information centre where we discovered that the tip of Denmark is actually near a town called Grenan, although I had forgotten that we needed to get to Grenan before heading out to the point. We didn’t have any way to get there except to walk (it was about 6km each way plus 3km each way from Grenan to the tip - unless the shuttle was running for the last 3km part) and we couldn’t decide what to do with ourselves. We eventually just wandered past the town and down to the beach, where (looking north) you could see several of the famous lighthouses in the region, as well as the beach right up past Grenan to the tip of Denmark. The view was awesome but the wind was biting - I hadn’t expected it to be so cold for the time of year! The sea was quite rough and the sky was mostly overcast, which didn’t make for such nice photos compared to others I have seen of that area. We spent some time in the sand dunes taking photos of pebbles and waves and beachfront houses, before heading up to the first lighthouse (Vipefyr). This was a reconstruction of an original lighthouse that was used in Viking times - it looked more like a catapult than anything else, and in fact, it was only recently that we found out that it was actually a lighthouse.

We had a quick look at a local graveyard (unfortunately it wasn’t old enough to have any proper Viking graves in it), and after looking around that area for a while, I decided to take a wander around some of the small local houses (because I was wearing summer clothes and was freezing), while Vaughan (who was wearing jeans, a hoodie and boots) decided to walk up to Grenan and the tip of Denmark. I wanted to go too but was just too cold, and because we were staying out of town on the other side, it would have taken quite some time to get geared up to go. I had a nice wander around while Vaughan headed north, and in fact, I think he jogged a lot of the journey and managed to make it to Grenan much faster than if I had been with him. The shuttle (the Sandormen Tractor) was running people out onto the spit, so perhaps I could have gone after all, but we didn’t know that at the time. The tide was in quite far, so the ‘tip’ wasn’t really a tip as much, and looked a little more like normal beach. Vaughan took some good photos and started to head back, as he was also getting cold. By this time I was back at the B&B - we had bought some food from the supermarket for dinner (Mexican), so I was cooking that while Vaughan was out. It got dark and he still wasn’t back, but finally he turned up, so cold that he had to have a hot shower and bundle up into his warmest clothes as soon as he got inside, so I was glad I hadn’t gone in the end. Skagen seemed to be quite a pretty place (in the right weather), but we kind of wished that we had access to a car. Nevermind - tomorrow, back on the train to head south to Arhus, so more adventures ahead!

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