World of Adventure Sports – Accidental Forks in the Road/Faroe Islands
PREMIERES TONIGHT
Outside Television
8pm ET
It was a series of accidental forks in the road that led me to landing on the remote archipelago of the Faroe Islands in the middle of the North Atlantic for the latest episode of World of Adventure Sports.
Like many good adventures I had little to no idea of what I was going to be in for.
Leaving Queenstown airport on a June afternoon in a snow storm lugging an inflatable paddle board, hiking gear and a smattering of cold weather kit I embarked on a 40+ hour flying marathon to make it to the Faroes.
First inhabited by Irish Monks a thousand years ago, it’s harsh landscape has shaped it’s people and it’s cultures. A culture of survival amongst the elements in order to stay alive and to provide.
Towering fjords, jagged sea cliffs and cascading waterfalls permeate the landscape in every direction. Faroese sheep skip about the steep hills in the land where folklore say that ‘you only fall once’.
The relationship between its people and it’s landscape is one of functionality. The ocean being a body that takes as much as it gives highlighted by the many men whose lives are lost at sea every year in pursuit of reaping the bounty of the ocean in order to provide.
As the peaks of the mountains emerge through the ever present clouds that shroud the islands, it’s a landscape that beckons you to explore. Such has been the functional existence of this place that hiking and recreating are only just starting to be discovered as a way of bringing tourism to these forgotten lands of the North Sea.
We went in pursuit to explore, what we discovered was a raw bounty of recreation waiting be hiked, paddled and rappelled that had us itching to come back for more.