Fur the perfect island of special sand mining (diatoms) and general awesomeness

Fur, the beautiful island

We ended up with an extra day in the North of Denmark, so we decided to go to the local island of Fur, as recommended by Lars.  Fur is really very close to Morsoe.  So close in fact that it was only a 25 min flight, 15 mins of which was taken up in engine warm up at the beginning and circling the airfield prior to landing.  If we'd had a lookout on Morsoe we would have been able to see Fur from it.  

Fur is a little farm strip, owned by Poul, who promptly appeared from building a bike shed / toilet / shower room next to the hangar.  Poul is a really fantastic guy, who turned out to be building a helicopter.  We had to see that.  So we both hopped on the back of his quad bike for the short trip across the island to his garage where the project was progressing steadily.  

Me on quad bike

Chopper, awesome

Then we had tea with his wife and daughter, who then took us for a walk along the sea-shore.  Back in the day Fur's waters must have been pretty quiet as a whole heap of diatoms and larger stuff has been laid down.  The diatoms are mined and the fossils are collected.  So the sea shore walk was a good opportunity to look for fossils, which Poul's wife is great at and found us several examples of what I would call moss.  Unfortunately I was less good and didn't find that bird / archaeopteryx / fish that I would have liked to.  We also had a look at the little hiking shelter log huts, which we really wanted to go back and try out, but even in a 5 month trip there is a time pressure to keep moving.

Stunning coastline

The fossils come out of the cliffs behind us

Fabulous hiking huts

Cornflowers in the corn, it all begins to make sense

Then we went for a drive around the entire island to look at the old and now silted up harbour, the diatom mines and other sites.  At 5.30pm we were dropped of back at our plane after having a marvellous time and really having seen the island.

Poul would like to encourage visitors to his landing strip and I can't think of any place I'd rather go.  Lovely for bathing, walking and kayaking.  Poul has bought 20 new bicycles that visitors can borrow and there will be by now a toilet and shower available.  

Diatomaceous earth

Day 6: Bornholm

I was determined to make it to Svaneke. And we did, but got the bus back.... Most of the ride was through a big pine forest in the centre of the island, which is really lovely, especially in the really remarkably sunny weather we've been having. Svaneke itself was pretty, but pretty full of tourists, so we kept going pretty quickly. 

Forest cycle way

When the bus brought us back to the main town, Ronne, we went for a walking tour in one of my brochures – lots of lovely half timbered houses with massive rosebushes and maybe tree peonies growing out of little holes in the cobblestones. The brochure struggled a bit to find much more than a 1915 church and lots of pretty cobblestoned streets lined with half-timbered houses, but they did their best. 

One of the many pretty streets in Ronne with half timbered houses and large flowers

I got a big chunk of wacky Danish cheese, which I'm not too thrilled about, but Julian seems to like it. I also had some with carraway, but what Julian didn't eat last night, the hedgehog took care of in several long bouts of noisy licking.... I was curious at the time as to what piece of plastic it had bitten into at one point: turned out to be Julian's peanut packet...

Mmmm wacky Danish cheese in the eating area of the camp ground