Going south on Sylt, Vagn and I wanted to see the village of Hörnum and its harbour. Hörnum was first settled by fishermen around 1500 BC, but storm surges and shifting dunes that would repeatedly bury houses, made a colonization difficult. Only after 1900 first residential buildings were raised, but the area was mostly driven by the military. Today, there is no military left on the island. A small port has a ferry connection to the mainland.
We wanted to experience the Hörnum-Odde, the island’s southernmost tip, which is constantly shrinking due to erosion. During the storm Erwin in winter 2005 alone, the Hörnum-Odde lost 20 meters of land.
Vagn and I discussed whether to watch the sunset from Sansibar or Hörnum-Odde. Sansibar is a well-known restaurant on Sylt, close to Hörnum. We’d heard it was the best place to watch a sunset from. But we had our doubts. We thought the best place would always be raw nature, not a terrace in a fancy restaurant. So we decided to get to Sansibar after the sunset.
When we were approaching the beach some strange constructions began to emerge:
The thatched-roof houses on the hill were beautifully lit by the sunlight:
Coming closer to the beach, we found out there were hundreds of concrete tetrapods there, used for protection.
The light was so beautiful…
It was quite comfortable to watch the sunset from those four-legged concrete made structures.
And it was damn cold…
So we played around the tetrapods to keep warm, took pictures of the sun, ourselves, occasional small flowers…
Some of the tetrapods laid before, were completely buried under the sand…
I think I took at least 50 pictures of the sunset that evening.
It was so beautiful to watch the sun going down and to experience all these nuances in the light change.
The moon was also out, lighting up the skies.
The final moments were spectacular:
We sat there on the beach for some time after the sunset, and then went back to Hörnum. The dunes are very well protected from the tourists, in most places with the spikes wire. Someone tastefully decorated a peace of such wire with the rosehips:
In Hörnum, before it became completely dark, we visited a grave for those who were born on the island, and lost their lives during the First and Second World Wars. There were 36 names, and for many of them the exact place of death wasn’t known. It just was “Africa”, “Holland”, or otherwise. It is always sad to visit such places.
We drove to the Sansibar restaurant, saw its beachfront, and agreed that in this place we would have never experienced such a magnificent sunset like we did in Hörnum-Odde.
The Sansibar showed up to be a very nice restaurant. It is a large wooden hut with a rustic interior, and reminded me of chalets somewhere in the Southern Alps. Its wine cellar stores 30.000 wine bottles, spread over 1.100 positions, worth several million euros. The restaurant is mentioned in the Michelin guide for its excellent wine list.
It was one more great day on Sylt. We were a bit exhausted with all these fantastic experiences, but happy. And the day after we were going to see the Morsum Cliff.
