On our second day on Helgoland we wanted to explorer the main island of the archipelago. Vagn and I took a ferry from Düne island where we stayed in a camp; we were very excited and looked forward to see the other island, and especially the cliffs on its western part.
The ferry goes every half an hour, and in the evening – once an hour. It costs 5 EUR return trip. On the main island, we just took the longest hiking path, and slowly went around the island.
There was a small area of allotment gardens, and sometimes they were decorated with all possible thing, even with the old boats:
When we reached the north-western tip, we finally saw the Lange Anna (“Tall Anna”):
Lange Anna is a single rock formation of 154 ft high. Its real local name is Nathurn Stak (Northern Stack). In 1969 it was declared a natural monument.
The stack is subject to severe weathering wear and decomposition. It was decided that any further effort for its conservation could do nothing but slow down the process, so the Lange Anna today is consigned to its fate. Experts assume an acute danger of collapse of the top two thirds because of an unstable layer of sands 16 metres above sea level, which already is the thinnest part of Lange Anna. So – don’t wait too long, visit Helgoland!
The views were spectacular; sometimes tourists were sitting there for a long time enjoying the views…
The amount of birds was overwhelming – there were millions of them, and one could come relatively close to them. This day I broke my own record: I took around 1000 pictures! You can imagine, how beautiful everything was.
The colonies of birds were fenced off from the curious tourists, and that made it possible for us to come very close:
Some birds had their babies with them; all babies were sleeping safely.
I’ve never been particularly interested in any birds, but on Helgoland I couldn’t get either my eyes or my camera off them. They didn’t really care about us being close, and it was very interesting to observe their behaviour.
We also did some off-road walk:
The highest point of the island – 200 feet:
Southern part of the island and its harbour area:
It was getting late, and before taking the last ferry back to Düne, Vagn and I wanted to have dinner in a nice restaurant with the ocean view. We walked through the city, and stumbled upon a restaurant with a view to a camping site! We thought the view was worth having a dinner there, and took the last available table on the terrace:
The name of the restaurant was “Aquarium cafe“, and I didn’t expect anything special. But – reading the menu, we understood how lucky we were: besides the nice view we were going to have real gourmet food, prepared from carefully chosen ingredients and with love for cooking. And on the front page of the menu there was a quote from Oscar Wilde: “After a good meal one is inclined to forgive all, even your own relatives.”
I had crostini with wild(!) garlic for a starter (photo below), and a risotto with chestnuts and roasted salmon (the salmon was roasted exactly in the same way as I would do it myself at home) for main. It was pure delight. I highly recommend this place; it is a rare gem for the price.
I’ve never before seen a camping site in the middle of the city – it was awesome! There were small kids, but we didn’t hear them; no noise at all. But the tents were set up rather very close to each other:
We reached our last ferry on time:
What a day! Sailing back to Düne, Vagn and I talked about those amazing experiences we have had on Helgoland. It would be difficult to bit – but let’s see, this is only the beginning of our tour…
Sources of information I used to write this blogpost:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lange_Anna