Following on from our discovery of the best museum in the world, the remainder of our plans – if you could call aimless wandering without much research plans – consisted of grabbing a few photos of some street art we’d spotted earlier in the day, then seeing if any of the museums or brewery we’d recently discovered on the maps were open, then jumping back on a tender boat back to the comfort of the ship. Ísafjörður was extremely cold, even at this point of midsummer, and the port area looked decidedly industrial so our hopes weren’t high that we’d find anything else to do, but we hadn’t expected to have enjoyed what we’d already found either so you never knew.
The street art of Ísafjörður is not going to win any international prizes. Or national ones. Or possibly even local ones. Somewhat basic would be an honest appraisal. Pretentious art critics might call them wonderfully naïve. For all we know, they might have been painted by six-year-old kids. Whatever. That’s not the point. The point is that they were there, they were bright, they were colourful, they were an expression of something, and that’s why we liked them.
An obvious subject for a photo was a large propeller on the pavement outside a building with red walls. We couldn’t see anything explaining its presence but it turns out that the building itself – imaginatively named The Red House – has some history behind it. Around the start of the twentieth century there was an increase in whaling operations in the region thanks mainly to Norwegian businesses, and processing areas were needed ashore. Buildings were constructed not far from the town. In the 1920s whaling fell out of favour and these buildings were converted to herring processing instead. By the early 1950s these had ceased operation until some locals decided to group together and form a new local fishing fleet for Ísafjörður. They had a building but not a convenient location for offloading catches, but were able to buy land from the government and dismantle then reconstruct their red building in the place it is today. It’s presently used as a storage facility.
And that brought us to the brewery. We hadn’t been certain it would be open but we could see as we approached that it was larger than we’d thought, definitely open, and definitely popular with fellow cruise passengers and possibly other tourists too. This was the Dokkan Brughús. A TV was showing sport which had attracted a lot of the people to the place, but it was the beer that caught our attention. Nine produced by the brewery itself, and three from the AEgir brewery in Reykjavík. All Icelandic beers!? Nine brewed on site!? We were in heaven!
We found a free table and ordered a couple of beers. Then a couple of flights. Then a couple more beers. Then bought some cans to take away with us. It was all that good. Any thought about going to see if another museum was open went out the window. We spent most of our time talking to another couple from the ship that we made room at our table for. We also got talking to the barman who turned out to be English, from Milton Keynes. The Dokkan brewhouse was absolutely fabulous.
Eventually, though, it got to that time when we needed to take the short walk to the dockside area and jump aboard one of the tender boats heading back to the cruise ship.
The fjord in which Ísafjörður is located is a wide one with not particularly high land either side of it so the sail away that evening wasn’t like one of those spectacular fjord cruises you will always experience in Norway, but the distant land under low cloud was still delightfully ominous and cold; a testament to this country and how far north we were, barely outside the Arctic Circle.
Ísafjörður had been a complete surprise. From starting the day with no real idea what to do we’d then spent hours in museums and a brewery, and they’d all been some of the best we’d ever visited. This was a cracking port stop on this cruise.
To conclude our time aboard Sky Princess in and around the port of Ísafjörður, pictures of dinner in the main dining room and some cocktails in the jazz club which, for some reason, was ridiculously loud that evening so we had to head off into the far corner to be able to hear ourselves speak.
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll be visiting the last of the new towns in Iceland for us when Sky Princess docks at Grundarfjörður and we head off on a tour of the absolutely stunning landscapes of the Snæfellsnes peninsula.