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The wallpaper for May shows my very first view of the Shetland Islands and that's why it means quite a lot to me. With the old Bressay Lighthouse that welcomes you after the long sea journey and says goodbye when you head out to sea again. It means arrival, relief, exhaustion, adventures, shakiness, curiosity, goodbye and all these things that you may relate to travelling. It was a gloomy early morning when our ship manouvered into Lerwick harbour and these greens and blues and greys will always be my Shetland colours.

You can download it for free by right-clicking and saving or you can download it on my Flickr.

I hope you all have a happy, sunny May!

of smiling sheep and poking ponies

Here's a kind of my personal Best-of of those animals, which you will find all over Shetland: sheep and ponies. There are meadows, but you also meet them taking a walk on the street or climbing through old stone houses. They are almost everywhere and they are allowed to. And since they are so free in their movements they aren't really bothered by curious tourists. But if you come too near they turn around. It's like with little children: you are not there when they can't see you!

If I was a sheep, I wanted to be a Shetland sheep!

If you visit the Shetland Islands you will also come across some Shetland Ponies for sure. 

They are only waist-high, but they made it up with loads of self-confidence and a bit of naughtiness ;)

We met a whole gang lingering next to the street when we visited Hermaness.

Unlike the sheep, they are very curious and when they saw us coming, they became instantly interested in us and mainly our bags.
One of them, I think he was the leader of the gang, didn't let us through until he had poked his nose into every bag we had.

Finally he felt our bags where not worth his while and decided to let us pass. Not without following us with a reproachful look for quite some time ...

Via Bressay to Noss (almost)

First of all:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I wish you all a wonderful, healthy, happy, adventurous new year filled with love and laughter!

A new year always makes me (like many people) want to start and try something new - which is a good thing, I think. So I thought about starting here with something new, too. Antonella (here) just finished her "52 rolls, 52 weeks" project, which I enjoyed very much. I loved the results she got and the idea of taking the challenge of a film roll every week and with it to learn and be surprised appealed a lot to me. So I thought about trying it, too, but I think its not the time yet. And I enjoy my Shetland series too much, and this film roll project would take much of the free time I have. But I will try to finish a film roll every month, like Digital Cosmonaut (here) started last year. 

But for now, let's stay in Shetland.

When you stand at the harbour in Lerwick, Mainland, you look to the next neighboring island: Bressay. And behind Bressay is Noss, a National Nature Reserve with loooooooads of birds and a hundred feet high cliff, which we absolutely wanted to see. Noss is almost uninhabited except of the warden, who lives in the only house on Noss, facing Bressay, and provides a boat service (boat = small rubber dinghy - eek!). You can see the house in the picture below. I still admire anyone who lives out there alone and that the current warden is a woman just enhances my admiration.

To get to Noss, you have to cross the  3 miles of Bressay, where there are no buses. Since we hadn't a car and it was the perfect summer day, we decided to walk and just try to get a lift with someone going to Noss, too. Soon we were lucky and a very friendly local picked us up. She was on her way home, but decided to drive us all the way across Bressay. You can imagine how thankful we were...

I will never forget the first view of the turquoise and blue water, the same colour as the sky, and the green, brown, purple of the islands against it. This solitude and the beauty of nature just gets you in those moments and takes you out of everything.

The summer boat service is, permitting the weather, available every day except Mondays. Now guess, which day we were there...

There was a short disappointment but somehow it was alright. We sat by the sea, watched the sheep, the birds and the waves, and let our minds wander, soaking in the sun and the serenity.

Just this was the 3 miles walk back home worth it.