The farm

„The men of these islands are the most flawless individuals one can imagine; they have handsome appearances and their women, too, are beautiful. Highly trustful, they do not bother to lock anything…” Pietro Querini

We return from Svolvær, the capital city of the Lofoten Islands and we look on the map received from the Tourist Information Center. To Tind, where we stay, there are still 130 km to go and we would like to see something on the way. Maybe we can visit some traditional place or something local. On the map, we see in the middle of nowhere the Aalan Gård farm.

So, there we go. We leave the main road and we approach the farm where we expect to see different types of animals. When we got there (silence everywhere), a woman appeared.

I was pushed forward to communicate.  „What can we see here?”, I asked. She replied : „Goats!”. I turn to the group: „Capre!”. The woman heard me and said: „Are you Spanish?” (in Spanish is cabra) We replied that no, we are Romanians and that we are also a Latin people, as the Spaniards. She decided we are OK and she sent her 12 years daughter to show us around.

After this introduction, the girl took us to the little shop where they kept various spices, tea selections and goat cheese. The types of tea and spices were presented under names such as nordland, viking or warrior.

We tasted various types of goat cheese, some of them quite interesting to taste. At the end we bought a few of them.

After we finished with the cheese, the spices and the tea, we visited the goats from the farm. Seeing the goats was the nicest part of the visit because it reminded us of childhood, of the moments when we were at the countryside visiting our grandparents.

All this may seem nice and innocent, but this is how I see these things:

I’m amazed and I jump all over when I see a volcano eruption in front of me, as it happened in Sicily, and I’m simply blown away when the aurora borealis appears all over the sky.

But then again, I looked at those people living at the farm and they seemed happy with their simple, yet natural lives, so I tried to see things from their point of view:

We raise goats and we make cheese for the tourists in various combinations. We also have a garden with local plants to produce different types of tea and spices. And is there anything more? In the end we are fine, happy to live surrounded by nature and maybe our lives don’t seem very appealing to you, but we are far from the city life where you don’t trust each other anymore.

We look at your lives and you all pretend to be different, but how much truth is there? Running like goats after something it doesn’t exist, never satisfied, always looking for more. And yet, why are you here in the middle of nature if you run away from it?

This is where you can find the Aalan Gård farm: