Pic Spam: Two islands in the sun
Aug. 5th, 2025 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakAfter thoroughly rainy four weeks, I finally had the time to upload my photos from a very sunny week at the start of July, dealing with two islands in the Northern Sea. I was staying on one, and for the first time had the chance to visit the other. Which is worth a little pic spam.
So that island in the Northern Sea where I was staying was my childhood idyll Sylt, where our family used to go when I was very very young, and where my APs and I in the last few years after decades have resumed going to. We also tried to make the day trip to Helgoland, but no dice in the last two years, the weather was always against us. However, this year, I finally got lucky. Helgoland - Heligoland in English, but this is is one of those cases like Habsburg, not Hapsburg, Hannover, not Hanover, where I am using the German spelling because it would feel affected and wrong for me not to - is Germany's sole island in the deep sea, and used to belong to both Denmark and the Brits at different points in the past, the English part happening in the 19th century until Bismarck traded it to GB for Sansibar. (Insert here the obvious: Colonialism bad, Sansibar was not Bismarck's to trade.) You can read more about Helgoland's history in the wiki entry I linked. Anyway, having been foiled a couple of times, I was very curious, and this time the weathergods were with me, and the ship to Helgoland left as advertised. It takes about two hours (plus, depending on the weather) from Sylt to get there, and en route you pass a couple of adorable sea lions,like these:
Then Helgoland shows up. It used to be bigger until a natural catastrophe in the 18th century literally broke it apart. The resulting smaller island is called "The Dune" and works both as a small airport and a place for sea lions to sun themselves. The bigger island still isn't very big. It has one town, divided in the "lower town" and the "uppertown" (Unterstadt and Oberstadt), more about these in a moment. When youo approach, you can see the most famous cliff, "The Long Anna" at one side.
The most picturesque part of the Lower Town is the harbour. I should say here that no building on Helgoland is very old, courtesy of WWII and the Brits not only delivering over 7000 bombs during air raids but later, post war in 1947, detonating 6,700 metric tons of explosives to make a point (and the largest non-nuclear explosion in history). (Back then, all inhabitants had fled or been relocated; the island was returned to West Germany in 1951, after which time the former inhabitants returned as well.)
This is the harbor and the Unterstadt from above:
Of course, if you are a day trip visitor like me, you don't stay in the Unterstadt for long. You walk or take the lift to the Upper Town because walking the cliff path around the island is where it's at. I mean:
In roughly the mid point, you see these two sides of Helgoland:
Among other things, Helgoland today is a great nesting place for birds, especially Lummen, aka Uria in English.
The two small islands you see on the horizon are called not islands but "Hallige" in German. One became infamous in recent years when a right wing mob tried to lynch our then Minister of Economics, Robert Habeck, when he was returning from holidaying on one.
As briefly mentioned before, the most famous of the cliffs is called "Long Anna" and basically is the signature cliff of Helgoland:
Today, Helgoland mainly lives from the tourists, but there are some animals there in addition to the birds, to wit:
And this year, there is a major scientific centennary to be celebrated on Helgoland. Fans of the play Copenhagen, alert! To quote English wiki:
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) first formulated the equation underlying his theory of quantum mechanics while on Heligoland in the 1920s. While a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at Munich, Heisenberg first met the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1922 at the Bohr Festival, Göttingen. He and Bohr went for long hikes in the mountains and discussed the failure of existing theories to account for the new experimental results on the quantum structure of matter. Following these discussions, Heisenberg plunged into several months of intensive theoretical research but met with continual frustration. Finally, suffering from a severe attack of hay fever that his aspirin and cocaine treatment was failing to alleviate, he retreated to the treeless (and pollenless) island of Heligoland in the summer of 1925. There he conceived the basis of the quantum theory.
And Helgoland makes the most of that. Including pointing out he was just 23 when getting this brainwave. What you see in a slight distance is the Oberstadt, the Uppertown.
So this was Helgoland. Now, in past years, I already posted photos from Sylt, so this time I will limit myself to the incredibly beautiful sunset I was privileged to witness. The place I was staying at was near the "Rotes Kliff", the "Red Cliff". The redness of which really comes out at Sunset.
And now for the sunset. I was using both my mobile phone and my regular camera and experimenting with different settings to take these.
And with this ending of a sunset, I shall leave you.
So that island in the Northern Sea where I was staying was my childhood idyll Sylt, where our family used to go when I was very very young, and where my APs and I in the last few years after decades have resumed going to. We also tried to make the day trip to Helgoland, but no dice in the last two years, the weather was always against us. However, this year, I finally got lucky. Helgoland - Heligoland in English, but this is is one of those cases like Habsburg, not Hapsburg, Hannover, not Hanover, where I am using the German spelling because it would feel affected and wrong for me not to - is Germany's sole island in the deep sea, and used to belong to both Denmark and the Brits at different points in the past, the English part happening in the 19th century until Bismarck traded it to GB for Sansibar. (Insert here the obvious: Colonialism bad, Sansibar was not Bismarck's to trade.) You can read more about Helgoland's history in the wiki entry I linked. Anyway, having been foiled a couple of times, I was very curious, and this time the weathergods were with me, and the ship to Helgoland left as advertised. It takes about two hours (plus, depending on the weather) from Sylt to get there, and en route you pass a couple of adorable sea lions,like these:
Then Helgoland shows up. It used to be bigger until a natural catastrophe in the 18th century literally broke it apart. The resulting smaller island is called "The Dune" and works both as a small airport and a place for sea lions to sun themselves. The bigger island still isn't very big. It has one town, divided in the "lower town" and the "uppertown" (Unterstadt and Oberstadt), more about these in a moment. When youo approach, you can see the most famous cliff, "The Long Anna" at one side.
The most picturesque part of the Lower Town is the harbour. I should say here that no building on Helgoland is very old, courtesy of WWII and the Brits not only delivering over 7000 bombs during air raids but later, post war in 1947, detonating 6,700 metric tons of explosives to make a point (and the largest non-nuclear explosion in history). (Back then, all inhabitants had fled or been relocated; the island was returned to West Germany in 1951, after which time the former inhabitants returned as well.)
This is the harbor and the Unterstadt from above:
Of course, if you are a day trip visitor like me, you don't stay in the Unterstadt for long. You walk or take the lift to the Upper Town because walking the cliff path around the island is where it's at. I mean:
In roughly the mid point, you see these two sides of Helgoland:
Among other things, Helgoland today is a great nesting place for birds, especially Lummen, aka Uria in English.
The two small islands you see on the horizon are called not islands but "Hallige" in German. One became infamous in recent years when a right wing mob tried to lynch our then Minister of Economics, Robert Habeck, when he was returning from holidaying on one.
As briefly mentioned before, the most famous of the cliffs is called "Long Anna" and basically is the signature cliff of Helgoland:
Today, Helgoland mainly lives from the tourists, but there are some animals there in addition to the birds, to wit:
And this year, there is a major scientific centennary to be celebrated on Helgoland. Fans of the play Copenhagen, alert! To quote English wiki:
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) first formulated the equation underlying his theory of quantum mechanics while on Heligoland in the 1920s. While a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at Munich, Heisenberg first met the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1922 at the Bohr Festival, Göttingen. He and Bohr went for long hikes in the mountains and discussed the failure of existing theories to account for the new experimental results on the quantum structure of matter. Following these discussions, Heisenberg plunged into several months of intensive theoretical research but met with continual frustration. Finally, suffering from a severe attack of hay fever that his aspirin and cocaine treatment was failing to alleviate, he retreated to the treeless (and pollenless) island of Heligoland in the summer of 1925. There he conceived the basis of the quantum theory.
And Helgoland makes the most of that. Including pointing out he was just 23 when getting this brainwave. What you see in a slight distance is the Oberstadt, the Uppertown.
So this was Helgoland. Now, in past years, I already posted photos from Sylt, so this time I will limit myself to the incredibly beautiful sunset I was privileged to witness. The place I was staying at was near the "Rotes Kliff", the "Red Cliff". The redness of which really comes out at Sunset.
And now for the sunset. I was using both my mobile phone and my regular camera and experimenting with different settings to take these.
And with this ending of a sunset, I shall leave you.
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Date: 2025-08-05 10:46 am (UTC)I always find it frustrating that cameras see sunsets so differently from eyes. Why can't I just photograph what I can see?!?
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