You stand on the beach on Fano Island with your back to the sand-dunes looking out towards the North Sea and you wonder if what youre seeing is real. The beach is so wide you cannot guess how far it is to the sea. You can see little black figures on the shoreline; sometimes they resemble the figure eight and sometimes they break in half, just for a fleeting moment, so that you see two ovals, one above the other. Everything about this island is dream-like and when you leave you wonder to yourself if you were really ever there.
But real this island is. Fano (pronounced fay-nooh) is the northern most of the North Sea islands that span from Holland in the south, to Denmark in the north. It is small, only about 8 km wide and 20 km in length and lies 3 km off the Danish city of Esbjerg, onetime 3rd largest fishing port in Europe and, undeniably, Denmarks ugliest city, though a good deal better than many other cities to be found in Europe.
The only way to reach Fano is by a small car and passenger ferry that departs from Esbjerg every 20 minutes. There has been talk of building a bridge to the island, but it is to be hoped that this will never happen. After a 15 minute...