From Sea to Shining Sylt

Off-the-ship excursions on Germany’s charming Frisian sale, by Jeanine Barone, executive summary by darmansjah

THE RICH AND FAMOUS have long engaged in holiday merrymaking on this narrow strip of land-just 7 miles wide and 21 miles long-battered by the North Sea along Germany’s coast. Beyond the designer boutiques and pulsing nightclubs in Kampen and the throngs swarming the beaches and souvenir shops in Westerland, you’ll find a terrain of unspoiled beauty on this North Frisian island.

CAPITAL AFFAIRS Rent a bicycle near Westerland’s train station and pedal along bike paths (Sylt is networked with 124 miles of them) to keitum, the capital in the 1800s. clustered here is the island’s best collection of Frisian houses, bearing their characteristic reed thatch roofs and pointed doorway gables. Kleine Teestube provides an extensive tea menu and decadent strawberry cream cakes, as well as a courtyard blooming with Sylt roses, tulips, and hydrangeas. Past the whale jawbone entrance, the Sylt Local History Museum, set in a former sea captain’s home, exhibits antiques such as an oak-curved mangle board used to press cloth and a hanging crown compass. The petite rooms in the Old Frisian Houses illustrate life during the 18^th and 19^th centuries with a five-foot-seven-inch bed, a double sided  fireplace or oven between the kitchen and living room, and an in-house horse stable. St.Steven church houses a 4,000 pipe organ and is adorned with whale shaped brass door handles, reflecting the community’s historic roots in the whaling industry

NATURAL WANDERING List, the island’s northernmost region, offers secluded, alabaster sands that rim the Ellenbogen, an elbow-shaped peninsula. The wild landscape is perfect for sunning, picknicking, or walking, but fierce currents prohibit swimming. Wlak along the nearby coast of Konigshafen, a shallow bay with mudflats on the Wadden Sea that attract redshanks, red knots, and other shorebirds. Heather planted o all but two of the dunes prevents them from moving. The remaining sandy mounds that shift are termed ‘walking dunes’. The multimedia presentations at the Forces of Nature Center dramatically illustrate how crabs, birds, and other creatures survive and thrive despite the turbulent North Sea. At Bistro Austernmeyer, an informal eatery, you can inspect the oyster beds and devour their speciality: oyster gratin with Pernod butter, chili powder, and curry.

LIVING IN THE PAST In Tinnum, a board walk veers over a marshy landscape to the Burg, a foliage-covered, doughnut-shaped rampart that was part of a 1,000-year-old Viking fortress. Near Wenningstedt, navigate a short, steep ladder down into Denghoog, a 5,200-year-old megalithic burial chamber constructed of massive pink granite boulders, one of which weighs some 40,000 pounds. Just nine miles away in Sylt’s most easterly community, Morsum, the gray – and rust-hued , 65-foot-high Morsum Cliff serves as a time capsule with diagonal rock layers from widely different geologic eras sandwich together by glacial forces and erosion.