Day 6 – the Day of Fosses

In the morning the full house erupted rather at once.  Notable events of the morning: the hut keeper didn’t recognize me, and was obviously perplexed how I’d gotten into the place during the night without him noticing.  The female occupant of the bunk above ours tried to climb up the wall because I was blocking the way to the ladder (the long table down the center of the hut could either be walked around or sat at, not both at the same time- the space was too tight).  She was using admirable climbing form, and had her feet above her hands before the sideboard she was grasping gave way and she crashed full onto her back to the floor.  I broke her fall a little, and the Belgian snatched a cup of tea out of her path preventing multiple scaldings.  She leapt straight up, mostly embarrassed, but it was a hell of a crunch.  She thought she’d killed my brother I think, but it was just his backpack.

Rustling around all the other hikers trying at once to stuff bags and get awkwardly out the door, we got ourselves packed and squeezed out, chatting for some minutes on the deck with an Icelander who was thrilled to be escorting two American friends over this hike.  The climber girl who had fallen on me, and her boyfriend, in fact.  He rhapsodized about fiskar (dried fish) with butter, and proudly shared some orange flavoured Icelandic chocolate, creating instant addicts out of us.  The morning was clear and crisp, a “bracing” cold, and the mist was scuttling away so we could see where we had been the night before- an expanse of rolling hills pocked with those mysterious pits.  The strange bowls were created by the action of the sun on the layer of ash heating the ice beneath, he explained, and we marvelled at this phenomenon.  He pointed out the path we should take down- one of many threads of footprints spidering away from the hut.  We could see the tracks of a Cat through the ash that must have brought supplies.  He warned us that the first half of the walk down was numbingly boring, and at that we set out into the grey ash desert.

A couple of km down we checked out the “free hut”.  It was a  corrugated iron shack cabled down to bolts in the ground, with an A-frame outhouse heaped in rocks to keep it from blowing away too.  The door opened on an enormous mound of garbage, behind that a filthy plywood floor.  The wind was whistling piercingly through the joints, rattling the windows, and banging the door against its latch.  Not inviting.  We agreed, we were glad we had paid for the Útivist hut.

The Icelander had been right: for a good while the walk down hill was pretty monotonous, following the treads of the Cat, which met a road, which rolled ever onward downhill through this desert of ash.  Slowly, the severe landscape changed.  Green was introduced, and on our right, a creek was making itself known in a cleft that got deeper and louder every time we paused and stepped off the road to look down into it.  Soon it was a foamy, milky rapids, and later, cleaner, with swirls on the surface that betrayed the speed and depth of the water now.  We crossed the river once on a footbridge, and for the rest of the way, the river stayed on our right.  Near that bridge we saw our first fox tracks in the ash, and shortly after that it got green.  Where there’s green, there’s sheep, so we saw lots of sheep and even more sheep evidence on our way down.  The sheep all stared back at us, usually while chewing rythymicly.

Today’s hike was very, very easy.  Going downhill generally is.  It was a steady, gentle slope.  The river beside us, the Skóga, grew larger and fell over a series of falls.  Not little waterfalls, either.  Considering we were descending a moderate grade, it wasn’t logical how again and again, we’d encounter a huge raging waterfall.  An interpretive sign at the end of the road would tell us there were 21 falls on the route we walked this day.  There were at least that many.  The frequent long stairstep falls probably didn’t count.  Unique, gorgeous, calendar beautiful falls, every one!  It was an abundance of beauty that seemed so excessive and extravagant that it became humorous.  Derek started saying “Oh, just another foss” at each, next, extraordinary spectacle.  “Oh, another foss” was something we said with a grin and shrug quite often the whole rest of our trip, as Iceland turned out to be truly thick on the ground with world class waterfalls.  Sometimes we’d hear the roar a ways off; sometimes the sound would be blocked by the land, or we’d turn a corner to discover another, suddenly.  Sometimes the trail would wind to the base of a foss, sometimes you would see one below you from the top of a cliff.  At every one we were just killing ourselves that we had no camera at all at this point to preserve it with, and we’d just pause and stare instead, trying to fix it in memory.  The sound and the mist and the “good ions” made for a very peaceful day’s walk downhill.  It was quite far, but not at all hard.   The nearer we drew to Skógar, the more oncoming hikers we saw, some out for a day hike up the Skóga, some setting out for Básar.

Most of the time we were walking through trenches in the grass that were sometimes hip deep.  The walking trails had compacted down, digging a ditch through the sod.  This turned out to be characteristic of trails everywhere in Iceland.  When they got too uncomfortably deep, a new trail would start right beside it, so in softer places there would be two or three trenches of varying depths with obvious historical order.

Our hike terminated at Skógafoss, a 62m waterfall missed by few tourists, because it’s readily accessible right off the Ring road at Skógar.  We came on it from above, climbing a stile, having a dizzying look down the falls, and at the backs of the gulls circling in the mist and nesting in the mossy rocks.   It was like reentering another world; as a tourist attraction, Skógafoss is very well traveled.  The steel stairs to the top of the foss are a revolving treadmill of steady foot traffic at all hours.  We were grubby, backpacked, and all serene from solitude and exercise.  Who were all these people?  Society has benefits though- we beelined to the visitor’s centre to immediately plug in our camera batteries and eat, as we had budgeted very accurately for food.  In other words, we had none left.  Menu options?  Minimal.  Fries.  Chocolate.

After the recharge, we went back to the waterfall and climbed it again to get some pictures.  Then we got on the road and hitched out of Skógar, headed to Vík. Vík is supposed to be a must-see for exceptional basalt columns rising out of the ocean at Reynisdrangur, and the sea arch at Dyrhólaey, and I really wanted to take this in, but we never did.  Ironically, we ended up passing through Vík FOUR times, but sadly it remained a list item for “next time”.

This time, it was raining, and we lucked out on a really long ride who was going straight through to Höfn, so we did not stop in Vík, but took the ride to Skaftafell.  This super friendly guy who was thrilled to stop anywhere we we curious about to take a picture, and who talked endlessly about the beauty and history of his country as we drove through it, just happened to be former CEO of one of Iceland’s big three banks.  Yep, all in a normal day for him to pick up a couple of unwashed Canadian backpackers in the rain.  He totally resisted my attempts to draw him out on the topic of Iceland’s recent, crushing economic crash, however.

It was hard to grasp the magnitude of the event from ground level, but this drive crossed miles of sandar -devastation created by the jokülhlaup of the 1362 eruption of the volcano Öræfi.  This sandar, Skeiðarársandar, is the largest in the world, a 1000 sq km floodplain of sand deposited by billions of gallons of water released from the glacier by the volcano’s heat beneath it.  Even to say you could see it from space is an understatement.  A smaller but more recent jokülhlaup event in 1996 took out all the bridges across it like they were made of matchsticks (see picture).  When we later saw it from a height, the grey plain is so large that it fades into mist at the horizon, and is totally impossible to take a picture of.  It’s just so big, it’s all that you see, for as far as you can see.

At Skaftafell we were greeted by a huge, modern, bustling visitor’s centre, gift shop, and regimented square acres of green lawn for a campsite, which we promptly set our tents up on, in the shadow of a green mound of a mountain.  Our tents drew comments, based on their resemblance to alien spacecraft.   I didn’t think they were that weird, but I guess, a bit different.  Derek did a  lot of research before buying our tents, based on weight, ease of setup, and packability.  I loved mine.  Derek spent an inordinate amount of time fidgeting with his, usually every night, trying to get it perfect.  Both of them were ultralight, set up pretty quickly, and dried out very fast, which was perhaps the best feature, since every day we’d wake up in heavy dew if not rain.

Tired from the hike, we got showers (cold), didn’t do  laundry (huge lineup), charged all our accessories (“chargers found plugged in here will be confiscated”), and ate in the cafe.  The cafe served coffee, sheep soup, cake, skyr, and junk food, all shockingly expensive.   I stocked up on skyr, cheese, and chips.  My love affair was skyr was just beginning; Derek had already had enough.  We watched the looped movie about the ’96 jokülhlaup, repeatedly.  I kept falling asleep in it, waking up, and then watching it again to see the parts I’d missed, only to nod off again, until i gave up and went to bed.  Well, first: I was craving a hot spring, we were hitting a week here without having been in one, and everyone we talked to was raving about hot spring this and that, so I hitched up the road to a pool noted in the LP that was supposed to be very nice, only to arrive just as they were closing for the night, alas.  It was dull, rainy, and we couldn’t see a thing for the heavy fog, but we were content to crash.

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Day 7 – Skaftafell

I was up with the first sunbeam to a gorgeous, cloudless day.  I jumped on laundry, although making the electronic washing machine work was a bit of a time-consuming challenge, and several other early risers got involved with me pushing buttons, before the thing miraculously came alive.  After that I was a relative expert, and had to start the thing repeatedly for other foreigners.  (Hold this button for ten seconds, then press this one and this one at the same time, then release the first while holding this other one, then wait 5 seconds, then press this one). Really. Or at least it seemed like that.  It was like arcane knowledge passed down between travellers.

I felt blessed to be able to watch the mist coil away from the grass, lift off the mountains and the glacier, to reveal for the first time where we actually were.  I made good use of my Thermarest chair (essential), ate skyr, and made notes in the white space borders of our LP guide, as I was still bereft of my journal.  The ground was drenched with dew and very cold on the soles of my feet, as I made frequent barefoot missions to confirm that the laundry STILL wasn’t finished.  Eventually I gave up and hung all our socks on the bushes and the guy lines of our tents, in good company with all the other campers.  Something is up with their laundry.  The first time I spent $16 and three f@#king hours to do one load of laundry I thought it was anomalous.  The third time it happened,  laundry ceased to be that big a priority.

After leisurely awakening, we decided to spend another night based here, bought new tent tags, then left around 10am for Jokülsárglón, a little further east down the Ring road, getting a ride from a French/Swiss couple with barely enough room for themselves and their gear in the car, let alone us.  But hop in!

Jokülsárglón is another site of stunning beauty easily reached off the Ring road that could be considered a tourist trap.  They definitely process a great many tourists that come for a quick lap in the amphibious boats, a few pictures, and maybe a waffle.  What it is is a great glacial lagoon formed by the ice melt off a tongue of the (inconceivably huge) Vatnajökull glacier, filled with little icebergs calving off the glacier, then drifting slowly towards the sea.  The ocean’s tide backwashes into the lagoon,  so it’s partially salt water, and the seals come in for respite too.

Good tourists, we promptly hopped aboard the next amphibious boat departure, price be damned, which drove into the water and toodled around among the icebergs, preceded by a zodiac there to find a safe route.  A beautiful Icelandic girl in a skidoo suit with a river of blond hair told us in perfect English how quickly the glacier was retreating now, 100s of meters faster every year, but that was ok, because global warming wasn’t happening fast enough for Icelanders.  She held a big chunk of ancient ice with bare hands as she talked, then passed it around for the photo ops and smashed it up on the deck of the boat into little chunks for us to nibble on.  I really liked the amphibious vehicle, and the transition from water to land, as you could feel the engine switch to the axles again and drive out of the water(no one else seemed quite as excited as me so I tried to keep a lid on it).

That was the Jokülsárglón tourist experience.  One can also walk leisurely around the banks of the lagoon and take pictures from the land.  Other interesting facts are that they filmed parts of Tomb Raider and Die Another Day here, and to do so they artificially froze some of the lake, and closed off the lagoon from the ocean (!).

The icebergs are gorgeous: stacked layers of white and blue and turquoise with streaks of black ash, and different degrees of opacity, depending on how the ice was formed in the glacier and the pressures exerted, on how long they’d been in the lagoon and how recently they’d rolled over, and on the vagaries of the sun’s action upon them.  We could have taken 100 times as many pictures here as we did, and Derek’s not having his DSLR hurt.

From the blue iceberg lagoon (time limited offer- will no longer exist in 25 years or less), we inhaled waffles with jam (breakfast was non-existent at Skaftafell, although sheep soup would be reheated later, ten bucks a bowl), and walked across the bridge and the road to where the lagoon really comes out to meet the sea.  Glistening, perfectly clear and intricately sculpted pieces of ice like we had sampled on the boat were washed up everywhere on the ash-black sand beach, looking for all the world like a black and white photo even in colour.  We spent some time here, taking pictures of the millenium-old ice in their last days as ice before returning to water, handling the smooth rocks and waiting for the other hitchhikers to be picked up before we got back on the road.

We got a ride back to Skaftafell with an Austrian couple.  I don’t remember any of it.  I was making a habit by this time of falling asleep as soon as I got in a vehicle or a movie.  It was starting to make me worry.  So weird, but as soon as I put the seatbelt on, it seemed, I was struggling to stay awake.   Still early in a sunlit day, we seized the opportunity to go on a glacier tour.  Only the beginner tour (“Intro to glaciers”), as we couldn’t afford much else.

Before that tour departed, we ran over to see the glacier that we were essentially camped beside, a short walk off the visitor’s centre to the oozing spread of ice reaching down towards sea level, and the canyon it had created.  The plain before it was rugged, scraped and sandy, with some rugged shrubbery, pools and rivers of cement, and an awesome view up over the cracking, pressured ice near the bottom to the expanse of snow and ice that Vatnajökull is.   There’s something about that much ice that can silence you with power.   It’s not silent though, it groans.  All night, it sounded like far off thunder, the ice heaving in the night.

Vatnajökull is vast.

We have some glaciers in Canada.  You can walk around on them and drive on them and even go on a very similar guided tour.  See the rocks that are mossy on all sides, see the cauldrons formed by whirlpools.  But Vatnajökull is larger than PEI (a bit smaller than Cape Breton), the same size as Lake Titicaca, with ice a kilometer thick.  All you can ever see of it at once is one little finger of it reaching between mountain ranges.

Our glacier tour was really lucky, there were only the two of us plus one crazy Isreali (non-stop clowning around), with our quintessentially Icelandic guide (rugged, blonde, stoic), who was also very indulgent, letting us climb down into any of  the maligns and crevasses, and climb higher and higher on the glacier, although he was really unhappy when we came down to see a family of tourists clambering around on the ice in running shoes.  “I will not rescue you when you fall in”, he spat, disdainful of fools.  On the way home the tour bus even paused at a gas station/grocery store, for us to buy bananas (a miracle!), rice (lifesaving!) and tomato sauce (hallelujah!) for dinner, which the Icelander approved of.  “College food”, he nodded.

We were starting to notice the food in Iceland, or rather the lack of it.  There’s plenty of chocolate and plenty of ice cream, but there never seems to be much choice for veggies and entrees. Between Vík and Höfn (150 miles), there seems to be two places to eat.  The visitor’s centre (sheep soup again?) and the Jokülsárglón cafe.  Waffles.  Delicious, but they’re two mouthfuls apiece; start with three per person.  This was a hungry day.  A person cannot live on skyr alone!  Not at this pace, anyways.

Back at our campsite in the lee of ridiculous vistas, we made rice, and saw the couple who had left us to our own devices at Gigjökull again.  Iceland is a really small world, for tourists at any rate.   Skaftafell is a major hub.  Oh, there’s that other hitchhiker, the one that had the Vík sign (wave); oh, there’s that Austrian couple again, (wave, “Hi!”); oh, there’s the unusually tall Belgian… you see other travellers over and over again at different hikes and campsites, and on the road.

After wolfing down dinner for four between the two of us, we went for a hike up to Sjónarsker.  Buried in the hills above us was Svartifoss, foss of a thousand postcards.  It was a long steep walk down to it (after walking very high up), and along the there were several other unique little fosses- long ribbons, wide washes that fell in steps, and there was a mossy structure that seemed to house a now-disused hydro-electric generator.   This was one of my favourite fosses of Iceland, although it wasn’t all that swashbuckling, considering the majestic curtains of water we’d already seen.  It was just… special.  It was like a cave, the bowl of space that held the fall, damp with mist held in the air and dripping off the black rock.  It’s the black basalt that makes this one so unique, all the columns of hexagonal rock for all the world like a church organ turned to stone. In the river’s spill out, there were piles of boulders, all hexagonal, different lengths, different dimensions, but all black, all six sided, everywhere you looked.  Amazing.

We lingered around that strangely “holy” pool and its quiet trickle of waterfall for awhile, then carried on up and out of the ravine and across the top towards the glacier again.  This was a profoundly magical place, something I’d only visited in J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination.  After gaining altitude, we could see over the sandar, the surviving evidence of power on a biblical order, and then we were in a maze of trails and boardwalks through short trees and thick hedgelike bushes.  It was exactly like being hobbits.  I would lose sight of my brother ahead of me, then would see him bobbing along among the twilit green.  The sun started to set in the west, silhouetting the peak behind us and setting the whole sky and the smattering of clouds ablaze in colours that would change by the second.  In the other direction, the setting sun was lighting up the snowy alpine of the mountains beyond the glacier with pinks and oranges and blues that looked fake.  Us, tiny creatures in between, wandered among the shrubs, laid on the moss that felt thick as muskeg, and ate blueberries by the handful, giving up on capturing any of this on camera.

This area is intricate with hiking trails.  I really don’t know exactly where we went, or how far, but we climbed for hours.  The sun seemed to never set, and we just kept going.  Eventually we reached the lip of the glacier-formed canyon of “our” finger of Vatnajökull that terminates at Skaftafell, so we knew where we were.  We were so high here, looking down from the cliff onto the ice, almost small below us, and across the wide canyon at jagged, majestic mountains.  I was seized by an urgent and totally illogical urge to summit Kristínartindar, a conical, steep peak with a clear trail up it,  although it was nearly dark.  It was right there!  So close!  Derek groaned; we argued.  Derek put his foot down and talked me out of it, after I tried to talk him into letting me go alone.  At this point, the sun was well below the horizon, but there was still light, a dreamy, glowing kind of light that seemed to come from everywhere.

I bargained with myself I’d climb here again in the morning (I did not), and headed down with Derek.  About an hour down, and descending started to seem just as hard as the ascent, plus we were in total darkness eventually, with meek headlamps, and it was gnarly.  Wet and slippery, rocky, craggy, and thick with strong, stubborn trees.  By the time we made it back to camp, my legs were jelly.  Sleep hit hard and fast, and the glacier went on thundering through the night.

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Day 9 – Culture night in Reykjavík

Day 9 was worse.

The Galleri B&B was gorgeous.  Luxurious, in fact.  I highly recommend it.  It was a bit out of character on this trip, an extravagant exception to sleeping in tents, but it was necessary, especially since Derek’s cold could either get better or really bad at that point, so it was important to have a comfortable warm sleep.  We had long hot baths, drank lots of hot tea, and slept as long as possible.

In the morning, breakfast was served in the gift shop, a mixture of food that Icelanders eat and what they think Americans eat.  Very cute, and ample.  I had multiple waffles, still making up for lost time and perpetually hungry.  The gift shop was full of beautiful handmade things, lots of them made by the two beautiful (blonde) daughters of the proprietors, whom we saw flitting about and who’d let us into our room in the night.  We lingered there for awhile, bought a few things (made more mental notes), and reluctantly got on the road in the late morning.

I wanted to go to Geysir, because we were “this close”, Derek wanted to get into Reykjavík to catch some marathon day events.  For awhile we played both sides, darting across the road to stick out thumbs at any vehicle passing, either way.

This did not work out.

After finally committing to definitely going to Reykjavík, and then walking all the way out of town, we still waited, and waited, and waited…  We took pictures of the sheep grazing in the median, and laughed at them.  The sheep moved on.  We decided there was more traffic going off the split to Selfoss than the more direct way to the city, so we moved over to that arm of the roundabout.  And waited.  And waited.  What traffic there was appeared to be horse trailers going to þingvellir, to the pony show we’d heard about.  There was no bus, unless we got to Selfoss.

In the afternoon, we got a ride.  Partway to Selfoss.  It was starting to look dismal to get into Reykjavík in time for the evening fireworks.

Then the guy with the stuffed Komodo dragon in the backseat (some vague explanation involving a strip club) picked us up, and things started looking up.  He drove like a demon, and took us right into town.  We asked about a Pentax dealership, and he took us straight to an Elko, the equivalent of a Best Buy.  Unfortunately, they don’t deal in Pentax, but here’s the address of the place that does.

On the city transit to get to the campground (more waiting), and finally, to set up our tents and drop the packs we’ve been standing around wearing for hours.  On the bus again to find some food (more waiting) downtown.  Happily, we chanced upon this amazing quasi-Indian cuisine place with a mad salad and soup bar, all fantastic ingredients.  SO good, and the first time I got full in days, it seemed like.

We wandered along the crowded downtown Laugarvegur to take it all in, saw some good music (and some bad) and then I got the bright idea of taking advantage of the free Culture Day public transit, and going to pick up our suitcases from the BSÍ.  We went and got them, then got on a couple of the wrong buses going in the wrong direction, got yelled at by a power-tripping driver for standing too close to the door, and finally made it back to camp just after the more cautious couple who decided to wait for the right bus. 

The buses were all off schedule, crowded, and unpredictable because of the holiday.  On the bright side, the BSÍ guy “remembered me”, remembered what luggage was ours (!), and then charged us for about half the time we’d left it there, with much winking.  I didn’t remember ever seeing him before, but I was grateful for the break in this expensive land, and happy.

Nearing dark, we headed back downtown for the fireworks.  Everyone was wearing Icelandic sweaters (a fashion statement that has no boundaries at all) and there were many handheld beers walking around.  Various street vendors and performance artists were doing their things.

One cooler art piece we noticed was spontaneously shed shoes and pants lying in little heaps in the street.  We didn’t see any pants actually being shed, but over and over, you could spot shucked clothes left behind.  We saw the rather talented blue ninjas tumbling and running through the street, and ran after them a ways to keep watching them, with several other kids.

Mainstage, in the heart of downtown, was blaring abominable music, but the hill above was the best place for the fireworks, so we joined the throng converging to wait and jockeyed for a place to set the tripod.  Children swarmed all over the sculpture of Ingolfur Arnarson and teenaged couples snuggled in the grass.

Icelanders even do fireworks differently.

In Canada, say, firework displays start tentatively, maybe with a bit of a teaser, then they escalate to the big stuff, with some pauses in between, with some attention to colour combinations, with some obvious planning of how two effects might overlap to best evoke ooh and aah, and then there’s a notable crescendo, culminating in an obvious finale- the big bang.  Then everyone knows it’s definitively over.

Well, Iceland fireworks aren’t like that.  They start cold, without warning, just as strong as they finish; just a full-on withering blast with no pauses, no crescendos, no altering in any way of pace, as though a small army of people is dashing around lighting fuses willy-nilly as fast as they possibly can, until they run out of explosives, at which point it all just stops dead.

It was possibly the most interesting display I’ve ever seen.  It was about as much TNT as three Parliament Hill Canada Day shows, all used up in an action-packed 15 minutes straight of constant explosions, just puking out fireworks until -pht- all over.   Derek and I look at each other like “WTF just happened?” then look around at everyone else, cheering and folding up the lawn chairs.   For them that’s normal.  The atrocious main stage act resumed belting it out, and the crowd started to disperse.

Wow.  Iceland.

This was the biggest party of the year in Iceland, but we just wandered slowly back to our camp, people-watching.  The streets were closed to vehicles; the crowds were as thick as a subway at rush hour; strollers were as thick on the ground as teenagers weaving among the crowd, and almost everyone suddenly had a can in hand.  It was like a family friendly folk festival, only with booze, blackouts, and an ambulance fighting through the crowds to reach an unconscious drunk.  Amazing.

It was a bit anti-climactic to make hot chocolate between our tents and go to sleep while a city-wide party raged, but Derek didn’t seem inclined to seek out a drunken good time, and I was more than happy to concur.

Yeah, boring.  Cities rattle me at the best of times, and crowds worked up to that pitch unsettle me big-time.  Even in this amazing place, I was emotionally exhausted by the whole thing; sad, shaken, tragic, overwhelmed with wanting and hunger to BE more.  I had a serious case of not enough; not pretty/young/successful/bold/talented/rich enough- a sure indication that I’ve let the city get to me.   I felt terrible too, guilty that my choices had screwed us up right and left, gotten us stuck and dragged us all over wrong turns for two days, and now my brother was sick and without a camera.  I went to sleep in my clothes, waking at 5am feeling like I hadn’t slept at all, resolved to surrender.  Surrender.  Surrender.

All night the wind chimes hung in the tree between our camp and the next sounded like cutlery clinking, and I dreamed our neighbouring campers were eating.

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Day 11 – The Golden Circle

Up at 6:15 and out of my alien spacecraft at 6:30.  I transferred our laundry to the dryer (thinking ahead), and went back to Laugardalslaug.  This was the perfect time to be here.  It was all old people, who knew the ways of the pool.  I managed the whole process correctly, following by example, sat stewing stoically in the hot pots with the old birds, and even used the hair dryers and lockers properly.   Back to camp, I started breaking, packed the car, waked my bro and retrieved the laundry.

Off to the camera store.

This is a matter of perspective.  Was it tremendously lucky that they had the exact same model camera as Derek’s flooded DSLR (only one of them), and that it had recently been reduced by 500kr, or did it really suck that it was still roughly twice as much as he’d got his on eBay?  It didn’t take very much discussion.

We bought it.

I tried to strong arm them for a further discount (pre-arranged; Derek said “I can never do that”; I said “for a thousand bucks, I can”), but there was no dice.  This is Iceland, she said.  Things cost more here; suck it up.   To preempt any suspense, the other camera came back to life (but waited until it was back in Canada to do so), and we recouped plenty of the cost, eventually.  But even without that compensation, that camera was totally worth it.

We left with the exact same camera, well, two actually, slightly a weird feeling, but one new one, working exactly like the old (new) one, now packed back into the (new) box.   All the lenses and accoutrements matched perfectly.  Derek was as overjoyed to have his camera back in his hands as I was to be driving.  Back out towards þingvellir, assured that it was worth seeing, on a now familiar road, under a cloudless sky.  Free to choose our destiny, and able to stop anywhere we pleased.

It was a very good morning.  We were bursting with happy and excited again.

At þingvellir in the blazing sun we walked around the historic area.  I really wasn’t feeling the whole “original democracy” legacy of this place, where the landowners and tribe leaders of Iceland’s history first gathered to argue, barter, revel and agree on early laws in the shelter of the natural ampitheatre of rocks, but I really liked the rocks, and we wandered far down a fissure away from the ”central attraction”, then back along the water of þingvallvatn (vatn= lake), looking at ducks and the elite summerhouses, to the little þingvallakirkja (kirkja=church) and cemetery at the bottom of the rift.

We wandered rather circuitously and timelessly around the paths and rivers in the sun, then back up through the Neðrivellir to the big, grandly flagged platform that now stands at the Lögberg, and up through the grand rift Almannagjá that’s as wide as a road.  This place is a tectonic boundary where Europe and North America are tearing away from each other (well, all of Iceland results from that fault and the associated volcanic activity), and here (as in other places in Iceland) you can see the ground literally splitting apart.  It’s sobering.  You can look down into the cracks in the earth’s crust at your feet.  Wow.

I had no patience for the cutting edge multimedia centre at the top of the hill, but let me tell you, the WCs were amazing.  Don’t miss those.  The entire wall of the bathroom was glass, a window looking out into the plain.  All the sinks and faucets were strangely suspended and automatic- you just waved at everything and it worked.  It was striking, like a magazine or art gallery, only with the whole room wide open to the wild with that glass wall so large it didn’t seem to be there at all.  Very impressive.

We drove around the other end of the park to look at Oxarafoss.  Yep, another foss.  I liked this one, I wanted to climb right into it, and it was very strong and blustery, so I got very wet creeping around the edges like Gollum at the pool of Ithilien.  We took some fun pictures and took some pictures for the other group of tourists there, quietly eating lunch on the rocks.  Remarkable- we were only a few hundred metres down the way from the logjam of tourists at the Lögberg, and here at this lovely spunky waterfall, almost no one.

þingvellir is one third of the “Golden Circle”, a trio of attractions that are so close to Reykjavík that almost everyone, even weekend trippers to the city, makes this circuit of Iceland’s features.  A foss, a geysir, some history, and we’ve seen Iceland.  Thank you come again.  This circle is so hyped and so abundantly supplied by every tour company in Iceland that I was all for skipping it entirely, but we were told not to, so we didn’t.  Despite the high traffic it’s still worth it- good advice.

Headed for Laugarvatn, it seemed to be a lot farther than we thought, and the gas light came on as we stopped at the caves.  Why here?  There was a little knot sign, (exactly like the command key on a mac, hmm?),  so we stopped.

An aside about the knots:  these little knot signs are EVerywhere.  They mark every and all “points of interest”, large and small.  What we found, though, when we started stopping at them, was that every one was totally worth the stop, for completely diverse reasons.  Most don’t qualify to “make the guidebook”, but every one is special.  One could make a project of taking Iceland knot by knot.  I’d love to visit every single one.

This one was the Laugarvatn caves, that the interpretive sign told us had sheltered a herd of sheep in a terrible storm, and had also been home to two families.  The men had been great carpenters and built front walls and doors on the front of the caves, and made them deeper, too, to accommodate growing families.  Looking into the “raw” caves, dripping and dark, it was a stretch to imagine.   The sign also matter-of-factly mentioned the elves that were known to live here (!).  Not to get all woowoo, but that was palpable.  It was  very magical place.

In Laugarvatn in the nick of time to tank up, there was a tense moment when both of my credit cards and my brothers’ didn’t work.  At least Derek’s was explainable; he hadn’t informed the bank he was going to Iceland, and he’d used his card in that vending machine!  Lockdown.  That could be fixed.  No idea why mine stopped, but it was a moment of stress.  I decided to ignore the problem and see if it went away (it did, by the next day).

Who needs money though, we had a car with a full tank, and we were off to see Iceland’s largest waterfall, Gullfoss.  We’d seen a fair few fosses already, and were prepared to be underwhelmed, but this one was really, really, big.  Too big for any pictures to really get it across.  It was like Niagara, in fact. Huge.

The giant swath of water turned a corner and dropped over two major steps.   You could walk around on the cliffs above it and it was big, you could walk down in the canyon, get soaked in the mist, walk right up to it, and it was BIG.  Massive.

We ambled around, taking pictures from every possible viewpoint, hanging out on the cliff above with the mist rising up from the river.

Here we got a good picture of what Iceland thinks about tourists.  Either they have far too much faith in “average intelligence”, or they don’t mind if they lose a few in the drink every year.

No guardrails, just a shelf of rock projecting into the bend in the river, with parents taking pictures of their kids standing around on it.  You can lie down and touch the water, screaming past at murderous volume and speed.  Niagara; I’m not exaggerating, and you can just walk around next to it.  Slip near the edge, and no one would even hear you scream, you’d just be gone.  This place sees thousands of tourists a day.   I was marveling.

The risk was intoxicating, vertiginous.  It was so loud, and wet, and windy.  I can’t believe you can be that close to so much power, and no one tries to protect you from yourself with sturdy guard rails.  I was frequently scared out of my mind in Iceland, but it was fantastic.

Next stop, Geysir.  O.G., the Original Geysir.  Yep, the geysir that all geysers are named after.

Geysir proper, the original 80m waterspout, has become irregular, reacting badly to people throwing stuff into it in the past and now erupting an unpredictable few times a day, but a literal stone’s throw away is “little” Strökkur, going off every 3-7 minutes, all day.  I was totally enthralled; we stayed here till sundown, and I wore

out a camera battery taking pictures of it.  It was great sport trying to capture the whole thing with multi-shot sport settings and video- there was hardly any warning.

This living pool of water would surge, ebb and flow, seething and subsiding out of the cauldron in the rust coloured earth, then suddenly would bulge like an overturned bowl with a great turquoise bubble, and shoot into the air, showering the whole area downwind with boiling water, which would then dart like snakes back into the hole in the ground to gather energy and repeat.

Amazing!  Lots of false quickdraws on the shutter.

I did get pictures of the bubble though, the most transient and pregnant moment, too fast to ever catch with the camera except by anticipating it with guesswork.

Again with the cavalier attitude towards tourists- all that boiling water flying around and a thin crust of earth over volcanic activity everywhere, and there’s a few ankle high ropes suggesting you stay back from the scalding zones- lots of little pools, pots, and spouts.  “Haetta” (=hot).  There was a bowl of water a crazy blue here, too, and up the hill, another brass marker pin, like we’d see lots of.

We stayed for probably 40 eruptions as whole sets of other tourists came and went; I was still unwilling to be torn away, still shrieking with surprise every time it fooled me.  Happy and satisfied, we eventually drifted away near sunset, taking the 500 north from þingvellir over some kind of pass towards Snæfellsnes (nes=peninsula).

We stopped randomly on the highway to take many many pictures of some horses, who promptly came up to the fence to visit and then gazed wistfully at us when we left.  Too cute.  We stopped again for Derek to take pictures of the developing (ridiculous) sunset, and I wandered off eating blueberries for supper.  Blueberries everywhere!  You could feed an army on blueberries in August.

Farther into this dirt road (that had looked like a highway on the map) and our surroundings turned ominous, to ash and rock before the light faded.  When the light died, we were trapped between nowhere.  Fog settled like a cage, and I could only see the edges of the road, and that barely.   Luckily the edges of the “road” were rocks mounded up, as though the road had been created by a plow pushing through rock (it probably had been, by a grader).  It was rough.  Derek revised his opinion of Kokanee Glacier Park road as “worst dirt road ever” on the spot.

The road seemed to climb forever, then it went up and down, and never once did the fog break even for a breath. It’s a bit weird to not see any other cars on a road for 12 hours too, and a bit disconcerting.   It was very isolating, and surreal, listening to Björk on repeat, three times through Gling Glo before we snapped out of it (after 2 weeks with 4 cds, I’ve lost the urge to ever hear Gling Glo again).

I was hugging the wheel always squinting at the ground directly in front of me and tensed, ready to correct, for sheep, or precipices, or pedestrians- who knew what could pop out of the fog. It was very fatiguing, and even after I said Ok, I just can’t go on like this, it was another half hour before the road seemed wide enough anywhere to park.

When I did park, we could hear water running, and I went to investigate.   I stumbled around in the dark off the road into a patch of giant ankle-twisting hummocks of grass, but I was so thrilled to see grass at all that I pronounced it totally suitable for camping.  Derek demurred, and pronounced me crazy.

I “set up” my tent (I had to get into it to hold it down in the wind- the video Derek tried to take of me wrassling with my tent in the headlights shakes with his laughter), and he elected to sleep in the car, which was actually rocking in the wind as well.  I had to wriggle around to get myself comfortable, curving my body to fit around the big mounds of grass, and my tent was bending to the wind down to my face, but I passed out effortlessly and slept without moving all night.

Right away we started taking glamour shots of our car, because everywhere we parked looked like a car advertisement. We ended up with 100s of car commercial photos.

I had one of my best nights of sleep ever, with amazing dreams.  I was just starting to feel the magic of sleep in Iceland, as we started to get out into the edges, and pretty soon I was like a junkie for sleeping on the ground here.

I have never slept and dreamed the way I did in Iceland, even on hard tilted ground or wriggled between chunks of rock.  I’m going to abandon trying to describe it, because I can’t, but the air and the earth in Iceland made sleep and dreaming a whole new layer of spiritual experience.

I can’t stop using words of shock and awe, “most, best, ever, never, -est, -est, -est”- superlatives all.  It all seems like hyperbole, but it’s not.  Iceland is superlative.  The whole place is elemental.  I really did see the edges of my experience there, with almost everything natural.

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Day 15 – Hornstrandir I

I woke up to a gorgeous open view that was all mine because the others were still sleeping.   The sun had warmed me enough to come out of my sleeping bag, and  I communed with the guide book, planning the future for some time, until the wisps of cloud in the blue morning sky coalesced into overcast, and I woke the others as it began to sock in and cool off.

We drove off from our renegade camp spot at the secret mountaintop location at 10:30.

What to do?  Suðereyri or not?

We chose Suðereyri, and it was bust.  Nothing was open, and it was a weird place.  It looked impoverished, but supposedly it is a progressive model of a green community committed to sustainability and thriving on tourism.

We didn’t see that.  We didn’t see anyone, or anything, interesting in the least, and we turned directly around and left.

At any rate, it was worth the trip, because the only way to Suðereyri by road is by an amazingly long tunnel bored 5km through a mountain.

A lovely green view approaching Suðereyri

This seemed astounding.  First of all, it’s the longest road tunnel I’ve ever been in, bar none (five kilometers!), and it seems a  monumentally costly road construction project to connect one tiny town that used to be boat-in.  Also flabbergasting, it has a T-junction in the middle of it.  After driving in the dark for minutes, there’s a T-junction!  Somewhere in the depths of rock under a gigantic mountain, there’s a little sign.  Notifying you: left turn to Suðereyri.  Another wonder of Iceland.

We sped on to Ísafjörður, where we promptly went to the Gamla Bakaríið bakery and ate a lot of bread.  We were near crisis with our camera batteries now, perhaps accounting for the dearth of photos on this day.  Everywhere we went we subtly sought out outlets and plugged our batteries in to snatch a few minutes of borrowed power – at the tourist outlet, the bakery, the library.

Our “hitchhiker” Cheryl was leaving us.  We were destined to go on a Hornstrandir hike, and she had less time left in Iceland than we did and wanted to be more economical.  At the tourist office she investigated flights and we bought tickets for a passage to Latravík at 6pm.  The man there grilled us about our preparedness and experience hiking, looking skeptical and intoning about “cold” until I bristled and said “Look, we’re Canadian, ok.  We’re prepared!”  Then he warmed up.

6pm seemed to allow us tons of time, but as it turned out, it ran out fast.  We took Cheryl to the road to hitch out of town, dropped a load of clothes in the laundry at the campsite, and Derek camped at the library to empty SD cards and charge batteries in preparation for a multi-day hike while I picked up stamps, provisions, and shuffled the laundry.

Laundry is no joke in Iceland.  Unbelievably, our single load of laundry cost $8 here.  To wash.  It cost another $8 to slightly overdry it. For a country with abundant geothermal heat and energy, the cost of laundering is astonishing.  It also takes forever.  I never thought a wash cycle could last two hours.

One $16 load of laundry later, our time had run out, and we were hastily packing our expensively clean clothes into our packs for Hornstrandir.  12 minutes away from 6 o’clock without the food packed yet, we panicked and rushed off to our departure dock at Bolungarvík… and promptly ran into road construction.

Road construction in Iceland – well.  The fend-for-yourself and we-assume-you’re-not-an-idiot ethos is alive and well in this aspect of Icelandic life too.  Clearly, they think flag people are a waste of money, or who could stand to do that job anyway, and cones and pilons must be considered a nuisance too.

We hit construction elsewhere too, and never saw a flagger.  But this was a rather massive operation, over a couple of km, with multiple lanes torn up and the traffic of a pretty busy road diverted.  No signs, no pilons, no flaggers.  That’s right, just traffic rolling pretty smoothly around the big yellow machines that were busy working.  Everyone was working!  I held things up a bit, because  I didn’t know where I was supposed to drive for a moment, but I figured it out.  And I guess that’s what they expect- people will figure it out.  When there’s an excavator sideways in the road, you stop for it.  When it gets off the road, you go around it.  Who needs flagpeople?  If there’s traffic waiting both ways, they work it out, like at a stop sign.  No biggie.  This was totally amazing to me, though, used to a million-cone line marking a lane reduction, flashing arrow signs, temporary streetlights, and flaggers in chartreuse jumpsuits with radios, ubiquitous everywhere there are potholes being repaired in North America.  Where we still have accidents.

We reached the dock at Bolungarvík in the nick of time to find our boat obviously there but no one in sight, thankfully giving us time to pack our food and snack a little.  Someone came to tell us we were departing around 7 instead, so we had time to repack, properly, grease our boots, and mail postcards.

We were the only tourists on the boat with a group of men who stood outside the cabin drinking beer and talking Icelandic.  Their cargo was two bales of insulation, which was really strange and mysterious to me.  I wanted to know, but didn’t know how to ask.  Why were four men taking two bales of insulation to Hornstrandir? That won’t go very far.

The boat ride in the flat light of an overcast evening put Hornstrandir in perspective real fast.  This was the open ocean.  Although Hornstrandir is connected to mainland Iceland, the fastest way to the eastern edge of the peninsula is by boat, which cuts across the Atlantic much more efficiently than overland.The bow of the boat was bouncing up and down, smacking the waves and throwing spray over the cabin.  Weirdly, the captain of our shuttle would not speak to me at all, directing all his speech to my brother, including his responses to my questions, steadfastly refusing to make eye contact with me.  He would ask my brother questions, looking at him, and then I would answer some of them, and he would continue talking, to my brother as if it had been he who just spoke.  It was a bizarre experience.

I stared out at the waves until my vision blurred, hoping to see a whale.  I saw a spray I was pretty sure was a spout, but it was too far off to confirm.  After the long boat ride, we slowed into harbour, where there was a lone bundled-up woman waiting on the dock to be picked up.  The men with their insulation put out in the zodiac to cross the shallows, then we went.  The boat zoomed off with the woman at the end of her trip, and the men had vanished somewhere as we walked up the beach, alone.

Its hard to describe, but there is no “alone” until you’re alone on an uninhabited island with no phones, radio, contact of any kind.  Hornstrandir isn’t an island, but a 580 sq km area without a road may as well be.  We were scheduled to be picked up after three nights at Hesteyri, a mountain range away.  We were completely on our own until then, and had to manage navigation, food, weather or injury without any back up plans. There are almost no paths, no trails, because the routes aren’t traveled heavily enough to create many.

Where we disembarked at Látrar there was garbage everywhere.  Rusty shells that used to be cars and farm equipment, grown-over, hollow foundations, and random buckets and trash almost hidden in the long serrated windswept grass.  We quickly found the emergency hut and curiously checked out all it offered.  There were blankets and candles and fuel and firewood.  There were quite a few snacks and bits of gear, obviously left behind my hikers finishing their hikes for others to use.  We were quite delighted with the emergency hut.

Since 1975, no one has lived on Hornstrandir, and the whole peninsula (the curved “horn”, or a rooster comb, of what I’ve always thought looked like the head of the creature that Iceland’s outline resembled) is a wildlife preserve.  There were several boarded up houses, and we followed the beach line looking for a place to camp for the night.

We chose the sandy bank of the river we’d have to cross in the morning, at the delta where it spilled out into the sea.  Seabirds were gathered on the surfy edge of the water, but they were too shy to let us approach them.

Camping on the sand has never worked out that well for me.  There’s always a humid feel to the air so you wake up feeling damp and wet, and I hate sandfleas.  There’s no purchase for tentpegs, and although the sand promises to dish into a cozy nest shape, in reality it tends to pile up in the wrong places and make a lumpy night’s sleep.  There was nothing but sand, though, sand and sand with coarse grass growing in it, so we chose a spot sheltered by a little dune and sought out rocks to anchor our tentpegs with.

We ate noodle soup and fell asleep on the beach.  It was loud- the waves.

For a few more pictures from this day, click for the Extra Photos

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Day 17 – Hornstrandir III

I woke up early and almost woke my bro because I could feel rain on the way.  But I was tired so I figured he needed sleep too.  I just scuttled into my tent before the rain started, sure enough.  One can hear so much more when you’re not in a tent.

In the rain I saw a line of swans come slowly down the hill to the pond, chattering away.  It was hard to kept count as they navigated the bushes, but there were possibly 9 little white S-curves behind the big capital S mama swan.

We got a break in the rain to break camp, and then we climbed the east mouth of the fjord valley, skirting the pond. We expected it to be very marshy but it wasn’t bad at all.  It rained most of our climb up the other side.  Already tired, it was a dreary and challenging trudge.  There was no view, because it was socked in, and there was no visual reference for our destination, because it was socked in.

Over and over there were “false summits”, where it appeared we’d finally hit the plateau at the top, but after walking a little farther more hill would loom out of the mist.

We had one Arctic fox sighting, one little brown furball dashing away from our intrusion.

Everywhere there were swans.  Usually there was one bright white couple in each small pond we came upon, but there were two pairs of swans in Teislavatn (sp?).  At the next lake, far up the hill in a pond surrounded by rock, there was another pair of swans.  In their rugged environment and the stinging rain, we dubbed them “back to the land” swans.

Today was hard going and plodding.  Over the top, there was a very long, long flat, on the rocky plain, marked with cairns.  In weather more inclement, they would be nearly useless, but from each cairn we could see the next; the visibility wasn’t that limited.

Our route drifted down towards sea level again after we saw the lighthouse at ? from above.  The rain lifted but the greyness didn’t.  Derek went blazing ahead because bugs suddenly appeared, swarming us like adoring fans.  Most unpleasant was sucking a bunch in on an inhale, something that fortunately doesn’t happen to Justin Beiber.

Over and over we crossed little streams, and the going was very up and down, although overall down.  Here trails began again, and it was very nice to have a trail to follow.  Pathfinding is kind of mentally tiring.

Finally we reached the beach and followed that to the attraction of Hesteyri, an “abandoned” town.

A trudging day. You can see how happy we are about it.

We trekked around, checking out the houses, and were disappointed.  Nothing seemed abandoned nor neglected.  Everything was locked up, well-secured and maintained.  Peering into windows revealed some very attractively appointed houses, that looked so much like they were locked up and walked away from yesterday it was discomfiting.  There was even a guesthouse, clearly equipped to entertain large groups.  There were coats hanging inside doors, boots in the tray, dropped gloves and tools, and food and dishes in evidence.

If this is a place abandoned in the 70’s, then the gnomes run an impressive maid service.

We cooked in the shelter of an old ruined foundation a little way from the “town”, barefoot.  My feet were cold and soaked white and they needed a break from the sopping boots.  A 100% hot meal, with soup to start, tortellini for main, hot chocolate to finish was just the ticket.   I got into dry clothes and we were off to bed at 6pm.  My legs were twitching as I drifted off, achingly tired.  I could feel them healing as I slept, trying to keep up with what I was asking of them awake.

I woke up again at 9, but the fjord was all locked up in fog, so there was nothing to get up for.

For just a few more pictures of this day, click Extra Photos

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Day 18 – Back to Civilization

Although I still love sleeping outside, I was ready for a hot pool.

I woke up irritated by the wind battering on my tent.  The sound of it intruded on my dreams until I woke up resentfully, and found that it wasn’t my dreams; the worst gusts of wind were flattening my tent right down to my face.  At least that was unique enough to be interesting.

There was nothing for it but to get up and bag my feet. I was pretty pleased with myself for producing two plastic bags somehow out of my luggage, out of the depleted food supplies no doubt, and I bagged my feet and last dry socks against my sodden hikers.  It was fabulous, however brief.  They didn’t last.  The plastic breached and slowly my socks sponged up water, but it started the day out right.

Alone, I hiked past Hesteyri to the mysterious red brick smokestack we could see past the town, that turned out to be an old whaling station.  I didn’t see any evidence of whales; the carcasses were of big beached iron ovens with rusted bellies and gnarled straps and gears.  None of it made sense to me, but the scale was amazing and impressive.  There were huge warehouse floors, ovens, and the tower was startng to crumble.  Some walls and whole structures were intact, but the roofs were caved in and rotting, and I felt weirdly unadventurous and reluctant to go squeezing into cracks in tumbledown buildings or to go under moss-covered partial roofs.  I trust the manmade much less than natural crevasses and outcroppings.  The trail to the whaling station was varied by bridges and little waterfalls, but I’d brought no camera.

Back near camp I picked some blueberries for breakfast (muesli) and woke Derek.  The wind was bad.  My tent had gotten all wet inside while I was gone and I was bitter about it.  I packed it all and hiked it to the one unlocked boat shed in town, right by the dock.  I finished the complete inspection of the town by snooping on the remaining four houses.  Like all the others, they appeared to be furnished, well-used, and every one locked up tight.

While Derek packed I picked blueberries in the low hills behind the town.  The blueberries were rampant and endless.  The mist was bordering light rain, heavy and dark.  That kind of moisture in the air seems to permeate waterproof clothes.

The yellow shed we sheltered in

It leaks in at your wrists and seems to come inside you with your breath, so it’s impossible to feel really dry although you may not be wet.  At any rate, I was cold.  By the time Derek came to get me I had a big bag of berries and my hands were stiff and vein blue, uncannily like  a corpse.  We went to the dock and hid in the yellow unlocked shed.

Self portrait of waiting

We waited.  We made hot chocolate, we looked around the shed.  We waited.  I can still picture the meagre contents of that boat shed in my minds eye.  A mysterious tool with a snarl of cable, nails and buckets, rags and old sacks, shreds of rope on the ground, oars and worthless warped lumber stacked on the rafters.  We were too cold not to stand, so we stood, stomping and clapping and occasionally mustering enough energy to shout and jump around, which didn’t really help too much.  Occasionally we laughed with a moment of objective perspective of us, hiding in a boathouse.  Mostly we stood staring numbly out at the long dock pointing into the bay, listening and longing for the boat that was coming to get us to appear out of the fog in the bay.

The boat was two hours late.  No zodiac this time; it could pull right up to the end of the long dock built far out into the deep enough water.  It dropped off two guys that had more luggage than I would think possible.  Boxes and drybags and backpacks, all impressively packaged gear, piling and spilling all over the dock.  They were rushing around, tossing and grabbing and hustling their stuff around at a near run.  I was soporific with our long hypnotizing wait in the boathouse, and dazed by their pace and the quantity of their stuff.  Probably the equivalent of six of our backpacks for each of them.  They tersely responded to my conversational questions that they were staying on Hornstrandir for 10 days, and continued barking at each other in German (I think), and hustling their gear around.   In fact, by the time we were on board, they’d moved their giant colorful pile of gear to the end of the dock.  It’s still a mystery what they doing with all that stuff.  Obviously it wasn’t just ten days of food, so they must have been up to something specialized, but their gear didn’t give away what.

The boat was two hours late.  No zodiac this time; it could pull right up to the end of the long dock built far out into the deep enough water.  It dropped off two guys that had more luggage than I would think possible.  Boxes and drybags and backpacks, all impressively packaged gear, piling and spilling all over the dock.  They were rushing around, tossing and grabbing and hustling their stuff around at a near run.  I was soporific with our long hypnotizing wait in the boathouse, and dazed by their pace and the quantity of their stuff.  Probably the equivalent of six of our backpacks for each of them.  They tersely responded to my conversational questions that they were staying on Hornstrandir for 10 days, and continued barking at each other in German (I think), and hustling their gear around.   In fact, by the time we were on board, they’d moved their giant colorful pile of gear to the end of the dock.  It’s still a mystery what they doing with all that stuff.  Obviously it wasn’t just ten days of food, so they must have been up to something specialized, but their gear didn’t give away what.

The pilot was the same driver as before, so needless to say he completely ignored me and spoke only to my brother.  The sea was rough, which made it very fun.  The prow of the boat heaved up and crashed  down on each wave, rain pelted the windshield and it was wild and noisy.  I played at standing on one leg at a time as long as I could in the middle of the cabin.  No one noticed.  The driver rattled on and on about “shelter” and finding the “right path” for the least turbulence.  I suggested we could go faster, and was ignored.

Back on land, we shucked our wet backpacks into our car and drove directly to a gas station.  In the washroom mirror, my face was dirty and my skin coarse.  The weather was more clear immediately. Back in Ísafjörður, we went on a binge of erranding.  A pile of food at Bónus, then back to Gamla Bakaríið for pastries and bread.  I was on the hunt for some light, simple sneakers.  My hiking boots were the only closed shoes I’d brought and I thought I could get by with them everyday, but these days it seemed they never got a chance to dry out completely, and wet heavyhikers were getting tiresome.  There was an ideal thrift store upstairs from the Bónus, but we could only gaze wistfully at the treasure trove of chaos behind the glass, as it was closed that day of the week.

At Hafnarbúdin, I declined to pay $100 (on ütsala – sale) for a pair of cheaply made $30 shoes.  Such is Iceland.  Hopefully, you’ve brought you everything you need, lest you have to buy something there.

Next we discovered the best souvenir shop, the Viking (Víking?), a chain shop.  It was staffed by a remarkable woman with a surprising UK accent.  The prices were relatively reasonable too; by this time we were adjusted to the gaggingly high price levels in general in the country.  The only customers in an oasis of kitsch, handverk (crafts, did I need to explain?), and brilliantly designed woolens, we piled things on the counter and ticked off nearly our entire list of people to bring back gifts for.  Feeling very successful with a big yellow plastic bag, we carried on Vin Búðin (“the wine shop” – Icelanders are literalists).

A friendly staffer whose name I was delighted to see was Snorri, gave us the lowdown on Brennivín.  The green plastic bottle with the striking black and white label is considered Iceland’s signature spirit.  While we were purchasing several to try out and bring home,  Snorri told us that it was cheap, trashy liquor, flavoured with caraway, and that many people died of the drinking of it so it came to be called “black death”, and had been packaged at one time with only a skull and crossbones.  The tense was a little unclear.  It seemed more past, when in harder times gone by more people were “dying of drink”, while in the present, it is considered a low level choice, but unique to Iceland, therefore a source of pride.  Iceland’s bottom of the barrel booze, in other words.  Sold primarily to tourists, it seemed. There were also lots of local beers and cider for sale singly, so we loaded up with an assortment of creatively designed cans for the road.

With that bender of shopping complete, counterbalancing a few days outside of civilization, we drove on.  At Súðavík, we stopped at the Arctic Fox Center, which was tragically closed.  I’d been so looking forward to it.  They had an inviting cafe, too, and posters outside cheerfully explaining how polar bears sometimes make landfall in the Westfjörds after swimming from Greenland and get shot for their trouble.   In the yard, though, there was a large enclosure dusted with seagull feathers around a fox play structure with one fox puppy (I know, a kit) with a big brush tail.  He totally made the stop worth it, he was such a photogenic and entertaining little fellow, not cringing or shy at all.  We lingered, taking lots of photos trying to capture his ultra-quick pouncing and smiling at his antics.  He was such a wild being.  Very primal somehow, and outside of the human world, especially in his eyes.

Can you see the truck on the other side?

The road east of Ísafjörður and Suðavík stays low in elevation and follows the coast, “fjörded” like the teeth of a comb.  For several kilometers, you drive south, pointed inland, while across the narrow finger of water you can see the next car ahead of you about 10km, driving the opposite direction.  At the “bottom” of the bay, you make a short turn and then drive several kilometers towards the ocean and the North Pole, while across the water you can see the road you were just on and maybe a big truck, the next vehicle behind you.  At the tip of the fjord, you turn again and repeat.  There’s the same car on the other side, still about 10 km ahead.  Repeat.  Repeat.

As the afternoon faded, we drove past Hotel Reykjanes and then turned around for it, deciding it was late enough to stop.  It was a strange looking place, a conglomeration of white cubes in the middle of nowhere, but it was perfect.  The owners were sweet and generous, and we paid (quite low) camping fees to tent on the big lawn in front of the buildings.  I produced a giant bag of laundry, and got taken into the basement and told all about how there was a problem with the breaker and the husband was working on it.  His tools were scattered around.  No charge for the laundry!

Their big square hot pool was about the size of a community lap pool (50m!).  It had a deep end and everything, but it was hot, clean water.  It was the perfect temperature to lounge in indefinitely, especially after days of hiking.  All the space to myself, I rested and stretched while steam rose off the water while the sky gently changed colours getting ready for the sun to set.  My brother stalked the sunset with camera, and it delivered another wild one.

For the first time, I had wifi in my tent, which was such a novelty that I had to stay up to 1am on the internet.

For a whole whack of fuzzy little Arctic fox pictures, click here.

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Day 19 – Hólmavík and Akureyri

I slept in ’til 8 and headed straight for the pool.  Derek did the same, to get warm, and when he came back we ate muesli and broke camp.  Going to retrieve my laundry, I found it all hung on the lines run along the low ceiling, a typical Iceland laundry setup.   The laundry room was warm from being below ground, I think, and all our clothes and even my hikers were all dry!

Lots of skyr, every day

There was a close call with the camera charger- we almost left it behind plugged in the bathroom, but thankfully remembered while pulling out.

We headed for Hólmavík, interested in the Witchcraft museum, excited by the Lonely Planet and their description of the necropants – wooooo!  When there’s the possibility of seeing, at a bona-fide “award-winning” museum, the magical money-producing trousers skinned off a dead man’s legs and groin, of course you must seize the day.

On the way we stopped for photo ops of seals hanging out with heads and tails stiffly out of the water.  Is that comfortable?  Why do they do it?  Also sheep and swans crossing the road made the morning drive interesting.

The museum was unfortunately like all the other museums- lots to read and little to see, although severe stuffed ravens overlooked it all and there was an appropriately creepy vibe.  The necropants, were, alas, obviously not real.  Sorry, the cat’s out of the bag (pun intended), we know, they’re not real pants made from the skinned lower half of a male corpse.  You could see where the hairs were glued on.  To be fair, the guidebook does say “plastic replica”.  I felt like I was at Ripley’s in Niagara Falls, anyways.

The genuine stone bowl that had been used for blood was considerably creepier.  It’s a nice museum, aesthetic and well-lit and nicely designed.  Reading material abounds, about the witches who were slaughtered for supposedly practicing sorcery, and their real craft books under glass.  I just can’t get into reading when the rest of Iceland waits, though, so I bought a book and coveted the fat little woollen ravens standing on rocks in the gift shop.  Later I had to have them mail me one.

In Staðarskali we almost left the camera charger behind again.  We were still on our usual program of charging at every stop where we could subtly find a socket.

It was slow driving.  We drove right past the seal museum and the sea ice museum, but we stopped for the turf church and the site of the biggest battle in Iceland.  We stopped for a white-tailed eagle, and the seals at Kirkuból.

Finally we made it to Akureyri.  It was somewhat welcome to be in a town with streetlights.  The first thing I noticed was that the circles of the red lights were masked out a little.  They looked a bit like hearts.  At the actually department sized Intersport store, I impulse bought a pair of white skate shoes that had line drawings of superheroes on them.  I couldn’t not, they were so awesome.

Unfortunately, they were children’s shoes only, and the largest kid’s size definitely didn’t fit me.  I walked around in them for awhile, going I can’t, they really don’t fit, but I have to, because of their sheer awesomeness; I may never see them again.  I decided if I wore them barefoot, they fit.   Bought them.  They became my totally favorite shoes for awhile.  When I tore out the insole and put a thinner one in, I could even wear socks, and only my big toe would hurt a bit.

We visited another camping store and then parked downtown and walked about.  There seemed to be hearts everywhere, pasted on storefront windows.  It was a mystery.  We went in the beautiful, grand Akureyri library, desperate for a rest room.  The library was wonderful!  Icelandic authors, by first name,  were mixed with English ones.  Derek said “Tolkien!”, and we rushed around looking for them.  The three Lord of the Rings books were there, in a beautiful colourful hardbound set I was dying to have.  That led us to the book store, the multi-storied Eymundson, which was totally overwhelming with books and CDs.  Eat, Pray, Love was in vogue, and the Icelandic translation had stacked tabletop displays.

Starving, we headed to Bautinn to eat.  An unlimited soup and salad buffet really hit the spot.  All was delicious, and there was an abundance of different kinds of bread.  Back to the bookstore for some music.  By this time, the two CDs, one unlistenable and one questionable, that had been in the car when we rented it, were wearing pretty thin after days of driving.  New music was a necessity purchase.  We checked out a couple of places and their hours to sightsee tomorrow, and headed for a campsite well after sunset.

On the way we found a rink, glowing in the dark next to the highway.  A genuine arena!  Excited, we parked and I barged in.  There were men on the ice playing mediocre hockey for about a minute.  I’d arrived just before close, as the final bell was about to ring.  Still breathless, I quizzed the puzzled men at the reception waiting to turn out the lights.  No, there were no skate rentals.  No, there was no “public skating”.  Quizzical looks.  Sigh.  We were this close to skating in Iceland, but it was not to be.  It was still exciting to be in the cold, musty air of an actual hockey arena!

I went back out and found Derek in the verge with a tripod, taking pictures of the lights on the hill across the water in the shape of a heart.  The lights would pulse, fading in and out, like a beating heart.  It was a big heart, described in lights on a hillside.  What was with all the hearts?  We figured there must be some event in progress today or this week or something.

Following the guidebook’s directions we fortunately found our way directly to the campsite.  It was one of the biggest we’d ever seen, fields after fields, bounded by shrubbery so it wasn’t just one gigantic field.  When we went in, just before close, the girl at the kiosk didn’t want our money because she’d already rung off.  “Oh, just pay in the morning on your way out,” she said, and waved us through.   We crept along through the many fields, trying not to disturb sleeping campers with our headlights and engine, and found our way to a field all our own, on the edge of the property.

There was a strange wall of electrical boxes on a panel at the mouth of the field.  I investigated with a flashlight and it turned out to be many different plugs, probably for RV hookups.  I found a standard one, and even in the middle of nowhere as it felt, we got to charge our electronics for the night.

It was an amazing night, so dark and quiet a location that I had an extremely restful sleep.  There was a beautiful moon and the air was cool.

So restful, that we woke up very early.

A few more pictures from this day

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Day 26 – Stöng to Reykjavík

I woke up in the early dawn suspecting that rain would catch me out and scooted inside.  When it didn’t rain I scooted back out to the grass, disliking the nylon barrier between me and the sky.  I wasn’t even sleeping on my mat anymore, just using it as a pillow.

Our clothes we had draped on the shrubs were mostly dry.  We went looking for Hjálparfoss in our vicinity- a very nice foss tumbling over basalt arches.  I tried to do a handstand perched on a tip of rock facing the foss, but the battering wind made it too dangerous.  I had to settle for a backbend.

Leaving there, we came unexpectedly on Stöng II, þjóðveldisbær. This is a modern recreation of the sod farmhouse at Stöng.

We were very lucky that there were some men working there when we showed up.  They let us walk around inside, and we got to see the sod building techniques in action.  Inside, the house was deeply dark, and we were taking flash pictures again to see what we were walking around. 

In the dark, something brushed against my legs.  I thought I’d imagined it, then it happened again, and it felt alive.  I took a picture of the area and it was a coal black dog checking us out.

When one of the men said “Oh, lights,” and turned them on for us, then we could see all the features – the wooden bed boxes that seemed quite short, the central fire pit, the pooping area – and some interpretive signs.  It’s a gorgeous place, ready to move right into.

Outside, the men were repairing a corner of the building, laying a piece of sod and then slicing the edge off of it to match the layers beneath, in a very crisp line.  He was using a drawknife, constantly stropping it to keep it sharp cutting through sod.

Their dog, a bit of a puppy, was sweet and very bright, and we had some fun throwing sticks for it in the lush green backyard.  In spite of the extension cords and tools lying around, this place felt like a pre-machinery farm, relaxing and vibrant.   I remember this area being full of green and rock valleys, where the road would wind around and up and down, sort of hobbitty.

The sun was out and with the good weather we backtracked to Háifoss, Iceland’s second highest waterfall.  It was very impressive, and you walk right up to it and look down into the big gorge that the waterfall drops into.

Around lunchtime we stopped and took a short walk around a tree farm at a place possibly called Selfit.  The wind had been intense all day and it was nice to take a break walking in the woods.  It was unusual to be in proper trees, so I realized that I hadn’t been missing trees at all in Iceland; it fact I’d barely noticed their absence and it was strange to be reminded of trees walking through a forest.

We got back to the car and I made some open face sandwiches.  We had a very simple diet in Iceland, and it revolved around the most readily available fruits and veggies.  Lots of sandwiches with spiced cream cheese, cucumbers and tomatoes.  We’d snack on bell peppers and bananas, (supplementing of course with plenty of sweet and savoury candy/snacks).

Today, it was cucumber  with cream cheese on rye.  As soon as I made mine I opened my door, and just as Derek was saying “are you sure you want to do th–“ the wind lifted all the cucumber slices off my bread as one and whisked them away, throwing some in the gravel, some rolling away like wheels.  I ran out chasing them while Derek shook with laughter inside the car.  Sigh.

Just up the road there was a big knot sign but there was no interpretive sign.  We climbed up this big promontory that seemed like the attraction – unusually bulky and separate, standing by the side of the road.  Perhaps the sign might be up there, but there was nothing.  It was a mystery.

This was our last whole day in Iceland, and we were on the hunt for another chance to ride horses.  We were in the area for horse farms, the agricultural southwest, and there were plenty of horses grazing in the fields.  Eventually we made some phone calls out of the book.  someone said No, too windy, then someone said Yes, come in an hour.

With an hour to “kill”, we put some gas in the car and some ice cream in us.  We drove out to Skaholt, then back to the farm for our date with the Icelandic horse (I think this farm was Sýðra Langholt, but that is not entirely sure.  I can’t recommend them highly enough, if I knew who to recommend).

Our last riding experience had left something to be desired, and I really wanted to try again.  This time is what all it could be.

The whole event was different from the beginning.  We were hovering around the barn when three beautiful young women rode up to us and jumped off their horses.  They asked us a bunch of questions, introduced themselves and their friend who had come along because we were going for a ride,  and pointed out the helmets for us to choose from, all while they quickly saddled up two more horses for us as theirs stood.  We all set out together, continuing to chat, while they discussed where we might go, deciding on the loop we would take back to the barn.  There was no speech, no safety briefing, no trail, and no formality. No performance.

The moment I got on my horse it was listening and responding to me, ears swiveling around at me alertly.  It was wonderful!  I was riding the horse, not sitting on the horse while it walked behind another horse.  We rode on the road for a bit, then left the road and went through fields, along a hill, all riding in a group, changing our order, picking up and dropping speed. The horses wanted to stay together but we were also clearly in charge of our own horse, and they were sensitive and obedient. The girls were friendly and asked us some questions and also boisterously chatted and laughed in Icelandic with each other.  It was exactly like we had stopped in on some friends and were just out for a ride.

We totally tolted!  It was fast, so I was a little bit nervous when all the horses opened up together, but then it got very smooth, and I felt very comfortable again.  Possibly we paced too.  It’s hard to tell from on the horse, but the trot is very rough, even more so than a western horse because their stride is so much shorter with the short legs, and then it just becomes comfortable and sustainable, while you’re still flying.

Two hours!  We stopped for the horses to eat some grass and drink, rode some more, let the horses run and then we brought them in, took their saddles off and watched them all drop to roll the saddle itch off.  It was such a blissful experience, and not like a business exchange at all.  She passed me the wireless card reader in the barn like an afterthought, we said goodbyes, and left content.

Feeling like we had now definitely had the experience of riding an Icelandic horse, we headed back to the big city.  We saw a stone réttir on the way – the sorting pen for sheep.  It was a work of art.

At Selfoss we found that washing your car is always free, which is fantastic, to not rush against the time a few quarters buys you.  Maybe not so fun to wash outside when it gets cold and windy.

In Reykjavík we went straight to Perlan for the waffle I was craving since our first breakfast, then to the campsite to empty out the car.  Nearly packed back into my suitcase, I had a giddy moment of thinking “I can bring so much more stuff back” with the empty space I seemed to have.

Then we drove the waterfront for the first time to Kryddlegin Hjörtu for a most satisfying supper.  This is probably my favourite restaurant in Iceland – relaxed, great value, always tasty, predictable, high quality vegetarian soup and salad bar.  Ahhhh.  Already a bit emotional to be at the end of our trip, I drove us back to Perlan for some nighttime pictures of Reykjavík from the deck.

After vacuuming out the car at a gas station I tried to find my way back to the owner’ place just by following my nose.  I’d been there once to pick up the car, but that had been weeks ago.  I didn’t do too bad but got lost right near his place.  Dropped off back at the campsite (Reykjavík’s city campsite), I couldn’t find Derek anywhere!  Turned out he was asleep.  I left my luggage in my tent on slept on the ground outside it, as per usual.  The night was cloudy, but it didn’t rain until morning.

There are several more pictures from this sunny day on the Extra Photos page.

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Day 27 – Departure

In the morning there was this persistent tapping sound, with a sort of crinkly tone.  It seeped into my dreams and got really annoying until I had to wake all the way up to address this sound.

It turned out to be a seagull a few feet from me.  It was pecking at a plastic shopping bag!  I hissed at it and it squawked back at me.  It left, and I fell back to sleep, then it returned.  Peck (crinkle).  Peck(crinkle).  Peck(crinkle).  I threw a shoe at it.

Awake now, I got up and packed, and I really did have some room in my suitcase.   I did some writing and internetting and then walked down to the 10.11 looking for some things to use that space for.  A half dozen skyr and a pile of chocolate.  It was a good place to shop for candy (right near the traveller’s  hostel – bet that’s no coincidence) and the guy there was very proud of Icelandic chocolate.

“All this-“, he said, pointing out the huge rack of Nizza and Pipp and Lakkris, “made in Iceland,”  then showing me the small selection of foreign candy – Bounty, Mars, Snickers.  I hadn’t known that so much was made in Iceland.  I wonder where the plant(s) is/are.  I just assumed it was made in Europe, the way North America imports so much processed food.  He said “Our [Icelandic] chocolate is so different, so good.  Very good chocolate.”  I’d have to agree.  “I think every day I eat some chocolate,” he says.  I admitted I was addicted, gesturing to my mound of about-to-be purchases.  “You are addicted to [gesturing to same]…like you are addicted to Iceland!” he said.

On my walk back to the tent a kid with a basketball feinted to toss me the ball, then spun it on his finger and carried on.  That was unexpected too.

When I called to book our bus ticket to the airport, I found out that one way to get to the airport is via the Blue Lagoon.  For a modest increase in price (nothing compared to their entry fees at the door), the bus will stop at the Blue Lagoon for a few hours on the way to Keflavík, and you can jam the Blue Lagoon experience into the last hours of your time in Iceland.  I couldn’t say no to that, so I didn’t.

On the bus there were a couple of obnoxious British loudmouths going on and on and on about football and footballers.  They drove me up the wall, but Derek was probably interested in the stats they were talking about.  At the Blue Lagoon, we left our stuff on the bus (2012 note: now you have to unload your stuff and store it in the building and reload onto a different bus – the bus doesn’t wait for you – too efficient now) and went in to the pool.  It was very high tech, with bracelets that you brush against a sensor to lock and unlock your locker in the changerooms.  that was cool.  Fancy.

The thing I wasn’t ready for that totally shocked me was that the Blue Lagoon is salt water!  Nothing I’d read mentioned that.  Nor the tripping / toe stubbing hazard, because you can’t see more than six inches below the surface of the water.  The water is white and cloudy, with that seawater slipperiness.  Very interesting.

There are pots of salt clay around the pool with long handled spoons to dip out clods of it and smear it on your face and skin for the “healing properties”.  The pool is very large, with differing temperatures in various areas and nooks, and there are features- the cave, the shower, the bar that serves drinks to bathers in the water.  Just wave your wristband to pay with your credit card when you leave.

The shower is the best- a powerful waterfall that hammers down on your shoulder when you stand over it.  There’s a risk for any women with swim suits that fasten at the neck; the pounding water was determined to unfasten the top of my suit.  There were some old men hanging around the waterfall.  They knew what was up.

The salt water made my hair so unhappy.  It was squeaky and brittle, hanging in ropes.  I could hear it crying.  Back in the change room I took a forever shower and dumped conditioner on my hair.  It seemed like we had all kinds of time in the Lagoon before we had to be back on the bus, but the time ran out.  We rushed back to the bus, getting only a couple pictures on the way out.

All in all I liked the Blue Lagoon, but I was sure glad I didn’t pay 28€ for the experience.

At the airport we got our VAT receipts stamped, checked our luggage, and ate a skyr.  Derek had one can of Guiness left over and drank it in the lobby, knowing he couldn’t bring it on board.  Slammed it, actually.  We had a laugh about that, not sure how chugging a beer would treat him on the airplane.  At security the skyr I was carrying on was denied, so I walked back a bit and wolfed it down, then went through security again.  After the stress of security there was vast shopping options that we sort of darted into.  Running through passport control, then the gate, finally slowing down on the ramp, we realized we had definitely caught the plane.

On the plane the attendants weren’t wearing their wool hats like they had on our arriving flight.  The whole experience was a bit of a disaster.  Derek and I couldn’t sit together, although we both had windows.  The child behind me was vigorously and continuously kicking the back of my seat, and his mother couldn’t make him stop it, even after I finally had to comment about the situation (politely).  I spent the first half of the flight sitting up straight and perched forward without touching the seatback.  When the beastly child fell asleep, so did I, with the channel playing Icelandic folk tales in my ears.  Their folk tales are a bit gory.

I was feeling wistful, anxious, and a bit wound up.  Having the last Hraun, the last appelsinu (orange) chocolate, looking at the last chance to buy Blue Lagoon mud from the “Saga shop” (Icelandair shopping), it was all sinking in that we were gone.

Ever since, I’ve been desperate to go back.

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