Day 13 – Snæfellsjökull

Despite staying up with the Northern Lights, we woke at 7am to break camp.  We headed southeast around Snæfellsnes peninsula to approach Snæfellsjökull from the south (again).  On a tightly planned schedule for the day (never a great idea), we made a quick stop at the little (300m) volcanic caldera Saxhóll.  I sprinted to the top, up and down, back on the main road in 15 minutes.  I thought my heart would burst, but it was worth the run.

As we rounded Snæfell from the south in brilliant sunshine- another perfectly gorgeous day- we had to stop to take a picture of the unique ripples in the grey mountain side on our left.  The spot we pulled over had a little path that led to a hollow with a spiral staircase disappearing into the ground!

This just happened to be Vatnshellir, a 100m long cave formed in the lava 8000 years ago.  Access was denied to random tourists without a guide (atypical for Iceland’s tourist philosophy, but probably very appropriate), and the steel silo housing the staircase was all locked up.

We could still see down into the railed viewing hole, and the air coming from it was cold and smelled like winter.
I believe we were near Lóndrangar.

A little farther down the road we stopped for the columns of rock we could see rising from the horizon against the sea on our right.

Walking up and out to the cliffs, we saw an arctic fox running across the field below us, and hung out on the cliff edge high above the surf breaking on the black rocks below us.  Birds were sailing around on the updrafts.  I was already loving the bluntnosed guillemots, ubiquitous but cute and bright white.

  After walking around for some time, perching on the edge, and taking vertiginous birds-eye shots of the birds swooping in the drafts, my brother found a warning on a post.

“Oh, here’s a sign!” he called out.  A little 4 x 4” sign on a post, floating out there in the field of gently waving grass.  Watch out for the cliff!

On to Arnarstapi and the “must-do” seaside walk to Hellnar.  The beginning of the hike at Arnarstapi is guarded by an impressive stacked rock sculpture – Baldur of the Sagas.

As we walked the winding path along the black basalt cliffs (close the gate behind you to keep the sheep out!), we tried over and over to capture the swooping seabirds in our shots.

This place was gorgeous, with the radiating patterns of basalt columns forming caves, ends rounded by the waves.

The sun was shining brightly off the water and the oil-black diving birds clustered on the black rocks, against the deep blue Atlantic and green grass topping the cliffs.

From there we drove up the mountain, stopping en route at Sönghellir, one of Iceland’s singing caves.  This was the most magic place ever, the second place so far that I felt powerfully the magic of the earth.

It’s called a singing cave because of the acoustic resonance, how sounds inside vibrate and shimmer.  I crawled up the curving shelves in the wall of the cave and settled in there, watching tourists below me coming and going without ever seeing me.  Dozens of them strode in, nattering the whole time: “Oh, here it is…It’s not very big…My flash isn’t working…What’s next, honey?”  I was amazed and appalled that they weren’t all struck with awe, considering how the place made my spine tingle and made me want to fall to my knees.  I couldn’t leave, going into the cave again and again, singing, and clambering around the general vicinity until I felt I’d adequately communicated with the spirit force in that cave.

In the parking “lot”/patch of gravel, it was so windy I grabbed the opportunity to dry out our tents that we’d rolled up still wet with dew.  One tent at a time billowed out like a sail and dried in seconds.

The gravel road up to the jökull was a steady ascent in a rust coloured wasteland moderated by moss and lichen.  We stopped several times to take pictures of the developing southward view behind us, and to dry out the second tent.  The view was breathtakingly expansive, of the ocean, that sandar, and a fascinating mountain- Stapafell.

Giants are said to have populated this area in the past, hence the rock monument at Arnarstapi to the last giant, and the cairn atop Stapafell rather corroborates that as a literal possibility.  The spike on Stapafell’s peak looks exactly like the other rock cairns speckling Iceland, but it’s HUGE.  No humans hiked those rocks up there; there’s no way.  I didn’t find any commentary on it, but it’s surely not naturally occurring, and it’s too massive to be human-made.  It’s a mystery.

We were spectacularly lucky to see the glacier at all.  Snæfellsjökull is notorious for being cloaked in clouds 90% of the time, like it was last night.  But the day was still clear and cloudless, and we quickly made the short climb to see the jökull up close – as close as one can without a special guide or pass to get on the glacier.  The ice was close, we could feel it.  Quite nippy on the top of the hill.

Our schedule revolved around catching a twice per day ferry at Stykkishólmur for the Westfjords that afternoon, so we headed down the north side of the peninsula from the mountain with a mission to cover ground quick.  We stopped at Kirkufell to see some sheep hanging out in the low surf and seaweed – clearly sheep are truly everywhere they’re not fenced out of in Iceland, and to pick up our first hitchhiker.  Of course, she was Canadian.  Not only that, but she was from Vancouver, and it took us about four minutes to establish one degree of separation.  So we practically knew each other already, having just met in Nowhere, Iceland.

We had the same destination, Stykkishólmur, but we were headed for the Baldur ferry and she was undecided about going to the Westfjords.   On the drive, we stopped at the “Lonely Planet notable destination” of Helgafell, where you may be granted three wishes if you follow the correct process of climbing the hill to the chapel ruins from the grave of Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir.  This was a lovely, serene place, overlooking green squares of fields.

At Stykkishólmur, we bought our passage on the ferry, Cheryl still undecided, and then sped off for the ultrafast tour of Stykkishólmur.  My credit card decided to work again for the tickets, happily.  Ignoring the problem seemed to work.  We had been hoping to stop in at the swimming pool for a soak and to clean up before heading into the remote Westfjords, but that was out of the question with under an hour before sailing.  We rapidly took in the church, Stykkishólmskirkja, as distinctive as all Icelandic kirkjas, but towering and majestic.  The bell tower was receiving some kind of industrial attention at the time.

We had more trouble finding the Library of Water, but it was worth it.  The minimalist art installation in a former library – I missed the “former” and was expecting art and books – was an irregularly shaped room with two dozen acrylic columns filled with water, and a rubber floor with words stuck on it. 

We had to trade our shoes for very unphotogenic white slippers to walk on the sensitive floor, but the place was a kind of high-brow funhouse, with the columns of water refracting the views out the windows and of each other as we walked among them.  At the last minute we ran (quite literally) out with our shoes untied, leapt back into the car and sped down to the ferry landing again.

Cheryl decided to stay with us for at least a day, and she dashed out to buy her ticket as cars began to roll onto the ferry.   So now we were three.

The ferry was shockingly slow.  For a 25km crossing, it took two and a half hours!  We were not expecting that much time in the least.  I suppose it was an older boat, with a closed car deck that you couldn’t stay on during passage.  Luckily, I snatched my laptop off the car deck at the Flatey stop, and we tanked up on fries and skyr at the cafeteria.  Mid-trip, the ferry docks for a moment at Flatey, a tiny island that you can see the whole of from the boat.  Everyone was crowded around that side of the boat to see the island, and a big ruckus broke out.  The ferry pulled away from the dock to leave, then reversed hard and docked again, as a man dressed like the captain, or maybe first mate, descended from the tower and much hollering burst out in Icelandic.  Nothing was unloaded or reloaded, though, and the ferry departed again.

The Baldur ferry is one of two ways onto the Westfjords – the large northwestern peninsula that looks like the head of the creature-like shape of Iceland overall.  The other way is to drive there, through the neck, which means much purportedly less interesting driving.  The ferry gets you to the interesting parts faster, supposedly, with an Atlantic Ocean boat ride thrown in.  The ride was bracingly windy and salt-sprayed, with a large outdoor deck close to the surface of the water.  It was a gorgeous day – our luck continued – and it was lovely to be outside in the mixture of sun warm and wind cold.

We were heading to the Westfjords to go hiking and camping in the lesser-seen Hornstrandir, the uninhabited nature preserve at the northwesternmost tip.  For this first night, though, we were headed directly for Latraberg,  one of several famous bird cliffs.  We stopped to tank up at the one-pump, last chance station, where everyone else off the ferry was also stopping.  We had to wait for another couple to finish filling before we could, and it turned out they were Canadian too.  After I paid and came back out, putting away my credit card, I heard the next couple pumping gas talking, and they were also Canadian!  All the Canadians we’d met so far on this trip,  all in the same day!  I started talking to them, and she said, “Well, apparently only 3% of all the tourists who visit Iceland come to the Westfjords.  I guess that’s all the Canadians”.

The road out towards Patreksfjorður was another contender for world’s worst road.  Paved with rugged 3” gravel, it was a very slow, teeth rattling ride.  As the road curled around the point and descended into a tiny hamlet of four or so houses, the beach stretched out long and bumpy with grassy hummocks, dotted with a few sheep.  We stopped to watch the sunset and wander on the beach.  As night fell we decided to just camp there next to the road.  The beach was tangled with seaweed, swampy in places, and the sheep were shy.  But the usual Inspirational Calendar sunset bloomed over the water, changing by the moment, and then, as the sun fell, we spotted the most mysterious line of bright pink chunks of light on the distant horizon.

They were bright, they were pink, and most mysteriously, they stayed there, illuminated long after the sun set.  We just couldn’t figure out what they were.  They were too far too see distinctly, on the edge of distance where your eyes throb with the effort of focusing.  But Derek took dozens of pictures and zoomed in on those, and we speculated what they could possibly be.  They must have been ice, to be so reflective.  Icebergs seemed most likely, but the light reflected from them was so strong it seemed they must be bigger than that, and they didn’t move in the least, even as the hours passed.  Someone said “Greenland!” and that seemed like the answer.  We were standing on the westernmost point of the westernmost tongue of land on Iceland, the closest one can possibly be to Greenland while in Iceland, although it’s still 300km away.

Long after we made supper, set up our three tents, and let tiredness close the day, the pink mystery still glowed faintly on the horizon.

We asked over the next few days about the horizon iceberg/Greenland phenomenon, and were told it was impossible to see Greenland, even from the highest point of Iceland, certainly not from sea level.  I frowned at this.  I know what I saw.  After we got home though, Google answered the question for good.  It is indeed impossible to see Greenland because of the curvature of the Earth, but there is an optical phenomenon called a fata morgana, or “hafgerdingar” in Icelandic, that bends light rays in different temperature air, especially in polar regions.

For more photos of this day in Iceland, visit the Extra Photos page.

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Day 14 – Westfjords: Látrabjarg

We slept in on our first morning on the Westfjords, awakened at 9 by keener tourists driving slowly by on the rocky road towards Látrabjarg.  We joined them at the bird cliffs after breakfast.  Látrabjarg is a renowned area for seasonal nesting birds, where they congregate in the thousands on the sheer cliffs of the jutting fjords.

We took our time, and leisurely walked along the cliff edge that juts up at a defiant angle towards the sea.  It was sunny, warm and clear, and we relaxed, lounging in the grass looking over the edge of the cliffs (me), and staying well back from the edge taking birds-in-flight pictures (my brother). It was another site of powerful natural magic, which I was coming to recognize now by my intense desire to fall asleep and dream there.

Closer to the parking area there was higher visitor traffic and more impatient tourists here to see and then leave, asap.  I was astounded by the nerve or idiocy of some people, striding to where the sod curls over the edge and leaning over for a look at the birds clinging to the cracks in the rock.  There were no ropes or guardrails (of course), and over the edge was a 400′ drop to certain death.  Seeing some people being so cavalier with the risk made my stomach lurch, and it seemed no wonder that a German tourist was said to have recently fallen over. That accident was also said to have sparked discussion on whether or not to install guardrails or limitations.  I hope they haven’t.

At least I had the sense to get down on my belly and elbow out to the edge to look over, not just lean out.  Some people!  And that’s where I was, down on my belly, when I saw the puffin!

The current tenants dominating the cliffs were guillemots, whose little white bodies speckled the black rocks, as did their droppings.  They were perched in lively groups and pairs on every available foothold, grooming, dozing, and defending their territory.  Everywhere you looked, there was drama and action, and it was all noisy, the juveniles crying constantly to be fed, a cloud of sound drifting up from the folds of the fjords.

So I was on my belly, and just happened to be looking in the right place to see the one tiny black puffin among all the guillemots swoop in with a mouthful of silver fish spilling over her bright beak and disappear under the sod curled over the cliff’s lip just a few feet away.

I hollered and gesticulated madly at my brother across the fjord, and although I could see the exact place she’d disappeared into, we didn’t catch sight of her leaving.  It was way past puffin season now, and this late bird and her brood were probably doomed, but it was still an exciting sighting.

On the drive out, we stopped at Hnjótur for some delicious waffles, and then drove on to Patreksfjörður, Cheryl driving now so that I could catch up on my travel notes in my little yellow book. We went straight to the swimming pool, which we had to ourselves in midday, and we napped in the pool, bathing in crystal clear 42 degree water, warm sunshine, and a view of infinity.  I highly recommend the pool at Patreksfjörður, even just for the view.

After some groceries at the tiny store and some gas, we took off for Dynjandi.  With a few stops for views on the way, we reached the spectacular waterfall in the early evening.  It’s an incredible cascade waterfall the kind that is so wide and grand it’s impossible to fit it into a picture, let alone represent the scope of it, and it was set in a huge blueberry field.   It was exactly blueberry season, and I wandered barefoot in the sometimes swampy and scratchy bushy hills and ate blueberries until I was full.

At the base of the hill, there was  a herd of Icelandic horses picturesquely plunked in an emerald pasture with a background to die for and a low sun providing dream lighting.  Derek spent some time seeking the “quintessential Icelandic horse picture”.

This was such a glorious location, we unanimously decided to camp here for the night.  The campground was busy, and like the book said, promised to be loud, but the surroundings were more than worth it.   However, first there was  a sunset to be chased.  Dynjandi is a low spot, and we could see the road winding uphill again around the high mountain/walls of the fjord.  Derek wanted a vantage point to shoot the sunset, and we had to move fast.

Driving as fast as I comfortably could, we passed some seals in the bay, and then climbed up over the peninsula.  We drove through an absolute moonscape, a desolate, green-less field (possibly the Gláma moors?).  Near the top of the climb, sobered by the bleak surroundings, we suddenly encountered a group of sheep near the road, and we all burst out laughing,  “Of course!” and “Even here, there’s sheep!”  This proved definitively that sheep get around, truly everywhere in Iceland (Hornstrandir excepted).  the sheep looked a good deal more at home in this moonscape than we felt.

Although we thought we’d missed the good sunset, we were closer to Þingeyri now than turning back to Dynjandi, so we pressed on.  As we summitted the pass, we chanced upon a shocking red red and apricot sunset.  Awesome!  It lasted only for moments, but we caught it, once again feeling the magic of being the only people to see that scene, in that transitory moment.

Driving on downhill in the darkening dusk now, I musingly commented “I want to sleep on a mountaintop tonight”.  No sooner had I said it than a turnoff  appeared and I swung into it.  Place names will be deliberately hazy for awhile now to protect the identity of our location;)

On the dirt road up the hill, we encountered the strangest birds waddling on the road ahead of the car.  They were too big to be quail, too upright to be grouse, and they waddled quick like penguins.  Dodo birds came to mind.  They were just utterly mysterious, and of course we could get no photo evidence or clues of colouring in the dark before they turned off into the brush.

We parked and walked to the top of the hill, which was serene and slightly breezy, with a view of the lights of a small town far below us.  The summit was narrow and long, and we could see the ripples of mountain ridges, varying shades of ink in the full moonlight, for nearly 360degrees, and we could see to the ocean.  The sky was spectacular.  I casually asked if anyone else wanted to sleep right here, and was surprised that Cheryl eagerly pounced on the idea.

Derek made it clear he thought we were both crazy, by now a familiar motif.  We talked him into it and overcame his objections.  I set up my tent for him (better in the wind and less dependent on pegs in the hard dirt of the mountaintop), and he retired with the food bag.  Cheryl and I chose to sleep open air, and she chose a deluxe location on a mattress-sized tuft of grass and moss that she declared simply luxurious and promptly fell asleep on.

I moved down the slope a little, tossed my thermarest on a patch of moss, and nestled down in my sleeping bag.  Then I had a princess and the pea moment with my choice of bedding.  My first choice didn’t seem quite right, so I hopped around in my sleeping bag like some demented one-man sack race and scooting my thermarest around to try other spots of moss.  Eventually I returned to the first spot and found it perfect.

For more photos from this day, visit the Extra Photos

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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 16 – Hornstrandir II

We totally got checked out by a fox in the night!

In the morning, there were delicate little prints thoroughly circling our tents.  I thought I’d heard walking in the night but was too tired to wake up and look out.

Gratefully, it was a bright sunny morning and we woke up warm and dry.

We walked up the river and crossed it where it was wide and therefore shallowest.  It was cold, and flowing strongly but smoothly, with a smooth sand and rock bottom, so it was by no means a scary ford.

Contrary to all instructions about fording rivers (always leave your boots on)- and there are good reasons for those instructions – I crossed barefoot.  I spend most of my summers barefoot so my feet are hard and tough, and it was such a delight to be in sand and grass I couldn’t stand to be in my boots.

Then I stayed barefoot for a couple of hours, until we got into terrain full of scratchy bushes, and it was amazing.

Derek thought I was crazy.

Whole essays and poems could be written about the pleasure and reward of being barefoot, but I’ll restrain myself here.

After crossing, we backtracked on the sandy opposite bank of the river to skirt Klief, the fjord in our path, by climbing over the rocks at the sea’s edge.  This was very beautiful, with the black rocks and peach sand.  However, it would not be nearly so pleasant on a stormy day.  After nipping around the base of the fjord we were on another beach (Aðalvík), and we crossed the river at the bottom of that valley and walked up the other side.

We were navigating with a topo map of the area, that had suggested routes and advice marked on it.  Routes are different from paths.  There’s a general direction you’re advised to take, but there are no walking paths worn down by frequent foot traffic.

We walked steadily and sometimes at a fair distance from each other, peacefully walking in the sun.

Our overall route was over the next fjord to Buðanes.  There is another cliff edge route around the base of this fjord, but it is marked as impassable at high tide, which it was.  The map also noted that you’d better move quick even at low tide, or you’ll be seriously f#$%ed when it goes underwater again- I forget the exact wording.   The cliff-skirt route is considerably shorter, but we weren’t nearly on time for low tide.  So it was over the top for us.

On the way we stopped for lunch by a little foss in the middle of the bushy field of blueberries, everywhere.

We encountered some mystery poop, as well.  I can’t imagine what produced this.  It’s still a mystery. Foxes are tiny, and while polar bears are known to occasionally swim over from Greenland, and this scat was pretty huge, it didn’t seem grand enough for the world’s biggest bear, nor likely.  Could it be – a swan poop?

It was a long climb up.  Climbing, or walking, on a trail is a different world from climbing or walking through vegetation.

It wasn’t exactly bushwhacking- the bushes weren’t that tall, but constantly lifting your feet up and over, and the small muscles constantly working to balance your feet as you place them on uneven ground, is fatiguing over time.  It’s about the difference between walking on a sidewalk and climbing stairs.  With nothing in their way on a sidewalk, your feet just swing forward with almost no effort and you can go forever.  Just walking through the scrub was like climbing, and on top of that, we were climbing, and it was steep.

Happily, it was a fantastic day, clear and warm.  Still, we climbed high enough to need to put cozy shirts back on.   It was cold enough for some snow to survive the beating sun at the top.   The snow was unexpected (in August) and refreshing. It was spring snow, grainy and heavy.  We promptly made a small snowman.

Next there was another climb, over the next bump of desolation- the grey wasteland of plateau atop the fjord.  There was a fantastic view, grey and hazy, over ridges of fjords, with the ocean eventually on both sides.  It was a wild feeling to know that literally as far as we could see, there were no other people out there.

Leaving the plant zone and entering the rocky “tundra”(?) was a welcome change of terrain for our legs. We were vague on our exact location per the topo map in such a monochromatic, featureless field of rock, but we were headed down into the next valley between fjords.  We had to go east in order to go west, because there was a clearly impassable area where the topo lines were all squeezed together.  We had a discussion about steepness relative to how close topo lines appeared.  Rather than walking all the way to the east where the route map suggested, I wanted to cut a little bit closer where the topo lines were only “pretty” close together, not “very” close.

So we popped out at the top of this:

As soon as we could see over this, we could mark exactly where we were, and it cleared a few things up.  Topo lines “very” close together means a sheer vertical; topo lines “pretty” close together means very very steep.  Still impassable.

We kept going east at the top of this stone amphitheater, although not as far as the map suggested.  Where it seemed safe we started to zigzag down.  It was crumbly, grainy orange dirt and rock, and it was definitely still too steep for comfort.  We were fine, however, and we saw some interesting birds nesting in the scrub on the way down.

Back into the land of vegetation, here the bushes were very deep, and there were actual walking paths here and there that semed to be formed through the thickest stuff.  Everywhere there were billions of blueberries.  Literally.  All the bushes were heavy with the clumps of blue fruit, and our entire view was carpeted with the reddish green plants.  I could lean on the bank of the trail and stuff blueberries in my mouth for minutes without moving.

Down in the valley with still miles to go to the beach mouth, it was rough going, and wet; swampy.  At the bottom of the valley, there was a pond in a marshy flat that had swans in it.  Exhausted from the day’s hike, I hit the wall, dropped my pack, flopped over and declared we were camping right here.  Everything looked the same, anywhere was as good as anywhere else.

We walked packless to Buðanes for the sunset.  There is an abandoned settlement of houses and a church on the coast, all brightly painted and picturesque.

Some of the homes don’t seem so completely abandoned- locked up and accessorized with modern BBQs and yard appliances; perhaps they are maintained for vacation homes.  It was a beautiful stroll in the late evening light, on winding paths that crossed many streams, to the little vacant town and the beach.  We saw four seals lounging in the bay, and inspected another emergency hut.  Far across the water, we could see Látrar, where we had started from yesterday, and it seemed amazing we had walked so far in one day.

So we started the day on a beach, and finished it on one, at sea level with a monster climb in between.

I slept beside my tent, set up in case it rained.  It didn’t though, so I spent the night outside.  The swans and loons farther down in the bottom of the valley were making an energetic racket, almost loud enough to keep me awake.   Besides that, there was another kind of singing, a subtle, mesmerizing kind, that lasted all night, and in my sleep I knew it was the elves.

For more pictures of our 16th day in Iceland, click 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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