Points on the map

Jump!

When I look at a map of Iceland it looks to me like a map of a fictional country, like the maps in The Lord of the Rings or other fantastical tales. The towns are small and seemed to be lost in the remote corners of the countryside, next to the dark andgrowling sea. Great volcanoes like Hekla and Snaefells control the land except for where the glaciers obliterate everything. The great Vatnajokull glacier with its tongues of ice covers are large portion of the south-east of the country, a vast expanse of white except where nunataks (mountain peaks) appear like desert islands.

It had been my ambition for many years to visit Iceland. I’ve always had a strong attraction to the north, and Iceland is quite a bit north. However with the exception of one tiny part is not actually within the Arctic. As I flew north from London to Reykjavik, darkness descended over northern England. But then a strange thing happened. It got lighter, as we descended through the cloud and the green moss-covered lava fields near the international airport at Reykjavik appeared it was almost light again. Indeed I don’t remember seeing total darkness until my return to London. While there is not 24 light, it never really gets dark, with a sort of endless twilight.

The trip to Iceland was arranged with Mike Gellerman and Isabelle Brilman, but Mike called had to change his plans at the last minute. The first night was spent at the youth hostel in Reykjavik. Iceland being an extremely expensive place, hotels were out of the question. A newspaper costs $3 and a can of coke costs $2.50. Even breakfast at the youth hostel costs $15. Instead we bought food at the supermarkets and cooked for ourselves. Mike had said prophetically that you don’t go to Iceland to eat. That statement hung over us during our travels around Iceland.
Icelandic cuisine is famous for its outrageous delicacies, putrid shark buried in sand and boiled sheep’s testicles. However the supermarkets were full of a wide array of yogurts and milk products. Mjolk is milk, while AB Mjolk is yogurt. Surmjolk is sour milk, and there are a lot more. Made from Icelandic milk of course.

Our journey was split into two parts. For the first week we would do a famous long-distance trek through the interior of Iceland; an uninhabited no-mans-land with no paved roads and no trees. In medieval times, if you committed a crime, you could be declared an ‘outlander’ and banished from Iceland. If you could survive 20 twenty years on the run, which meant hiding out in the vast wilderness, you would be pardoned. And there were people who survived, including one Grettir Asmundarson.
For the second week we rented a car and headed north-west to area known as the Westfjords, a defiant part of Iceland that spreads its fingers into the Greenland Sea.

A few things you should know about Iceland. It was first settled in the late 9th century by Vikings from Norway. The Icelandic language is as spoken by those settlers. It has not changed in 1100 years and Icelanders can read famous Sagas written in the 9th and 10th centuries as a easily as a modern book.
There are something like 230,000 Icelanders, half of them living in Reykjavik. That is something that only impresses on you when you start to travel around the country. There are very few settlements outside Reykjavik that could even call themselves a town, and most are mere villages. It is such a sparsely populated country that as you travel around it you keep expecting to find more people than you do. A town that proudely stands out on the map at the head of a deep fjord turns out to be a mere 500 souls living for some unknown reason on a patch of flat grassy land with only a dirt road and one ’shop’ that seems to sell everything and nothing.

Our walk took us from Landmannalaugar to Thorsmork, a 4-day trek over mountainous terain in the countrys interior. To get to Landmannalaugar we took us bus, one of the four wheel drive buses with huge tired and are raised up high. The tracks which pass for roads in the interior are only for specially-adapted vehicles, even normal four wheel drives would have a hard time. The rivers are not bridged meaning you have to drive through the river.

The Thorsmork is popular with Icelanders and foreigners alike, and rightly so. It is one of the world’s great walks. Four days that take you past bubbling hot springs, black lava fields, green grassy hillsides, and through surreal landscapes of black and green pointy mountains that made me quiver with thoughts of dragons and demons circling in the sky.
The day treks are about 15 kilometres and take about 5 or 6 hours, nothing too strenuous, and mountain huts are positioned at strategic positions along the trail.
All food and supplies have to be carried from start to finish, and as the rivers are not bridged, there are several places along the trail where the river has to be forded. The rivers are naturally cold and quick flowing. The proper way to ford a river is to hold hands with the person you are walking with and cross together, looking upstream so that the flow doesn’t bend your legs. That’s not the way we did it.
I would walk across first, and then turn back to watch Isabelle and snap a funny photo.

Fording the river

At the end of the walk, we travelled back to Reykjavik for a night in the big city before foresaking civilisation again. Our bus forded several rivers in the way back, not placid streams but rivers fed by glacial runoff, grey and fast flowing, and at times the water came up to the steps.

Highland landscape

We saw spent the evening in Reykjavik. Being the capital city, it’s vibrant and there’s plenty to do, but the population is only around 130,000 (more than half the national population) so in reality it’s a large town.
After picking up our rental car, Isabelle and I head north. Highway 1 forms a complete circuit of Iceland, but this was only completed in the 70s. You get a sense of what Iceland is about by driving on it. It’s a simple two-lane road, but there is no hard shoulder. As all surfaced roads in Iceland, the edges are marked by tall posts for when it snows. The road twists and turns and requires a high degree of concentration to drive on. Indeed in guidebooks and pamphlets for tourists you see instructions on how to drive in Iceland. This is because there are plenty of hazards that you don’t find in most countries. Sheep walking onto roads is an obvious one, but one of the most dangerous is where the tarmac road suddenly becomes dirt. You have to slow down before you hit the loose stuff or your car can easily loose traction. And it is surprising how quickly you come across dirt roads. Turning off Highway 1 towards a small youth hostel on the north Icelandic coast we had a 30 km drive along a single-track dirt road. As the sea came into view ahead a bank of cloud rolled over a high ridge to our left. Every few kilometres we would see a small house off in the distance. These small farms appeared totally isolated, and we couldn’t imagine how they survived. Iceland does in many ways seem to marginal. It was quite poor until relatively recently, and even with economic improvement many farms have been abandoned even by the hardy Icelanders.
At Osar we found the red-faced farmer who ran the hostel. The summer season is very short in Iceland, running for most of July and August, and country people seem to appreciate the extra cash they can make from providing accommdation to the tourists who come here.
A very cosy pine cabin had been built newly this year, and there were English, Spanish, and American tourists staying there. A ten-minute walk away was the star attraction, the seal colony. A sand bank provided a kind of rest and relaxation area for the seals. Adults and their young lay contentedly on the sand, looking at us over the narrow expanse of water that seperated us. Sometimes they would curl their bodies, resembling some kind of yoga.
As the tide came in the seals would wait until the water had surrounded them before heading off into the sea to look for a fish dinner.

Even as Iceland looks quite small on a map of the world, it is a varied country and travel times make it feel very large. We chose to spend the next week in the Westfjords area, which points out into the sea towards Greenland. Whereas the centre of Iceland is ‘newer’ rock, flows of lava and sulphurous vapours, the Westfjords are much older, and have been sculpted by glaciers and the weather.
We headed first to Nordufjordur, tiny settlement at the end of the road that my guide quite simply described as one of the last places in Iceland.
The weather was overcast and rainy as reached the settlement, after a white-knuckle (very scarey) drive over mountains and along a narrow gravel road beside the sea. A small house offered ’sleeping bag accommodation’, very common in Iceland, generally a house that is well-appointed with hot showers and a kitchen. I camped but Isabelle has the house to herself for the first night. The warden was a widow who only spoke Icelandic, a rarity. Incredibly she took credit cards, producing a small manual credit card machine from an old shopping bag when Isabelle asked. It seems that everyone here takes credit cards, most people looking surprised and answering ‘of course’ when we asked them.
Over the next few days we walked some windy walks, and I bathed in a geothermally heated pool right next to the frigid and menacing sea.

From Nordufjordur we headed to Isafjordur, the commercial hub of the Westfjords. We were nearly tempted by the Thai restaurant mentioned in our guidebook, but but by this time had become used to the routine of buying yogurt and the odd fruit and vegetable, and cooking for ourselves. At our next stop, the fantastically situated Korpudalur youth hostel, we grilled marinated lamb steaks outside. The hostel is situated in a wide valley with scree-covered peaks rising in every direction. The sun shone through small holes in the cloud cover and lit up small sections of the mountains. The tops of the mountains had been heavily eroded, making serrated ridges.
The next day the weather improved, and we walked to the end of the one of the peninsulas to discover a bucolic valley with a tiny chapel. We tramped through ankle-high grass and moss, jumping over small gurgling streams, their banks covered in flowers. It was perfect; there were no buzzing insects that you can find in other northern countries, and no signs of man except for the chapel (which was locked).

Continuing on in our anti-clockwise (counter-clockwise) direction, we arrived the next day at the braoad sandy beach of Breidavik, near Latrabjarg. The Latrabjarg cliffs have the largest bird colony in Iceland, being home to thousands of puffins, guillemots, and other sea birds. It’s the puffin that every comes to see, of course.
The little birds are undeniably cute and (perhaps) cuddly, but it’s the way they look at you then jump off the cliff, soaring far out to see that endears them to visitors. They fly back, and make a spectacular landing as they skid to a halt.
The Icelanders eat them, of course, as they eat everything else that lives on or near the island with a few exceptions. Years past the local farmers would rappel down the cliffside to collect the birds’ eggs, or trap the birds themselves.

The tiny island of Flatey was our last stop before heading back to Reykjavik. The island lies in the middle of Breidafjordur, a large fjord which seperates the Westfjords from the Snaefellsnes peninsula. The island is less than 2 kilometres long, and has a permanent population of 4, although it increases in summer as some Reykjavik families own summer houses there. Even though cars can not be unloaded from the ferry, it wasn’t a problem. We got off and left the car keys with the ferry captain. They took the car off in the next port, Stykkisholmur, and held the keys on the ferry for us.
We trudged along the only road on Flatey, naturally a dirt track. The first house we saw had a sign advertising accommodation. Linna came out and greeted us in stilted English. There was no way you could hurry Linna, she moved slowly and talked slowly, and if you tried to change the subject or move to leave she would just carry on at her own pace. Hurrying was unknown to her perhaps, and who could blame her, living on an island with 3 other people and not a lot to do.
I left Isabelle and Linna discussing the price of the accommodation something like this: ‘How much is it?’
‘3000 or 4000 Krona, which do you prefer?’ Isabelle looked puzzled, ‘3000′. ‘Well, let’s see, we’ll talk about money later…’
We found the only cafe on the island, and had waffles and hot chocolate which took nearly 45 minutes to make, and was brought to our table by an angelic young lady with blue eyes and long blond hair, who I made the mistake of saying ‘merci’ to such was my confusion. I then corrected myself by saying ‘takk fyrir’ - thank you very much in Icelandic. As we tried to pay next morning and waited for the ferry, Linna told us they raised Eider ducks for their down (feathers), but we only saw about 10. Several times we asked to pay and motioned to leave but Linna, now joined by her husband with his long white beard and weathered face, ignored this and brought out her photo album. pictures of her grand-daughter being confirmed at the church.

If you ask what makes a place like Flatey special I can’t really tell you. In reality it’s a tiny piece of flat rock stuck out in the middle of the sea covered with some grass and a few houses. Isolation is probably the best quality, and getting on the ferry here certainly makes the other ferry passengers stare at you. Their eyes are saying ‘you stayed on that island?’
It is amazing to learn that 120 people used to live on Flatey. Don’t ask me what they did there, something like fishing perhaps but Linna tells us that the locals still hunt seals and puffins, which they are not allowed to sell, nor are they allowed to sell fish. But that’s the story all over Iceland, small communities of people who seem to be living in these incredible locations for the sheer hell of it. Of course nowadays you can live anywhere if you have money, but these people subsisted in these places with no outside help, and that’s very different.
They didn’t have deliveries of Swiss chocolate, beer, ice cream, dental floss and washing detergent.
Of course the Icelanders lived nowhere for the hell of it, but for some reason that I can only guess at. Iceland was settled back in the late 9th century by Vikings looking for new land as their homeland of Norway could no longer support them all. One lone Viking named Floki came and tried to settle, but all his cattle died in the first winter, and upon climbing a nearby mountain to look for new pastures he saw only icebergs in the neighbouring fjord. Disheartened he called the place Iceland and went home to Norway. Settled in time, Leif Eriksson, son of Erik the Red, sailed from Iceland and found Greenland. Trying to promote the new land to his friends at home he called it Greenland. Of course Iceland is green and Greenland is full of ice, but there you go.

I am off to Armenia in two weeks…