1 A Brit in Iceland
The Story of a Summer in Iceland
June to August 2003
Dr Graeme Davis
Preface
This is a series of impressions of Iceland drawn from a ten week visit to Iceland in the summer of 2003 (and also a little time in the Faroe Islands, Shetland, and onboard boats on the North Atlantic). As all travel books, it is written in the conviction that the visitor knows something more about the places described that those who live there. What follows is Iceland through British eyes.
The British Academy are responsible for this book, though they don't know it. It is the British Academy who sent me, a lecturer at Britain's Northumbria University, to the University of Iceland, to write a book - though not this one. The book they wanted written and which was written is A Comparative Syntax of Old English and Old Icelandic (published Peter Lang, 2004). You don't want to read that one. But you do want to read this book.
Sane folk fly to Iceland. It's not all that far by air, whether from Britain, or from anywhere in Europe, or from North America. Icelandair have a good network, plus connections with SAS and some other major operators, and there is now a budget airline, Iceland Express, flying from London and Copenhagen. It is easy to fly to Iceland. So I took my car on the ferry. And the car proves to be the star of much of this account, and the car journey Britain to Iceland a fascinating experience of the never to be repeated variety.
By plane the trip Britain to Reykjavik takes less than three hours. By car the trip from Britain to Reykjavik takes about five days, including three nights on ferries and a mighty long drive across Iceland. The vehicle that braved 10 weeks of the worst roads in Europe is a 1997 Mercedes Benz C180 - a polar white one, which seems appropriate. This car proved to be indestructible.
My thanks to Mercedes for making their cars Iceland-proof. My thanks to my summer visitors from Britain to Iceland, who in various ways have contributed to this account. My thanks to many Icelanders, who may well be horrified at their contribution herein. This is Iceland as a Brit sees it. Enjoy!
Chapter One - Iceland Bound
Journey Outline:
NORTHUMBERLAND (my home) TO ABERDEEN, 246 miles, 5 hours driving - a comfortable little run.
ABERDEEN TO SHETLAND, 211 miles, 12 hours on the boat. This is an overnight voyage by NorthLink Ferries from Aberdeen to the Shetlands' main town of Lerwick (but pick your day - sometimes it is 13 hours and via Orkney!)
SHETLAND TO SEYDISFJORDUR, 580 miles, 31 hours on the boat. This is two consecutive overnights on Smyril Line's ship the Norrona. Don't miss the boat - there's just one a week (and that high summer only), and this is the only ferry from anywhere, absolutely anywhere, to Iceland. That's right, Iceland is served by one ferry a week, summer only.
SUDERLEID ROUTE SEYDISFJORDUR TO REYKJAVIK, 488 miles.
Seydisfjordur is easy to find on a map. Find Reykjavik. Then find the part of Iceland that is furthest from Reykjavik. You've got it? That's Seydisfjordur, pretty much as far east as Iceland goes. Which means a monster drive from Seydisfjordur to Reykjavik. There is a choice of roads - the south road or the north road - both much the same length. I took the south road - suderleid - with an overnight in Hofn:
Seydisfjordur to Hofn via East Fjords 322 km, 201 miles, 6 hours.
Then Hofn to Reykjavik 459 km, 287 miles, 8 hours.
TOTAL DISTANCE NORTHUMBERLAND TO REYKJAVIK 1525 MILES. Five days. Four nights.
The most exciting story of the outbound trip was the one that I slept through!
On boarding the ferry at Aberdeen I was handed a written severe weather warning. Basically this meant that a storm was expected, and in the event of delay, diversion to another port, damage to car or other property, or just about any other eventuality, NorthLink were not liable - passengers were invited to reconsider whether they wanted to travel. I rather gathered that I would be paying the funeral expenses. So now should follow a story of a freak typhoon in the North Sea, hurricane winds, tidal waves and the like. But in fact I went to my cabin and didn't wake up until Lerwick harbour next morning, and if there was a storm I slept through.
Then followed a 20 hour day in Shetland - from 6am to 2am. Spend a few moments thinking about this and let the true implication sink in. And add rain. Imagine 20 hours of non-stop, torrential rain in a region of Britain where just about everything is closed before 10am and after 4pm (and don't forget the extra couple of hours closed for lunch). There you have it - the true Shetland-in-the-rain experience for the through-traveller to Iceland - the only people in Shetland who don't have some form of accommodation where they can shelter from the elements..
So I went to Sumburgh Head in the pouring rain to see the birds, and had the cliffs to myself. It's funny, most folk won't watch birds in a deluge. This is an excellent bird-watching spot, even when torrential rain reduces visibility, and the puffins and guillemots and kittewakes and lots of others can be seen from a range of just a few feet. Notices in Sumburgh Head announce that it is a whale-watching spot, but unless the whales practically came ashore I had no chance of seeing any. Though it was as wet ashore as in the sea, so perhaps anything was possible. Then Jarlshof archaeological site in the pouring rain, and surprise, I had the site all to myself, followed by Shetland Crofthouse Museum in even more rain - there were a few other drowned souls sheltering here. The afternoon got wetter - an exhibition of Shetland Paintings by Ruth Brownlee in Lerwick was pleasant and dry, and there is some good material on Shetland matters in Shetlands Library. For example the Lord's Prayer in Shetland Norn caught my eye:
Fyvor or er i Chimeri. Halaght vara nam dit.
La Konungdum din cumma. La vill din vera guerde
i vrildin sindaeri chimeri.
Gav vus dagh u dagloght brau. Forgive sindorwara
sin vi forgiva gem ao sinda gainst wus.
Lia wus ike o vera tempa, but delivra wus fro adlu idlu.
For do i ir Kongungdum, u puri, u glori, Amen
The Shetland experience continued with an exploration of Shetland night life (which took about five minutes, because I was taking my time), and a heroic effort to make an Italian restaurant meal last more than two hours. Then hours of sitting in my car with the engine running to power the heater, sometimes with te wipers on and sometimes with them off. Rain, rain, and more rain.
This story could well have ended in Shetland. Lerwick is a frontier for the Uniter Kingdom just twice a week when the ferry Norrona passes through, heading for the Faroes and Iceland one way, and Bergen the other. There aren't proper customs buildings here, but security at Lerwick was nonetheless thorough - that's once customs opened at 1am, an hour late. I was stopped at the barrier, which is under a garage-style awning, which means that the rain might not actually fall on your head but it blows in from the side, and the ground becomes a river. They wanted the boot open. And they were greatly puzzled by a new, yellow bucket in the boot (bought for œ1.99 with the intention of using it to clean the car on the kerbside in Reykjavik). So they searched the boot, which meant getting everything out in the wet. Then they searched under the the bonnet. But here they hit a problem, for under the bonnet they couldn't see a thing - Mercedes do rather pack the engine into the space so there are no gaps left for anyone to look through. So first they crawled underneath the car, then they decided to take the screen-wash bottle out. Just in case you are wondering, its not designed to come out, and certainly not with five litres of screenwash in it, but out it came. I gather from the expletives that it was both heavy and awkward. Taking it out didn't really give them a much better view, but they decided that they had had enough. Then they frisked me, thoroughly.
With my luggage somewhat damp and back in the boot - and what wouldn't fit back in the boot on the back seat - they decided I could go. And then the car wouldn't start. When they had asked me to get out I'd left the key in the ignition, while the car's security system requires that the key is taken out whenever the car is being serviced, or indeed having its windscreen washer bottle taken out. As a result the car was well and truly immobilised by its own security system. It just wouldn't start. I was getting as far as wondering what the AA call-out response time would be like at 2am, and whether they could do anything, and whether this situation could get any worse, when the car's security alarm went off - and wouldn't stop.
Finally on the umpteenth cycle through the locking system I got the alarm off and the car started. The moral is simple. If anyone is planning to carry out the next great train robbery, I advise don't try to leave Britain via Shetland. Try somewhere quiet like Heathrow or Dover.
Boarding was about 3am, an hour late, because of British customs delays. The Smyril Line ship Norrona looked like the Starship Enterprise towering above the quayside - all bright lights and with a shape that has to owe as much to design as function. My home for the next 31 hours.
Passengers were mostly Germans and Danes travelling on the first leg of the north North Sea route back to the continent (change at Torshavn in the Faroes for Hantsholm in Denmark). Going on all the way to Iceland the passengers were mainly Danes, with a few Germans and Norwegians, one French family, one group I decided after much eavesdropping on their language were Hungarian, and as far as I could make out not a single Brit other than me. Nor an Icelander.
Smyril Line's Norrona is a luxury ship, every bit as glamorous as the pictures in the Smyril Line brochure and on the web-site. And then there are the couchettes. The British Academy funded my trip, but their support certainly doesn't run to a single person cabin - indeed the return trip in a single-person cabin would demolish about a third of my ten-week's allowance. For non-wealthy travellers there are couchettes. These are in groups of nine, with three racks of three high bunks in each miniature cabin, and if approached with a sense of humour are fine. They are a nice example of what you need to be prepared to accept to make a trip like this work. If I waited until first class travel was possible for me I'ld be waiting for a long time! So I was in the couchettes, and approached with humour and a willingness to accept over-crowding, sauna-like temperatures, lots of noise and a location below the water-line they were just fine.
First glimpse of Iceland was the Fjord of Seydisfjordur, spectacular with its cliffs cloud-topped and a glimpse of snow on the hills when the clouds lifted. Then Icelandic customs. All drivers reading this, please now pick up a pen and a scrap of paper. Write down please the unladen weight of your car. That's right, what does it weigh? - and in kilograms please. This information is required when bringing a car into Iceland. Don't ask me why. It is. It's on the form. (NB the Mercedes C180 weighs 1350 kgs - and it took 20 minutes of frantic searching through the car manual to find this out.)
This quiz question aside Icelandic customs were fine, my windscreen washer bottle remained fixed under the bonnet, and the process was complete in about two hours. Then the six hour run to Hofn, one of varied spectacle. I'm not even going to attempt to describe it - this one you've got to do!
An unforgettable feature of the first day in Iceland was the worst roads I've ever seen. I've seen bad roads in Turkey, China and Egypt, but there very much off the beaten track, and anyway not this bad. This is Iceland's road number 1, the ring-road, and it might be expected to be good. And there are stretches of good road. But also miles and miles of truly dismal rutted track, some really nasty gradients, bends, blind summits and a long list of motoring challenges. Plus a section of very wet and very muddy road, complete with a deeply mired car that hadn't made it through, and with a tractor in the proces of pulling them out, so I went round through even deeper mud, and there's now mud on every part of my car. Mud in every crease a seam, and my polar white car has turned brown.
Arrival at Hofn needed a sense of humour which I was probably lacking - my excuse is that all the humour had been expended on the Norrona's couchettes. My hotel had double booked. What else is there to say? There wasn't a bed for me. They didn't have the bed they had sold, and they weren't going to boot someone else out. I suggested the manager could sleep on a couch for the night, but he seemed to think this was some strange English joke. Which it wasn't. It took a while for me to hunt round Hofn and find a bed as the town was pretty much full, and I ended up right by the harbour in the Hotel Asgard, a tidy hotel in a nice location. Now Asgard is the Norse paradise, so I guess this is the Nordic equivalent of the Mediterranean's Hotel Paradiso. After three days on boats and a long drive it certainly felt like heaven.
The only problem with Hofn is pronouncing its name. It is pretty much the sound of a hiccup. One of the many good things about Hofn is that it is open in the evening. The contrast with Lerwick is striking. On a wet Monday evening in Lerwick I really didn't know what to do with myself. In Hofn there was plenty to do. For starters the restaurant I found (one of the two in the town) served deep fried fish with strawberries and chips. This is the gastronomic find of the century - deep fried fish and fresh strawberries really does work together - and every British chip shop should be selling it. The restaurant was the sort of place where lingering was possible. The shops in Hofn are open until 9pm, and the museum until 10pm. For that matter I noticed that sports centre, swimming pool, church and social club were all open. There were people about.
The museum is on glaciers, focusing on nearby Vatnajokul and its prize exhibit is the world's first snow-cat, built in 1972. Before snow-cats travel on glaciers was scarcely possible. There are tales in the Viking Sagas of people crossing glaciers, and in more recent times there was a custom of crossing a few hundred yards of a tongue of Vatnajokul to avoid the crossing of the Jokul River. But the first recorded crossing of Vatnajokul dates from the early years of the twentieth century. As the museum tells the story, it was three likely-lads from Hofn who made the trip. It seems they decided that they wanted to do something that would make them famous, and with minimal equipment and little fuss set out from Hofn to cross Vatnajokul. They made it in four days right across to the dales north of the glacier, getting their place in history - a truly remarkable tale of grit and courage. And then, finding themselves without horses to ride around the glacier and without enough food for the ten-day over-land trek back home, they decided to cross the glacier again. So they were not only the first people to cross a glacier in modern times, but the first people to cross a glacier twice. It's like Francis Chichester sailing single handed around the world, then deciding he's got a few iron rations left on board so he might as well go round again.
The road west from Hofn is a good one - which means a road with a surface all the way - and in parts of excellent quality. But the sites are too good to simply keep driving. For example there is Jokulsarlon - Glacier Lake - the lake between a tongue of Vatnajokul and the sea, and it is choc-a-bloc full with icebergs, and chunks of ice of all sizes.The smaller ones wash ashore showing weird and wonderful shapes. In the morning light the ice was bright blue, and the water, and the sky all blue - the blues were amazing. Pictures of the arctic and antarctic show a lot of white, but travellers talk of the blues. Here there was a lot of ice, and from some angles it was white, but the blues made the strongest impresion. I spent an hour or so on the lake-side, picking up some of the smaller lumps of ice, until hypothermia threatened and I decided it was time to move on. Maybe this chill is why it is called Iceland.