by Glen Chilton
From there we moved on to a geyser field. The biggest of the lot, named Geysir, was old and tired. Although it was a real whopper when it went off, it did so with diminished frequency, saving itself for the aftermath of earthquakes. Despite its geriatric predisposition, every geyser in the world is named after it. Its smaller brother, Strokkur, erupts on the scale of Old Faithful in Yosemite Park at twenty-five to thirty-five metres, which it does every two to ten minutes. I sat on a bench and watched it erupt several times. Robin took lots and lots of photographs.
Just beyond Pingvallavatn, Iceland’s largest inland sea, we found ourselves at Pingvellir National Park, which is particularly significant to geologists. According to a plaque, “The junction of the tectonic plates is more clearly visible here than anywhere else in the world.” I was expecting some sort of fire-and-brimstone setting, the kind of place where you might throw an enemy to send them to hell. Not that I was disappointed exactly, but this meeting of tectonic plates was a groove in the Earth, five or ten metres across and about the same depth, half-filled with cheerful blue water. Bouldery to be sure, but not hellish. We were told that the American and European plates move apart by two centimetres a year, meaning that GPS calculations have to be updated once per decade. Robin’s reaction to the whole thing was “That’s brilliant, that is!”
WHEN ROBIN HAD ASKED ME to set the itinerary for our trip, he explained that whatever looked good to me would be fine with him. And so I checked to see where we could get to on Air Iceland from Reykjavík. I read the description of each of the communities in a guidebook and chose two that were most likely to support lupines.
Most airlines have a great screaming infantile fit if even one passenger isn’t strapped into their seat forty minutes before the scheduled departure time. This does not apply to Air Iceland. Arriving at the regional airport in Reykjavík two hours before our flight, we were turned away from the check-in desk and asked to report back in ninety minutes. Five minutes before takeoff, we were summoned to the airplane. No metal detectors to walk through, no X-ray machines for the carry-on luggage, and the woman who checked our boarding passes saw no reason to ask for identification.
By coincidence, the Fokker 50 that had taken Lindsay and me around northern Ethiopia was the same model that took Robin and me to Heimaey on the Westman Islands off Iceland’s south coast. Same model but built in a very different era. Unlike the filled-to-the-brim planes in Ethiopia, there were only nine other passengers on the fifty-two-seater here. Robin had no trouble getting a window seat.
Heimaey is one of Iceland’s largest communities, even though it is home to only 5,000 people. Its airport is, in a word, cute. For the impatient traveller like me, it is possible to grab one’s luggage as it is lifted down from the hold. For those with more patience, a trolley with the luggage is driven straight into the departure lounge. Outside the terminal, the taxi rank sat empty, and no one stopped to give us a lift into town. It was time for a tramp.
Unfortunately, Robin was still wearing his camera around his neck, and as soon as he saw some interesting rocks, he stopped to compose a photograph. Twenty seconds later, he spied a rock with an interesting flower and stopped to compose a photograph. Fifteen seconds later, he spotted a mound he could stand on to compose a better photograph of the rock with the flower.
“Look, Robin, rather than standing around strapped to this very heavy backpack while you snap photos, shall we walk into town first?”
“Oops. Sorry. Yes … I, um, forgot about the backpack,” and although he didn’t put the camera away, he and his little suitcase on wheels did struggle to keep up.
We found our guesthouse and dropped our bags before setting off in search of adventure and food. I was distressed to find that Robin still had his camera around his neck and a pack full of camera accessories on his back. He went almost two minutes before pulling off the lens cap, but in the next ten minutes we didn’t move twenty-five metres. Or rather, I didn’t move twenty-five metres; Robin was fifty metres up a hillside.
Watching someone else take photographs is like watching them trim their fingernails while muttering about F-stops, shutter speeds, and depth of field.
“Robin, you need to get off the road.”
“What?”
“You are standing in the middle of the road, and you are about to get run down.” I snapped. “Robin, I’m going to leave you to it. How would it be if we met up in a couple of hours, say four o’clock? You have the key to the room.”
And then I marched off in a straight line to get some food.
I was well into an internal dialogue that featured Robin as a really poor choice of travelling companion. The dialogue changed to a consideration of Iceland as a poor choice of destinations. If this was, indeed, Iceland’s second biggest community, I had seen a good chunk of it in less than an hour, and there wasn’t a bloody lupine in sight. And when I found the so-called grocery store, it was about as well stocked as the top drawer of a nun’s bedside table and didn’t have a single carton of milk on the shelves. But after I stuffed back a banana, some yoghurt, and a bag of salty peanuts, the world started to seem a cheerier place. Robin wasn’t a buffoon; he was Robin, and it was as much his photo holiday as it was my lupine adventure. I felt like a jerk.
And Iceland started to look pretty good again. I spotted hillsides with patches of lupines and took the time to look at the soaring, volcano-created peaks around me. I watched children who had just started their summer holidays. Some were kicking footballs, some practising their hopeless golf swings, some splashing in the pool, and some roped up on a cliff face. I started to examine closely the whimsical houses that made up Heimaey. One looked like a cross between a Scottish petrol station and a Nevada brothel. Another was based on a Swiss chalet designed by a blind Cuban architect who didn’t know where Switzerland was.
I walked by the town’s facility for generating heat for its homes. A plaque out front explained that heating oil had fallen out of favour after a series of nasty fires. After a volcanic eruption in 1973, someone got the idea of using the lava’s heat to warm homes and started a pilot project on five houses and the hospital in 1978. Ten years later, the lava cooled down. Now the island is heated by electricity from the mainland, supplemented by heat from the community’s garbage incinerator.
I walked to the edge of the town’s lava flow, the result of the volcanic eruption. I watched the ferry as it docked. I strolled along the harbourfront and watched a cliff of nesting kittiwakes. When I met Robin, I offered up a bottle of red wine and a package of cookies, and asked him all about his photographic ramblings.
AFTER A BREAKFAST gleaned from a slightly better-stocked grocery store, we trundled off along the island’s west shore, heading south. We followed a line of lava cliffs—not the sort that anyone would make a grand suicide attempt from, but death would almost certainly result from a misstep. Rough and jagged black lava stripped the tread from my hiking boots.
In terms of birdlife and plant life, an important ecological principle was demonstrated here. Close to the equator, you find lots of diversity but low abundance. Here, closer to the pole, lives a lesser diversity of form but in tremendous abundance. White Wagtails skittered everywhere, and oystercatchers and redshanks scolded us unremittingly. Robin took lots of photos of the lava and offshore sea stacks, and spent not an insubstantial portion of my day trying to get just the right shot of fulmars soaring by the cliff edge. I lay on the grass while all this was going on, thinking pleasant thoughts.
We walked toward a series of tall wooden racks. They were obviously designed to dry something, but from a distance, we couldn’t imagine what. As we got closer we found, hanging from blue nylon ropes, many thousands of fish heads. Why in the world would anyone want to dry a fish head, let alone thousands of them? They certainly weren’t going to get any drier, so why hadn’t they been collected? Perhaps they make really good soup. The racks were close enough to town to be convenient, but far enough to keep down complaints about the smell.
Resources from the sea. The coinage of Iceland tells me that islanders recognize and appreciate their tie to marine food. A cod is found on the 1-krona coin. The 5-krona coin features a dolphin, with a capelin on the 10 krona, a shore crab on the 50 krona, and a lumpfish on the 100 krona.
At the south end of the island, like a big blob of quickly drying paint, is a piece of land hanging on by a narrow isthmus, no doubt the result of some long-extinct volcano. Robin followed the roadway to the peak, but I circled from the periphery. This grassy peak, named Stórhöfði, hosted a lot of sheep. With sheep comes sheep poop, and with that come flies. They didn’t bite, but had no end of fun getting up my nose. I was puzzled by the wealth of small burrows in the hillside. I saw no evidence of rabbits. Then it occurred to me that the holes were puffin nesting burrows. The ground beneath my feet must have been full of growing puffin chicks, and I kept to the trails to minimize the risk of collapsing a burrow.
Back in town, Robin and I walked to the lava field. The ground underfoot was tortured and twisted, but also remarkably fragile. Somehow I expected cooled lava to be as hard as steel, but it broke and crumbled rather easily. Wherever a little ash had settled to make the beginnings of soil, lupines had established themselves. And I suppose that this was the point, really. They had been introduced to Iceland to stabilize the soil where nothing else would grow.
We took the most gradual route I could find to Eldfell’s 200-metre peak. Beyond lupines, what vegetation did manage to get a foothold was very tiny. The stones underfoot were thumbnail-sized, and this made for a lot of backslip. It was a tough climb, but our efforts were rewarded with a stunning view. I have been up a lot of mountains, and the view from this one ranked highly. Grassy green hills and plains lay to the east and south. Lava fields to the northeast were sage-coloured from lichen and moss that bravely clung to the land. The town lay to the northwest. To the north across the channel were the peaks and glaciers of mainland Iceland, and all around was a whole lot of ocean stretching to infinity. The breeze blew from the east, and as it climbed the dark lava rubble, it warmed. Having been to the Westman Islands, I now have no need to travel to the Galapagos.
While we had been hiking, Heimaey had been invaded by a battalion of ten-year-old boys. It was something like Lord of the Flies, but on a much larger scale and with fewer spears. In a café, Robin and I were told that a three-day soccer tournament was about to begin, and that the island’s population had just swollen by 1,000 boys and their guardians. The café was filled with little people kicking toilet doors, trying to get their teammates to hurry up. Our server explained that the chef had “gone away to sea,” and that the items on offer were rather meager. Most of the beverages were gone too. The chef had probably run away at just the right time. We high-tailed it back to Reykjavík.
I wAS IN GREAT ANTICIPATION of the forty-minute flight from Reykjavík to Ísafjöður. It seemed a delightful opportunity to see the country from above, particularly since the skies were completely clear. Well, I can report that most of the interior of Iceland looks remarkably like the back of Robin’s head.
I tried to imagine the meeting between the Ísafjöður town council and Iceland’s Federal Aviation Authority when the application for an airport came up for discussion. “Now, let’s see if we understand you. You want to build the airport on the far side of the fiord from the town? Well, that’s up to you. Now, to get to the runway, planes will have to fly down a particularly narrow valley with their wings practically touching the cliff faces on both sides, right? And to lose altitude, in a couple of places the planes will come within six metres of the ground before diving over the next cliff, is that right? And then, at the very last minute, the plane will have to bank hard to starboard to have any chance of snagging the runway? And you think that passengers are going to go for this? You do realize that planes will be able to land only during daylight? So in the middle of winter, that will be about ten minutes each day. Well, good luck!”
And goodness knows there are a lot of valleys and fiords in this region. Boasting 35 percent of Iceland’s coastline but only 8 percent of its land mass, the northern fiordlands looked like the head of a dragon to early cartographers. To me, a map of the region looked like the head of a dragon puking up islands.
As we prepared to explore Ísafjöður, I prayed silently. “Please don’t let Robin bring his camera. Please don’t let Robin bring his camera.” There is no God.
Ísafjöður is beautiful in every meaningful way. Situated on a spit of land, it is surrounded by cliffs and water. The architecture is the perfect juxtaposition of warehouses and fish plants against brightly coloured single and multi-family dwellings. Not every building was slapdash, but there was an organic realness to the place.
The town’s tourist information office was situated beside a café. Robin got the first round of drinks in while I inquired about hikes. Then I noticed a poster for the Óshaíðarhlaupið. If I could trust my grasp of Icelandic—which I couldn’t—it seemed to imply that the town was going to host a half-marathon race two days hence. Checking with the endlessly friendly information staff confirmed my suspicions. A fellow showed me the point-to-point route on a map and offered to help me register for the race online. I asked his name. When his response finished rattling around in my brain, it came out sounding like a dirty word, so I thought of him as “Lars,” which probably isn’t even an Icelandic name. “You will be our only foreign runner. Prepare to be famous!” said Lars.
“Um, twenty-one kilometres is a long way…. I haven’t been doing a lot of training over the past few months….” A half-marathon was bound to leave me feeling pretty stiff. There were two other distances, but surely the four kilometres was for children and the ten kilometres was for sissies. If I ran twenty-one kilometres, it would give me the chance to see more of the coastline—roughly twenty-one kilometres more, I should think. Oh, what the heck?
While getting in a second round of drinks, I spoke to the barmaid, who didn’t seem the typical blond-eyed, blue-haired Icelandic type. She explained that she was from the Philippines and had been a professional singer. While on tour in China she had met an Icelandic gentleman and had moved to be with him. That was eight years earlier, and she had to admit that she was still struggling with the language.
ROBIN AND I SET OFF for a hike. We passed through Ísafjöður, aiming for the closed end of the fiord. Several well-tended gardens sported lupines; they weren’t the nasty purple variety that infested large chunks of Iceland, but pink, red, cream, and white forms. Just beyond town, on avalanche-prone hillsides, grew wild invasive lupines with their toxic purple horridness.
We arrived at a very tall waterfall in the Tunguskógur region. A very pretty cascade indeed, the water took its time passing down various ledges, but did so in a nearly straight line, making it easy for Robin to get it all in one photograph. On some slopes, coniferous trees had been planted. In most spots, they were doing rather poorly. The ravages of winter, or perhaps an insect pest, had turned most of their needles brown. By the waterfall, the trees were a little more proud of themselves, many having reached the lofty height of four or five metres. However, it was clear that the optimist who had ordered the planting of these trees wasn’t fully committed to native species. Picea sitchensis, Sitka spruce to me and Sitkagreni to an Icelander, had been introduced from Alaska in 1951. Russia had contributed Larix sibirica in 1951, Alaska had provided Pinus contorta in 1958, and Picea abies had made the leap from Norway in 1961. We took a gentle hike through a very short forest.
Back in town, I picked up my race package for the following day. To that point, Robin and I had been blessed with continuous good weather, but the moment I was handed the package the whole scene changed. Dark clouds blew in, the temperature fell, and it started to rain. It was as though the Nordic weather gods were going to punish me for having the impudence to register for a half-marathon without sufficient training.
At 12:45 p.m. the next day, a bus took a few dozen half-marathon runners up th
e fiord to the small fishing community of Bolungarvík. As we piled on, only one runner wasn’t equipped with clothing appropriate for the weather, and he was clearly a lot more frightened than the rest. As we drove, a race organizer stood up every few minutes to give instructions about the course. In Icelandic. I was sitting at the front of the bus, and he couldn’t see the terror in my eyes. “I am going to get lost and die of hypothermia,” I thought.
We tromped off the bus in Bolungarvík, voted Iceland’s most depressing community four times in the last six years. The digital readout on the postal building claimed that the temperature was 5°C. I didn’t need the postal service to tell me that the wind was howling, rain was falling, and I was bloody cold. I was instructed to drop my jacket in a van that would be waiting for us at the finish line, for those of us who lived that long.
“Are you from Canada?”
“What? Oh, right. Um, yes I am.” My country of origin was printed in large friendly letters on my shorts.
“Did you come here just for the race?”
“Honestly, until two days ago, I didn’t know that there was a race. I just saw a poster,” and part of me wished that I hadn’t. The clock thermometer indicated that the temperature had fallen to 4°C.
We were called to the starting line. A man on a phone was in contact with the official timekeeper at the finish line.
“þrír fundargerð!” he called out. The rain was turning to sleet.
“Tveir fundargerð!” Does that mean we are almost ready to go?
“Einn fundargerð!” Just don’t get blown into the fiord.
“þrír, tveir, einn, fara! Góða ferð!” This is it. I am definitely going to die.
We were off. Eight seconds passed, and a delightful thing happened—I became strangely and completely calm. Having run somewhere between 250 and 300 races, my brain and body had long since learned exactly what to do when the starter’s pistol went off. I relaxed.