Iceland Day 6 - 7

Steve’s, ‘cheese doesn’t go off’ policy backfired this morning as he held up a squidgy lump of orange goo from the inside of his tent. It was probably going to have been his lunch, and he ended up having to buy a fish sandwich later on… big mistake.

Today’s trip: ‘South Shore Adventure’ with Reykjavik Excursions again.
Cost: 10,600 Kr = £77
Duration: 9:00 to 18:30

Another sunny day, and another quick delivery to the BSI. We boarded a nearly full 22 seat coach and stormed off through the city again on the same route we took yesterday. The guide talked about everything from who built Reykjavik’s domestic airport (the British army) to the gloomy(ish) economic situation in the country. I actually have most of it written down, as to avoid falling asleep on the bus – which I will do on anything that moves – I listened to everything he said. Luckily for you, I’m not going to pass it on.

The first stop was the giant waterfall of Skógarfoss, placed conveniently right by the ring road. This 62m monster flies off a cliff face that turns and then runs parallel with its resulting river right out to sea. The sea has been within sight for most of this trip since getting out of the capital, and it is supremely visible from the top of the fall. I got to within 20m of the bottom before the spray got too much for my non-waterproof trousers, and then decided to see what was at the top. Railings and a stepped path lead you right to the highest point, and there are well worn paths leading off it that are great picture taking spots. Looking out over a waterfall, an ancient seabed and the sea itself is quite a sight, and the 20 minutes of the stop wasn’t really enough to spend for that 3 minutes at the top. That was probably why one Canadian couple were about 10 minutes late back to the bus and got a severe telling off by the guide. I did sympathise with them, especially when we were told that the neighbouring museum was our next stop - for an hour and a half. You could hear Steve groan.

The Skógarfoss museum was well put together, and the slightly… actually, very, camp German guide did know what he was talking about, but it was still just a few large rooms full of old things. Had the things been Viking artefacts it might have been more interesting, but as it was full of 18th and 19th century rubbish it wasn’t. Then we got a tour around some restored houses by the 87 year old founder of the museum. We ended up in the very small chapel where he played the piano and tried to get us all to sing hymns. Steve, me, and the other people under 50 mostly kept straight faces. I should say that the museum is brilliant for people who like museums.

The communication and transport museum behind the boring one was at least interesting to Steve, who found at least eleven different types of Landrover in it before we finally left and headed for the village of Vik.

On the way we drove through the rolling green valleys where Icelanders like to put their holiday homes. They mostly look like North American hunting lodges, and are never less than three hundred metres from each other – Icelanders like their privacy. We also saw never-ending fields of a purple bracken like plant that turned out to be the Alaskan Lupine. Apparently this is being planted everywhere because it’s hardier than other native plants and collects fertile soil that can later be used to plant trees. Planting trees is something Icelanders like doing, as trees don’t tend to survive well under suffocating layers of volcanic ash and lava.

During the drive around the ring road to Vik, the geography of Iceland’s south coast became clear. If you spread out one hand and draw a line from finger tip to finger tip, you will have a map. The drawn line is the ring road and the coastline it usually follows. Your fingers are the mountains and cliffs that dart out towards the sea in huge high formations, and the space in between them is where farms are situated in fertile grassy fields. Your hand itself is the mass of immense mountains and glaciers that form the backdrop of every eyeful of Iceland you get.

These glaciers used to be much bigger during the middle of the current ice age, and made the island sit lower in the water like a heavily laden ship. When the ice got tired of waiting around in the cold, it retreated inland and carved out Iceland’s unique geology. Along with thousands of lava flows and blankets of ash, that is.

Which brings us to Vik. Without the retreating ice, the 300 inhabitants of this ‘town’ would be living in shark hunting grounds. And they wouldn’t have black beaches. Black, sandy beaches. You can see the first Viking explorers going home to talk of these beaches, and being laughed away and accused of being retards. Unless of course, you can find black beaches in Scandinavia, in which case I’m the retard. These beaches should be visited once in a lifetime, and that’s all that I need to say.

Although, one French woman came here to see them once before she died, and ended up dying much sooner than she’d probably expected. Apart from the temperature of the water (you get under 4 minutes) there are freak waves along these shores. Last year, the French woman and 2 blokes were walking along the waterline when a wave reared up and swept her away. Had her companions tried to go in after her, the death count would have been more than 1 on that tragic day. Do not swim in the water. Unless the weather is clear, do not go down to the water’s edge. If the wind is strong, just don’t. I sound like a Dr Who episode there. Watch the waves, never take your eyes off them. There’s a good reason why Iceland looses more fisherman than anyone else. Right, got all that? Visit, but don’t die.

Of course, we went down to the water’s edge and stood in it. I should say it was a clear, bright day with only a token wind and we did keep an eye out for mini tsunamis.

After watching Steve try to jump a glacier stream that snaked down the beach into the sea (I say try, he did make it… well most of him did) we left for the return journey and a few more stops.

We turned off the highway and bumped up and down along a rough track in the bus, fording a few streams as we went. It made me fall asleep, and people must have thought I was either a narcoleptic or really off my head on something. Screeching to a halt in a cloud of black dust and flying gravel, we arrived at the Solheimajokull (Sol-highm-ya-koll) glacier. The name translates into, ‘Glacier in the fen valley’. For anyone who doesn’t know what a glacier is, it’s basically a humungous lump of ice with bits of rock in it. In all its glory, this glacier is easily accessible to even normal road cars (don’t bother with a fully load 1 litre car though, you won’t get up one hill on the way back). However, in all its glory in 1993, the glacier was 200m closer to the car park. Don’t blame global warming for this though, it’s been retreating for thousands of years. It is visibly melting, and you can walk right up to it and onto it – if you’re not scared of crevasses that is. It’s not often that you can see the very landscape changing before your eyes, but here you can see the ice dripping into streams below Solheimajokull as it grinds a path behind it. However, it isn’t that big, sitting inside the rocky valley, and Iceland has some much bigger glaciers, so I won’t bore you with this one.

After this short stop, we carried on to our last stop of the day at the Seljalandsfoss waterfall. I’m not even going to try to write how to pronounce that tongue-twister. It is over 60m high, and boasts one feature that makes it different from your stereotypical run-of-the-mill waterfall. You can go behind it. This brings in the crowds. Of course, here ‘crowds’ means ‘more than one tour bus’. A path leads up and behind the fall into a small hollow area behind it, were some idiots can go right down to the very edge of the pool of icy water and get drenched by the freezing glacial water. There’s probably one idiot per bus who goes and stands where the water laps at their feet, and as no one else looked willing to do it, I jumped down onto the shingle bank and immediately got a face full of hail-like spray smashed into the instantly raw skin of my face. Standing a couple of feet from the bottom of a waterfall, I was quite grateful for my raincoat, which I suddenly realised had never in fact been wet before. It was very wet now. It was like standing in the shower in your raincoat, looking straight up at the showerhead, and blasting the water down on its most powerful and coldest setting. I had to gasp for breath such was the ferocity of the wind and spray, and actually had to turn around to gulp down some air. Watching sheets of water cascade off the cliff above down into the pool around me, I felt like a police riot cannon was trained on me, and then realised how wet my legs were. I was not wearing my waterproof trousers. Struggling to get my camera out, I was thankful that the RNLI use it and therefore that it must be 100% waterproof – and luckily it was. A few rubbish snaps later and I thought I should leave before the fourth layer of skin on my face was blasted off along with the three that were already gone. I could feel the backs of my legs dripping with sub-zero drops of water, and knew that the impending two hour bus journey wasn’t going to be great fun. So I climbed clumsily back up the slope, not regretting a thing. Until Steve saw me and started laughing, anyway. I should say that he came down for a brief look too, but wasn’t stupid enough to stay for as long as I did. As we walked away from the fall, I realised just how drenched I actually was – the stares of everyone I passed sort of gave it away. The raincoat had worked perfectly, and I can’t think of a better test for something that claims to be waterproof. As my trousers made no such claim, I wasn’t surprised to find them now being 50% water. I squelched back to the coach almost dreading a very damp journey and the prospect of getting trench-leg. Not to mention the cold I caught 2 days ago, which I’d nearly got over. Such a wimp. I left wet footprints behind as I boarded the bus, and couldn’t help smiling at the gormless tourists sitting obediently on their little chairs as I covered them in water while sitting down. I knew I should really take of trousers this wet, but as that sort of thing would probably get you arrested even in Iceland, I had to settle for rolling them up to the knees. This at least stopped half of my legs from losing all their heat. I also tried to keep my legs moving, which worked quite well up to about fifteen minutes into the drive, when I fell asleep.

Day 7

Tour: Mount Hekla Landrover Tour (http://www.superjeep.is/) (Watch the video on it. That was our driver, Ragnar.)
Cost: 22 000 Kr – now advertised at 23 000 = £170
Duration: 09:00 – 18:00

We stood waiting for a either a coach or some sort of 4x4 to pick us up outside of the Youth Hostel, when a beast of a white Landrover swung into view. It flew past us and crashed up over the curb and into what is probably the hostel’s front garden. A few people were looking at it with bewilderment, and it was quite an entrance. It was a 7 seater, with a Dutch couple and a German woman and her daughter already in it. Saying that it was more comfortable and smoother than Steve’s Landrover would be a small understatement. We cruised out along Route 1, the ring road, that we’d been on the last two days, and then took a minor but still paved road into the interior. After a while, the driver/guide spun the wheel around and we shot off the road at 90 degrees at around 50 miles an hour onto a dusty black ash layer. This was probably a proper road, but it got the 3 females in the vehicle screaming like, well like girls. As we raced along this uneven terrain there were plenty of bumps and jolts (and gasps and yelps), but so far Steve and me were unfazed.

We stopped at the double waterfall of Hjálparfoss I Þjórsárdal. It looks like two rivers hit each other at a 90 degree angle, and just happen to do it over a cliff to form a very unusual waterfall.

Back on the road, the Landrover sped up some manmade steepish piles of dirt to make us feel like we were doing serious off-roading, which was amusing. Another relaxed stop at the winding river valley of Þjórsárdalur was another highlight. We were driving along what looked like a barren, unending desert, when the driver screeches to a halt at the edge of a cliff edge that hadn’t been visible only seconds before to reveal a sprawling valley cut down into the ground. The river flowing through it is the Þjórsa, and Þjórsárdalur is its kingdom. You would never be lucky enough to stumble across this kind of thing in Iceland without a guide, and it made paying the £170 feel slightly less painful (although at this point, we hadn’t bothered to work out the cost in pounds). The Germans had been on the same tour a couple of years ago in the pouring rain, and kept mentioning how much better everything looked when it was baked in the sun.

We then drove past Iceland’s power plants, all buried nearly entirely underground as not to ruin the scenery, and we saw the massive rivers and canals whose flow they control. They were clearing some of the bore holes used to generate power as we drove past, by chucking water down them. This makes the ground shake, and every now and again a giant splash of water comes flying out of them – some of the bore holes are 5km deep. We reached 50 mph through this area, on earth where you’d have to stick to about 15 in a normal little car. We were far out of civilization now, and into lava fields and endless layers of ash from Hekla’s eruptions. The common black ash was in places covered with a lighter ash that can also float on water, and this created patches of yellow alongside the track. In the wide expanse of the ashen plain, we could see 3 of Iceland’s large glaciers along with the domineering Mt. Hekla – perhaps a 10th of Iceland could be seen stretching off into the distance. That’s a lot of ash and lava. As with much of the rest of the country, the Alaskan Lupine has been planted everywhere here to add some colour and to try to introduce some bigger pants. Lemon grass is planted in strips 50m from each other by aeroplanes, for the same reason, although it looks like it’s taking over in some parts. Over the last 8 years, these tufts of grass have held enough soil in place to allow a few small rows of trees to be planted, so I suppose it is working. Although the next eruption will probably kill the lot, and the next eruption is very due.

We then entered the more mountainous areas and drove between towering cliffs and low valleys and craters. The flat land here is not grassy at all, as the ash kills it, but the ash is blown quickly off the hills, and so many of these are covered in grass. The result is a sort of opposite world where the ground and mountains are coloured in the wrong way around. Some of them are also yellow, some are red and others are green, but because of rocks and not grass. Incidentally, this is Europe’s biggest desert. It looks like one too, barren and deserted, but still hauntingly fascinating as glaciers on 3 sides slip in and out of view behind soaring peaks. Lava fields are not flat areas of shiny black hardened lava, but millions of man sized contorted shapes of boulder-like lava which look like grotesque sculptures. Their twisting, lumpy forms stretch off into the horizon, although each field was born during a separate eruption, each of which is known and recorded. Driving through this apocalyptic landscape is an unforgettable experience, but you’ll see so much you’re bound to forget something. It doesn’t help when you fall asleep, if you somehow manage it during vaguely bumpy off-road driving. I hit my head on almost every part of the Landrover, which at least woke me up. Taking plenty of pictures at the many photo stops is a good way of making sure you don’t forget too much, although you’ll need a good camera to get the scale of it all.

As I write this I just ate a pot of coffee flavoured skyr gannet style, and if you like coffee and yoghurt you’ll love it. Flavour is called Með Cappuccino.

Back to the volcanoes. Some hours into the trip now, and we got to lunch time when we rolled into the open plain of Landamannalaugar. This is a big destination in the interior, although not accessible for much of the year (its 100 metres under the snow). A 4 day hike winds its way here from Reykjavik, and Iceland’s off-road buses can make it here too. Landamannalaugar sits at the base of a mountain range and has always been a fertile oasis in the black and lifeless desert. Although here fertile just means grass can grow. Before Hekla’s cataclysmic eruption in 1104, all the land we’d driven through had been prime farming land, but now only Landamannalaugar is even vaguely habitable.

A group of gap year student type people were painting and helping to rebuild the hut and facilities – there are jobs with worse views. There is a hot spring, at bath temperature, curling out into the plain amidst a swampy grassland, which is popular to swim in. The blue, green, red and yellow algae were a bit strange though, and might have been the inspiration for Lord of the Ring’s marshes. More on this later.

There are numerous 4-5 hour hiking trails leading off in all directions from Landamannalaugar’s huts and 4x4 park, and these would’ve probably been amazing if we’d been there for a whole day. In the 1.5 hours we were there I still managed to walk over, under and through some ice, up a lava field cliff and across a green rocked canyon with a glacial stream trickling through it. Steve didn’t fancy the walk. Landamannalaugar is well worth visiting if you can get there – in good weather in the summer normal cars can get to within half a mile of it and you can walk the rest.

We eventually left and started to head for Hekla. We charged through a series of small rivers a few metres apart from each other, at high speed and with Bohemian Rhapsody blasting out at full volume (there was some Wayne’s world style head banging going on) out of specially made speakers. That was something else. We then stopped to take pictures as Ragnar turned around and went through again. All I got was a wave with a Landrover somewhere behind it. Steve would have got a better picture, but he’d stayed in the Landrover. Ragnar played rock music throughout the tour, and his catchphrase is, ‘Time for some rock and roll,’ which could equally apply to the driving as the music. He kicked off with Jailhouse Rock, went through Money for Nothing, American Pie, We are the Champions (plus many more), and finished off with Stairway to Heaven. That guy’s a legend.

Talking of legends, Tolkien travelled extensively through Iceland, and spoke the language – Old Norse. Peter Jackson wanted to film here, as it’s the real setting, but as the summers are too short, they had to go to New Zealand. Once you’ve seen the original sunken earth houses of the Viking era people here (their beds are less than 4 and a half feet long) the inspiration for hobbits becomes clearer. Also interesting to know is that 80% of Icelanders really do believe in elves. In other words, if you can’t afford to fly to New Zealand but want to see Middle Earth, the original is only 3 hours and under two hundred quid away.

Hekla. It couldn’t be more of a Mt Doom if it tried. It has erupted every ten years in the last few hundred years, and is over 8 years due now. Its ash has reached as far as Moscow and Cairo, and its legacy covers huge chunks of Iceland. The only recent fatality it has caused was a photographer in 1947 who got too close, which is surprising considering the damage it can cause. Hekla has long since been known as being the gateway to hell, which was why no one dared to climb it until 200 years ago. When two locals did, they reported back to the Danish governor, who asked them,
‘Is Hekla really the entrance to hell?’ One of the climbers nodded grimly,
‘I am afraid it is, when we looked down into its heart we heard Danish voices.’

If you don’t get the joke, the Icelanders have never appreciated being under the Danish crown. Hekla is also the origin of the English phrase, ‘What the heck?’ which shows how widely people knew of what it supposedly was.

Although after all these stories of terrible destruction and fiery underworlds, Ragnar then told us that you can in fact drive two thirds of the way up it in August. A bit of an anticlimax that. Add to that the fact that the small eruptions every ten years are called Tourist Eruptions because they bring in tourists and don’t do any harm, and the mountain loses a bit of its mystique. As we neared its base, we drove up to the forward limit of the buses and normal traffic. An area in the black dust is marked out to make a makeshift car park, and one bus was parked up within in, people milling around taking pictures of the distant monster.
‘Ha,’ Ragnar snorts, ‘this is why 4x4 tours are better.’ He slams his foot even closer to the floor and the Landrover rears up and charges straight at the bus. We cut across the ‘road’ and have to hang on as the Landrover picks up speed. We just about skim the protruding wing mirrors of the bus and zoom off in the direction of the volcano, leaving a dense cloud of choking dust coating the unfortunate tourists who are staring wide-eyed at the wheeled missile that’s just burst their ear drums and made them see just how crap their tour really is. We fly by, laughing along with a seriously cool guitar riff from some band I don’t know, and leave the beaten track well and truly behind.

After a fair climb we got as far as we could go – snow was still blocking the road up – so we stopped for a look. Looking up at a mountain is much better than just looking at it. There is a guestbook which now has an entry reading:

‘Attempting final ascent of mountain. Food low. Water low. Equipment lost. So cold. So very cold. Snow falling again. Lost another toe this morning. Hope tha’

Very mature I know, but it had to be done. The rock beneath our feet resembled aero chocolate, it was green, bubbly and crunchy, although there were reds and yellows all over the place too.

We left Hekla in peace and cruised back towards Reykjavik, after re-inflating the tyres when we hit the tarmac roads again. We got out while Ragnar did this, and were quickly set upon by a swarm of midges. They don’t bite you, but the living cloud of them gets everywhere. In hair, ears, nose, clothing. Showering that night was essential.

We returned to the hostel by crashing over the pavement again, and got out with huge grins as a group of penniless hikers looked on, open-mouthed. This tour is serious fun, and if you have the money, you won’t find many better things to spend it on. Hiring the 4x4 yourself (if you know what you’re doing (really know)) of course, is one thing better.