This is from my early days of exploring Iceland. Actually, my first trip to be exact. During these times I looked at the little map I’d been provided by the car rental people, and chose places at random to visit. It was not a very well-organized approach. But then again this doesn’t swing too far wide of my general approach to life.
I recall the drive from the airport that first visit. The plane lands in darkness, and this night continues well after its arrival at 7:30 in the morning. This being towards the end days of October, the light would eventually come from the eastern sky around nine in the morning. This is coming back to me from memory and notes from that time, so what follows will be a bit random—but here we go.
The radio played—on that first and subsequent visits—the most obscure and eclectic collection of music that somehow found its way into the car on these dark, early morning drives to the capital. These were songs that no american radio station would dream of playing. But, strangely, they evoked images of my homeland from days gone by. And I mean long gone. The dusty cowboy boots, crooners lamenting the loss of a woman, quick musical brush-strokes that painted a scene of loneliness and lament. It was this that I listened to. Easily I could have passed a theater marquee with latest James Dean feature in block letters, and it would have fit. It was made for this drive in this foreign and strange landscape. I’ve sought out the selections from these airport trips, because it is music I’ve heard nowhere else—and often a song so long buried in memory as to be irretrievable will make itself heard on the radio during these times. It is an amazing combination of sound and vision. Should anyone reading this be planning a drive from the airport to the capital, I’d strongly suggest tuning into whatever signal is strongest and is playing any kind of music.
I should add that many of the selections are also Icelandic songs, and though the meanings are unknown to me, the melodies and rhythms are beautiful.
Let’s see where this brings us. I won’t dwell on the landscape, because it’s hard to describe through the darkness. But over flat lands interrupted by hillocks and swells, you’ll see in the distance more prominent features. Covered in snow, they’ll rise up from volcanic plains—a reminder of the origins of this place. Mostly this drive takes you between rows of high overhead lights that border both sides of the highway. The airport itself is in Keflavik, and the town of that name is close by. It’s a good place to stay for a few days to get a feel for the language and culture before plunging into the big city of Reykjavik. This isn’t what I did, however. This being my first visit, I went straight to Reykjavik, drove around until I found my hotel, and gratefully pulled into the parking lot. The drive should only be around 45 minutes, but I’m sure I managed to stretch it to an hour or more. As I write this there appears just now a news item describing the detour one american made when he followed his GPS device’s instructions. The drive that should have taken 45 minutes became a five and a half-hour gruel-a-thon as he blindly steered his car north, north, north until he came to a place that his device said would be his final destination. I would think after an hour or two he might have stopped to ask someone. Even if he didn’t want to consult a map, most Icelanders speak english well enough to tell him he was going the wrong way. When he arrived at some random house in the city up north, following his device’s assurance he was at his destination, he knocked at the door. Of course the person who answered didn’t know how or why this visitor came to be there. There was surely a moment of confusion as the american explained why he was some 400 kilometers from where he needed to be. When he offered up his explanation, describing the hotel in Reykjavik he was looking for, it became obvious he was hopelessly and stupidly lost. Shortly thereafter he became an internet sensation, even making the New York Times.
The name of my hotel was Esja, and it was nice. Probably nicer than I’m accustomed to, being used to more—how shall I put it—modest accommodations. Even a basic hotel in Iceland is cleaner and more modern and offers better amenities than its american counterpart. This trip was a stopover on the way to Paris, and—at this time—Icelandair and the tourist industry were offering some incentives to spend a few days in Iceland instead of hopping back on the plane for the final push to europe. I was one of the people who took them up on their offer.
As I mentioned, I didn’t have an itinerary or agenda of any kind—other than to get in my rental car and drive around and see what there was to see. My first day I headed out, following some random roads on my little map. When I spied a hitchhiker from Sweden, I stopped to give him a lift. It was an extremely windy time—something I’d come to know as a trademark of the country. So, safely out of the wind with his large backpack stowed behind, he gave me some tips, which I followed.
First I drove to the area where the famed Geyser is. It’s a geyser, yes. But it’s also named Geyser--or "geysir" to be exact. And there are several in that area. They are all grouped together, with bubbling pools of scalding hot water scattered about. It’s a steamy and impressive sight. There was little in the way of tourist accommodations at the time—a small restaurant and gift shop. On my recent visit, the place has expanded considerably. The geysers themselves are unspoiled, but there is much more in the way of shopping and food than before. A little commercial oasis.
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| Geysir |
Skogafoss was one of the first giant waterfalls I found by chance. Along the coastal road, a uniform wall of water cascaded as if from the edge of the world, and plunged with thundering precision into a pool of clear glacial water below. If you like things neat and tidy, this waterfall is for you. I believe the official height is listed at around two hundred feet. What makes this vertical sheet of water and mist so impressive is of course its sheer size, but also the fact that you can get very close to it. This magnifies its size to some extent. It looks like it drops from the edge of the world because in fact this was at one time the edge of Iceland. It is where the coastal cliffs met the sea. Now that the coast has receded, the cliffs and cascading water are left to put on this display a little inland. The day that I stopped my car to stare in slack-jawed wonder at this behemoth of nature, it was misty, with light rain falling. The photo I’ve included is from a sunny day and the waterfall is often befriended by a colorful rainbow or two on these days. On my visit, the busier tourist season being mostly finished—I had the luxury of enjoying the roaring river of falling water on my own. I’ve talked mostly about the sight of this wondrous thing, but I have to delve deep and remember my impressions of the sound. With the intervening years I’m better able to describe this. Iceland is a quiet place. The sounds of nature are what bubble to the surface—birds, streams, waves lapping at rocky shores. To come upon something like this waterfall in an otherwise quiet landscape is akin to hearing a sleeping giant roar—or perhaps snore loudly if it’s still sleeping. For a first-time visitor like me, it’s hard to soak it all in—the magnitude is just too much. It’s a not-so-subtle hint that you are visiting a place where earth-changing forces are at work.
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| Skogafoss |
And I’ll interrupt here for a moment to share what I tell people who ask about Iceland. First, if you want to experience it or get an idea of what it’s like, just go there. But my initial impressions are what I always share as well. It’s a place I always say offers landscapes that hearken back to the beginnings of time. You sense that you are walking through giant creations of upheaval and millennial carvings that are still taking place. I am sure this is true for other places on earth as well—but Iceland seems to be a more accessible place to view this and get lost in the magic and mystery of it.
Later I was to follow my Swedish hitchhiker’s suggestion to see one of Iceland’s wonders: The boisterous and vast network of waterfalls called Gullfoss. Again following the little roads marked out on my map, I made my way to this place. My car was a Toyota wagon with five-speed transmission and it held up mostly well in the conditions on that first trip. I was to put it to the test later. But the wind made itself felt in the little car, often pushing it one way or the other. I remember exiting the car, struggling to close the door, and then struggling again to stay upright as I climbed the wooden walkway to the lonely outpost just outside the falls. The wind was intense. Thankfully the walkway had iron railings to hold onto, and I held on for dear life. There were a few other visitors there, and they employed similar survival techniques—grabbing hold of the railings and bending towards the wind to stay upright.
You view Gullfoss from a vantage point up above. The terrain is wild and invites no intrusion from weak human-lings. The vastness is like looking out at a wild prairie or extensive plain. But this plain is full of waterfalls—coming at each other from different angles and competing with showers of spray and crushing plummets of white that are relentless. The roar is a bit more distant than the up-close Skogafoss I’d seen earlier, and again it’s difficult to absorb the scale of what you’re seeing. You see the river approaching in the distance, then being broken over the crazy ruptures and uneven landscape that then sends it into a wild and cascading frenzy. The sun was out at this time, and there were two perfectly-matched rainbows keeping the frothy white water company.
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| Wide View of Gullfoss |
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| Gullfoss |
Here are two different views of Gullfoss. In case you haven't guessed, "Foss" is the word for "waterfall" in Icelandic. It comes to mind also that I shot a video that shows some of these first travels. Here is the link to that video, and the background song "'39" by Queen is one of those musical oddities I'd heard on the drive from the airport one dark morning.
Please forgive the quality of the video, as I shot it on low-tech equipment by today's standards. But a Sony Hi-8 camcorder is what everyone was using back then, so that's what I had. Editing it on a primitive platform didn't help matters any, but mostly the song by Queen comes through intact, and the images bring back memories of those first days in Iceland.
That evening I returned to the hotel, put the car away and walked to the old part of Reykjavik—an interesting collection of art galleries, cafés, small restaurants and so on. These early times saw me eating a lot of hot dogs. For one thing, I like hot dogs, and for another these were good. I won’t claim to know what exactly they were made from, but they came on a good roll, were a recognizable food, and they were an easy fix for someone like me who doesn’t eat a lot to begin with. With a hot dog in one hand, a bottle of coke in the other, I was getting to know Iceland. It was our first date.
The next day I was to get maybe too familiar with her. Just a little. I knew I was in a country with massive glaciers. It was hard to hide this fact, because they were prominent features on my little map. Besides, I’d heard people talking about them. And the raging rivers and waterfalls had to come from somewhere, didn’t they? So I spread my map out on the bed back at the hotel, made some marks on different roads close to where I’d been the previous day, and set out along the southern coast. The radio in the little Toyota wagon was playing something unusual—either Icelandic or a hopelessly obscure selection from England or the USA. I should add that there is a lot of talk on this radio station as well, but when they stop to play music, the selections are always good.
At some point I turned onto route 221 or 222. It was a road that would take me north and partly into the interior. Straight ahead lay the sleeping Mýrdalsjökull. Since the end of the name, “jökull,” is the icelandic word for “glacier,” I will skip the redundancy of saying “Mýrdalsjökull Glacier.” My recollection is that the distance was not significant—maybe ten or twenty kilometers to get to the glacier’s edge. But the road was a significant obstacle. With rocks, washouts, dips and more rocks, it was clear I wasn’t going to zip up to the ice field and take a leisurely return trip to the coast. But the scenery. It is what I live for, this. Massive boulder fields, side tracks leading to glacial rivers, then flat expanses of moon-like desolation. I was to learn later who was responsible for this desolate landscape, and her name is Katia. More about her later. This kind of driving was tiring, mainly because I had to be always vigilant about the ruts and rocks and various hazards that would break the little Toyota if I didn’t watch out. At this point I remember I was climbing. Up, up, up. And as I climbed, the road got worse. To research this writing, I consulted some recent narratives of people who made this drive. Mostly they turned back.
There was no other traffic during this trek. The only vehicle I came across was a dormant Caterpillar bulldozer from the 1970s. With an enclosed cab and a massive blade to push large rocks out of the way, it was simply left out there in the middle of this nothingness to be put into service when the need arose. Judging by the state of things, it hadn’t been put into service lately.
I pushed on. Now the road was getting crazy bad. Because I was climbing into an area that would eventually become the highlands, snow appeared on the road. Not a lot, but some. This was October, near the end of the month. The patches of snow were significant enough that I made a run at them to get through without bogging down and getting stuck. This strategy worked, but the snow was followed by areas of mud as well. So this required that I hit the gas, getting some momentum to carry me through the mud bogs. Result: Car covered top to bottom with splattered snow and mud. The Toyota had been shiny red back at the airport. Now it was mud-colored almost everywhere, with some patches of red showing on the roof.
At some point I came upon a strange sight. Maybe halfway to the glacier, a large tracked excavator—another Caterpillar—was being operated by a solitary man at the controls. No one else around. His american-made pickup was parked nearby, and his work consisted of gouging a trench through this massive landscape. I stopped. None to clear about where I was exactly, I approached the yellow digger. I wanted some reassurance. He swung the dinosaur-like machine around on its pivot to face me.
“Glacier?” I asked, pointing up the deteriorating track I was following.
He didn’t speak much english, but he knew what I was looking for.
“Ja, glacier.”
Then I gestured as if to drive there in my car.
“No,” he said, looking at the little Toyota and shaking his head.
With the arrogance and ill-founded self confidence of a new arrival in this country, I got back behind the wheel and headed for the glacier.
I’ll skip over the rest of the drive, only because it was more of the same conditions I’d already encountered—only worse. One of the main hazards I’d later realize was that the soft snow I was pushing through could very well have hidden some good-sized rocks. Hit one of them with the underside of the motor, and it was quite likely I’d punch a hole in the oil pan. Catch one at an odd angle, and rip a wheel right off the car. I was lucky on this trip, but I would not recommend anyone else try a similar approach.
Near the end of this dirt and rock road stood a hulking glacier-bus. I don’t know what it’s actually called, but it was obviously something built way up on big flotation tires to carry camera-wielding tourists onto the icy plain. Then, beyond the glacier bus was the glacier itself. The other thing—among many—that I didn’t know at this time is that the weather can change dramatically at any moment. On a subsequent glacier tour in another part of the country, my driver took me onto the ice in his “super jeep,” parked, and we got out to take some pictures. The day was bright and sunny, clear blue sky overhead with dazzling and blinding white from the snow-topped glacier. Within a minute or two a dense fog rolled in, totally obscuring any visibility. And it didn’t let up. On a field of white that we couldn’t see, socked in by grey fog, the situation looked hopeless. But he’d been tracking our route on his GPS device, and it was thanks to his knowledge of these conditions that we were able to slowly re-trace our path. Following a crude line on the GPS monitor’s screen, we got down to a lower elevation where the fog cleared out enough to allow us to see.
Up at Mýrdalsjökull my main concern was that the daylight was starting to dim. I’ve mentioned that Iceland is a quiet place for the most part. Here the silence was complete. Face to face with the giant expanse of ice and snow, I was left alone with my thoughts. One would hope that such a moment would bring great and deep insights into the nature of one’s being or self and a sense of place in the world. I can’t say this was necessarily true. I was nagged by knowing that the road back was not going to be any easier than the road here. And I still risked breaking the car.
But the glacier. And the hulking and idle glacier bus parked in this improbable place. And alone there—like so many other foolish travelers had been before me. The introspection would have to wait. I wanted the experience, yes, but I didn’t know what to DO with it. Go out on the glacier? I was already pushing my luck just being here. And the issue of waning daylight was becoming more pressing. It was only late afternoon, so I still had a little time to linger and make the slow trek back.
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| Mýrdalsjökull |
I actually made the return drive okay. By the time I'd put the washed-out track of rocks and ruts behind me, it was nearing the end of dusk. Now I was on a black gravel road that shifted like ball-bearings under the
car's tires, but it was like a superhighway compared to the road that climbed up to the glacier. I met exactly ONE vehicle coming the other way. It was a tow truck. I imagine the enterprising tow operator was accustomed to retrieving hapless visitors who'd gotten themselves in a fix. With disabled and twisted wrecks dangling from his tow-hook, the trip down to the coast was most likely made in silence.I'll leave off there, as this stay in Iceland was only three days. I've reconstructed the narrative from journal notes I made at the time, and used photos that are available for public use on the internet. The few print pictures I have were made from film, and would be poorly reproduced here.
I flew to Paris, made the most of my time there--visiting the haunts I remembered as a schoolboy. But now Iceland had a hold on me.
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