Taooftash - Iceland in March

We were in Iceland a week ago and as upset as we were that this trip, like so many others, fell under the shadow of the 1st Rule of Cancer Club, it served the important purpose of allowing us to get away from some of it and talk. The following is a small write up and link to pictures.

The land of icy puffins.

I am no fan of City Breaks, unless we know someone there and as I am of fair skin, beach holidays are not a favored option. So after many of these getaways and a reasonable bit of complaining over the last couple of years - I am over 35 now, I am allowed to be grumpy - Tash finally came up with an option (well, Tim one of her work colleagues and Marisa and Nathan had to go first to report back that the puffins were not carnivorous and the temperatures were bearable) to go to Iceland.

People really aren't kidding when they say that Iceland is an inhospitable place, the flight over revealed a mountainous landscape of ice and snow out of the port window and as we turned inland to the airport nothing but a flat pancake of fields of rock. I was happy, but instinctively knew that this would be no place to find a decent shoe shop, so reassured Tash as we made our way through the beautifully designed airport that it really would be ok.

Our first taste of Iceland proper was walking across the small car park to our little 4 wheel drive hire car. What a wind and was it cold. At this point I really did wonder what the week would hold as Tash was in a bit of a beat up way physically from our recent issues, has no decent circulation so gets cold quickly and had chosen that moment to mentally switch off.

"What do you mean you have lost the car park ticket, the clerk only gave it to you minutes ago and that is all you had to carry out of the terminal"

I can report that the wind was as cold on the way back to the terminal and then I drove round the terminal twice trying to find my way out. Most garage forecourts are bigger, so who knows what I was playing at.

Things quickly looked up as the car heater pushed out welcome hot air and Tash came back online, whipped out her trusty map (Little Ken only does Europe so we went old-skool on this trip) and forty minutes after landing in the country we were neck deep* sitting in the Blue Lagoon, Iceland's most famous thermal pool. I can think of no better way to start a holiday.

*because it was so bloody cold

We spent the first two nights in Reykjavik and struggled to find a restaurant that didn't claim an international reputation with prices to match - no really, there is nowhere to eat that doesn't cost £40 a plate. Global capitalism is a tricky thing, whereas it suits London and New York, it feels a bit out of place in a country voted as the most happiest in the world. No more obvious than the twenty minutes I spent waiting outside a knitting shop (the new shoe shops) on the main high street (cute rather than main) watching a constant stream of cars inch along so that everyone could see them, a car based passeggiata as the Italian's would call it. There were some very powerful and expensive cars that edged their way along, informing me that the Icelandic male is just as in love with the V8 engine as his American or Australian counterparts.

I noted two things regarding this vehicular peacock parade; Firstly; the brand new powerful BMW M5 that passed me by would be lethal driving on any icy road surface and so could at best be considered a 'Summer car', this was followed by one of those jacked up glacier driving 4 wheel drives that you might have seen on Top Gear, the owner of which I deduced could not be bothered to muck around with such unimportant things as a Winter/Summer car, or even a Glacial/City car, favouring to drive his supped up skyscraper high V8 Toyota to the shops. The second thing I noted was that two streets down was a perfectly useable and nearly empty ring road that would have got them to the end of the street in no time at all.

Curious.

After Reykjavik Tash, I and the Suzuki Vitara (the cheaper option was a Suzuki Jimmy, which I ignored for many reasons) headed out north into the series of famous tourist attractions known as the Golden Circle, starting with the geyser at Geysir. Except that as it was very snowy still so we couldn't get to any of them, encountering the phenomena of the Icelandic "road impassible" sign. This is quite clear, a large red triangle with "Impassible" on it and a gate pulled across our half of the road that only an idiot could miss. We both understood it and as Tash checked the map for an alternative route I popped out to take a photograph of the geyser I could clearly see on the other side of Thingvallanavatn lake in front of us. Mid way through this exercise a similarly coloured Vitara rolled back down the closed road and got hailed by Tash. It turns out the couple in it, English, middle aged and on a city break by the looks of it - they were dressed normally whilst I was prepared for the worst in all my walking gear - had ignored the sign, hoofed it up the road and had got axle deep in snow at the first opportunity requiring a tow out by a passing local (see previous comment about skyscraper Toyota's), it was apparently "the bloody useless car's fault".

The wife pointed out that my geyser was a geothermal water plant. I guessed that they weren't taking the ignominy well.

Deciding on a longer route we kept to the non snow covered tarmac for a couple of hours before the need to off road got the better of Tash. Indicating that we should pull off the road for a picture opportunity, a panorama of the glacial river system that runs alongside the volcano Hekla, Tash took the bull by the horns so to speak and charged the car up a steep snow covered road (that is to say there were was a sign indication so and one set of tyre tracks going up the hillside, but no road just snow). Remembering that the Vitara is 4 wheel drive, but no glacier truck and that we hadn't seen another car for an hour, I screamed. Quickly recovering my composure I concluded that the high revving of the engine had drowned out my previous attempts at retarding our skyward trajectory and I then screamed at Tash to stop.

"What" she queried as if this sort of driving is completely normal.

I had to explain what some of you already know about off roading; You never drive blindly into something, especially if you are on your own. In fact what I actually said, and I have been waiting to use this line for some time was "You wait until your father hears about what you have done"

Despite my womanly noises and practical fears we were not stuck fast and the car got back down again. About an hour later it was my turn to try and kill us. We had been driving along a big glacial valley and eventually the road took us over some water and Tash indicated that we should now go back down the other side, via a snowy indentation at the side of our safely clear tarmac thoroughfare. This was to be our first "dotted" road, meaning, unsurfaced and a bit dodgy according to the map. Unlike the road to Geysir that had grounded the other Vitara this was open, but very snowy and the way back was too far. Off we went. Driving on snow is like driving in deep mud, whenever any part of the underside of the car catches snow, the axel sumps most often, you become directed not by the front wheels but by wherever the snow is less dense. Either side of the road was wheel breaking lava fields so I was reminded to concentrate and after twenty minutes, just as my knuckles were white, the snow and tarmac mix started to favour more reasonable travel. Just in time Tash pointed out, for us to see a caravan of über trucks pulling off of the tundra in front of us. The little Vitara did good.

Tash and I enjoyed each days driving further up the south east coast taking in new breathtaking features every day. Many of them were simply nature at it's best and one of them had a little help. The crater at Kerið, which conveniently is not very high, the summit is a car park, which is next to a road, you really would not know it is there unless you were looking, provided the only non-natural "gasp" Hopefully you can read what some little oik has managed to climb down and write in the crater.

We saw many and they are all beautiful, though noted that they all seem to be conveniently situated less than half a kilometer off the main Route 1 ring road, I suspect that there are much better ones kept out of reach of us tourists.

The picture here is of Seljalandsfoss; we pulled in to see it on the way home one night, just as the light was getting good for pictures and bad for tourists. However we were not alone. Tash has adopted this pose in homage (nee piss take) of the larger photographic group we shared the waterfall with.

You could see the three models from quite a distance, no normal person would choose to wear lime green with incandescent cerise and stand casually in front of a waterfall, so it wasn't difficult to work out. The photographer laying on his back at their feet was another giveaway as was the two man video camera team who followed them.

We sat and watched this from the car park for a bit and then another car turned up. These dudes were the real mcCoy, you could tell that because the older of the two men that got out had a puffer jacket with his name on the back and they were French too, I guessed Pierre Bouncon Photography was not a natural icelandic name. These two professionals avoided the "dudes" in front of the waterfall and climbed the stairs to go behind it (a feature of this particular falls) In an almost choreographed way, once they were out of sight the dudes moved over to the stairs and we got out the car to take Tash's catalogue shots.

Things came to a head when it was our turn to go up the stairs leading to behind the waterfall. The video camera pairing had taken over much of the bottom, the actual staircase being encased in ice and more than a tad precarious, so as the French duo reappeared from their trip to the otherside, they had to contend with a slippery descent and filming (I think you can work out the dudes nationality before I tell you). They were decidedly damp and the younger French man just had that look that said "I need to tell you some thing" so I asked him how his walk was "ahh I tell you, it ezz fwuking wet back there no" and they went to get warm.

We got as far as the top of the steps and the spray from the waterfall was just immense. There was no point following the path down around the back of the Waterfall. The dudes and their photographer had discovered this as they met us at the top, which wasn't a very big piece of rock and didn't shrink much when the photographer made his way back down leaving Natasha standing the other side of these fluorescent clothed nu rave boarders. I had to ask them to move so Tash could get ready to descend, down was much more precarious than up. We already had an inkling that these three youths were not the brightest buttons, one of them got asked twice because he was busy cleaning his Raybans, it wasn't sunny. He simply exclaimed "man that was gnarly", I think referring to the soaking he had got, but equally it could have been the daylight he was now experiencing, it was hard to tell, but they were most certainly, Yanks.

As we walked back to the car I amused Tash with a brief discussion on how great their life must be; if a simple waterfall can be gnarly, imagine how amazing using the shower must be, "warm and gnarly man!" and what do they say when it rains?

By the time the glaciers made it in to the trip we were confident off road veterans, which was just as well as when we passed the first accessible one called Solheimajohull, in the morning, the road to it was shut, but on returning in the evening it had been snowploughed and off we went to see one of natures most wonderful things. In the UK you get school qualifications in each subject; deciding your "options" at thirteen ( pick eight subjects and then three years later, there you are, stuck for life with a set of exams that are utterly useless in your chosen career). My favourite (useless qualification) is geography as I spent five years learning about plate tectonics, rift valleys, glaciers, hanging valleys and the best of all, terminal moraine. In that time curiously I also spent one term learning about Mr Fazesser and his work on a Brazilian coffee plantation, this has been no use to me at all, but now the glaciers were on the scene Tash was privy to all sorts of massively incorrect and vague information that I have had stored in my head for over twenty years.

The car took us across the sandir, think moon landscape and you won't go far wrong and then we climbed up it's snout, not far, as Tash cannot do physical exertion at the moment. We stood together on a glacier and it was one of the most meaningful moments of my life.

By the way, the scientists are not lying. Terminal moraine is the name given to all the rock that is deposited at the end of the glacier, as the glacier retreats it remains there in great mounds as if the ice had ground into the earth to stop itself, which of course it did. Spotting where these great monsters once ended is easy, but coming to terms with how far they have retreated since is not. One glacier tongue has managed 2 kilometers since 1930.

That is basically what we got up to and here is the link to the full picture set.

We will be in touch again soon.

The Tao of Tash in Iceland - the lovey dovey shot

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