Question Marks and Hypotheses

(Hyperborean Hopscotch 2017: Day One)

I waited in the lobby of Iceland’s small Keflavik International Airport for twenty minutes until a shuttle driver for the car rental company arrived. He drove five customers to an office/garage a few minutes away, where a Russian employee that spoke very little English and understood none of what I said almost double charged me for my rental. Luckily I caught the mistake and we figured everything out with the help of an Icelandic manager who wandered into the building.

I was only about 15 minutes behind “schedule” when I hit the road. Given the hassle of airports and car rental companies, that was pretty damn good. (In New Zealand this past February, I got my rental car about 3 hours later than I’d expected.) I was handed the keys to an abused Suburu Forester -  dented, scratched, weird rattling sound, broken rear windshield wiper, blown speakers, an all-around piece-of-junk machine – the pathetic specialty of SADcars. That’s the actual name of the company. I rented from them on my previous trip to this country, and while that car was also a beater, it got me everywhere I needed to go. Would my luck hold again? I didn’t know. But I was about to put this cheap junker through more of the suffering it was clearly familiar with.

From Keflavik, I caught route 41 towards the capital city Reykjavik, then jumped on route 1 - the “Ring Road” that circles the whole country. Northward, skipping Reykjavik entirely, I was hit with my first wave of stunning Icelandic scenery. The lava fields and mountains around Iceland border on supernatural, especially on the kind of misty morning I'd arrived. There's no way to be certain trolls and fairies don't live here. Lots of people think it’s possible. I do.

Driving by the town of Borgarnes, a place I’d wandered around on foot and stayed for a night three years earlier, I made myself promise that on my way back south I’d revisit the small pier there, if I had time. But one point of this trip was to see new things, so I set that idea aside and made my way farther north than I’d been on that previous journey.

My first stop this time was an entirely unplanned walk around Grábrókargigar, a place I just saw while driving and decided to explore. The area’s main attraction is a pair of volcanic craters with short hiking paths up to their rims, overlooking the valleys below and offering spectacular views of mountains to both the north and south.

Crater.

View from the rim.

Farther along the Ring Road, I located the secondary road turn-off I was after. It led along Vatnsnes Peninsula, skirted two lakes, and finally brought me to the bay along Húnafjörður. I was surprised when the road abruptly turned to rough gravel.  This made me a little skeptical about driving my trusty piece-of-junk rental (which I had named Tormund after a Game of Thrones character) on rougher terrain than expected. I decided to roll the dice and continue on, a good call because about half the roads I wound up on were as bad or worse than the one here.

What surprised me even more than the road out to Húnafjörður was the traffic: for half an hour or so I had to drive trot-speed behind thirty-some Icelandic horses. Five or six of them had riders, and the rest were being herded down the road. I slowly passed this confusing parade until eventually they were all behind me, with no damage to car, horse, or man.

Traffic.

Soon after that I pulled into a parking lot. A path led out to a viewpoint over the bay, where I spotted the natural off-shore landmark Hvítserkur. This giant rock formation is a basalt sea stack shaped like either a troll or a dragon, depending on one’s imagination. Whichever it is, clearly it had gotten so thirsty that it waded into the water and began to drink, despite the approaching sunlight that turns trolls into stone. Personally, I think the best explanation for its shape is that it’s actually a troll-dog. I don’t know if that’s a thing or not, but last Halloween my dog Hero dressed as one to help me guard a bridge (and hand out candy) in the park where I work. I think Hero would appreciate that I tracked down an Icelandic troll-dog, his long lost cousin.

Troll-dog

After photographing the beast - home to gulls, fulmars, and other seabirds - I climbed down the rocks of the overlook to get a new perspective from the beach. It was a fun little scramble, but once I climbed back up I thought I should probably move on.

Down to the shore.

Back down the gravel road, passed more trotting ponies, onto the Ring Road, and eastward.

I stopped half a dozen times on my way to Akureyri. These stops were not places I knew before I arrived, just mountains and rivers and gorges that caught my attention. I like this kind of road tripping: headed in a vague direction, but finding hidden gems along the way. Don’t get me wrong, everything appeared on the maps I kept on the passenger seat. But I only used those when I felt lost. Otherwise, I preferred to just find things. That’s how I stopped at Grábrókargigar earlier in the day. I just pretended to discover places, then learned the names and what they were afterwards.

In The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule Joanna Kavenna wrote of early northern explorers:

“They saw the world in a different way from us ‐ their maps were incomplete, furnished at their edges with question marks and hypotheses.”

I'm fine with question marks, hypotheses, trolls, dragons, and so forth.

During one of these stops, I noticed Tormund’s passenger side front tire was dangerously low, and I feared a flat. That could have caused some time and money problems. In Varmahlíð, the nearest village, I met a teenage gas station attendant named Freðrik who helped me air up all the tires on the car. This kid was really interested in my trip, and seemed happy that I was so enthralled by his country. He made a point of taking me out into the front parking area of the shop and pointing across a wide valley. At the base of a mountain was a small farm I could just barely spot without binoculars. “I live there,” he said. I told him it was beautiful, and he agreed: “It really is. It’s a good place to grow up.” When he heard about my camping plans for Iceland and Greenland, he asked me if I “really like the cold.” I replied that I was kind of drawn to it, and he understood.

The tire stayed aired up and never came back to haunt me. If it had continued to go flat, I don’t know what I would have done. But my luck held out.

Further east, I made it to Akureyri - “Capital of North Iceland” and secondmost populous place in the country after the capital region - where I stopped for groceries, WIFI, and to fix a banking fiasco: my debit card had been suspended on Fraud Watch, even though I alerted my bank of my travel plans on three separate occasions.

Leaving town, I stupidly took the road south for twenty minutes before realizing the sun wasn’t where it should be. Along the river Eyjafjarðará, which runs into the longest fjord in the country, I talked to a fisherman who corrected me: The sun was where it should be, but I was not. This was not the Ring Road and I was no longer going east.

Back in Akureyri, I chose the correct road – east – and drove up over a mountain with outstanding views of the world below. On the downslope, I entered a great rainstorm and glimpsed a couple vibrant rainbows. By the time the rain ceased, the sun was shining again and I had reached Goðafoss, the Waterfall of the Gods. Several huge, powerful walls of water cascade together here into a pool thundering with the roars  of splashing glacial runoff. It drops 39 feet down, with a width of 98 feet, from the river Skjálfandafljót and it is one of the most visually stunning falls I saw in the country. That’s significant considering I saw maybe a thousand falls between my two trips to Iceland. I could have stayed at Goðafoss for hours, staring, listening, trying to interpret whatever messages the Gods were sending through the waterfall, but it was getting late and I had to go.

Waterfall of the Gods.

The sky was casting magic, living light all over Mývatn when I drove around the lake counterclockwise from the southwest to the northeast. The sunset itself was brilliant, but what it did to the water, wetlands, and surrounding rocks was even better. Everything shimmered. I stopped at Grjótagjá cave for a bit, a place perhaps best known for a memorable love scene in Game of Thrones. I climbed inside and around its interior geothermal pools. Unfortunately, my head lamp battery died and I was extremely tired from a long day of road tripping. So instead of lingering in the cave, I found a campground nearby. Lots of people were busily setting up tents while ducks paced around and made noises suggesting their disapproval of our presence in their habitat. Mývatn and its wetlands are home to over a dozen species of ducks, due to nutrient-rich water that is ideal for aquatic insects. Another species, human campers, also flock here due to the lake’s natural beauty.

The lake.

Neither human nor bird noises mattered to me: I climbed into my sleeping bag and promptly fell asleep.