THE SAGA OF ICELAND An epic tale of an epic adventure Written by Dr. Jim Waterman August – October 2009 1 2 – Contents – The Cenotaph 4 The Adventurers 5 Prologue 7 Day One – The arrival in Reykjavík 10 Day Two – Around Reykjavík and Hafnarfjörður 18 Day Three – The Golden Circle 26 Day Four – From Hveragerði to Snæfellsness 34 Day Five – Eiríksstaðir and the Skagafjörður area 42 Day Six – A bonus day: Hrísey and Akureyri 50 Day Seven – Into the Diamond Circle 55 Day Eight – Whales, willies, and more of the Diamond Circle 64 Day Nine – It's a long way from Húsavík to Höfn... 72 Day Ten – Water, ice, frost and fire 80 Day Eleven – The Skaftafell Experience 88 Day Twelve – An icy hike, and the arrival in Vík í Mýrdal 95 Day Thirteen – The Epic Tale of Skógar 103 Day Fourteen – Black sand beats the Blue Lagoon 118 Day Fifteen – The Return 126 Epilogue 131 3 – The Cenotaph – This review is dedicated to those we have lost in the Great Pagan War Per Yngve Ohlin (Dead) 16 January 1969 – 8 April 1991 Øyvind Aarseth (Euronymous) 22 March 1968 – 10 August 1993 Terje Bakken (Valfar) 3 September 1978 – 15 January 2004 Tomas Forsberg (Quorthon) 17 February 1966 – 3 June 2004 This review is also dedicated to Iceland's four times winner of the World's Strongest Man (1984, 1986, 1988, 1990) Jón Páll Sigmarsson 28 April 1960 – 16 January 1993 VIKING POWER 4 – The Adventurers – Dr. Jim Waterman Age 30 Brains of the operation Hannah Straw Age 26 Fitness expert and instigator of interesting conversation Kit Rathenar Age 29 (Ghost of the) Navigator Picture taken outside Gamli Baukur, Húsavík. 5 6 – Prologue – Sit back and listen and you might just learn a few things about me you didn't know. You all remember Yolanda, don't you? Some of you may still even talk to her. A large part of me still can't figure out how we functioned as a couple, but this trip was born out of that fateful period in which I attempted to be a Good Boyfriend™. Her enthusiasm for the Old Norse Sagas was boundless. In fact, her enthusiasm for anything Scandinavian short of lutefisk was exceptionally high. Higher even than what I have a reputation for. Naturally, if we were going to go on holiday together, it would be somewhere cold and Nordic. Norway was the obvious choice, but one night during that summer of 2004, I had a dream... I was flying to America. No idea why, I just was. And I heard a call that we would have to make an emergency landing, diverting to Reykjavík. As the plane touched down, it hit me... never mind Norway, I was in Iceland. The next day I bought the Lonely Planet1 and Landmark2 guides to Iceland, as well as the Footprint guide to Reykjavík.3 I wasn't hedging my bets; I wanted to know everything. Yolanda was, of course, well up for the trip. And then... she wasn't. Never mind those two months we spent living together that should have split us up and didn't, apparently her objection was on financial grounds. Eventually, I thought we could compromise and go for the trip to Norway instead. No... that didn't figure either. Long weekend in Bergen? Forget it. It soon became obvious that she refused to spend more than 5p on anything... and those trips we'd had to Wacken together should have rung the alarm bells long and loud. We were not going to be going anywhere together. Even a weekend in Bognor Regis would have been too much. This trip, it seemed, would have to be put on the backburner, and was seemingly killed stone dead when the long-awaited split came a year later. But I refused to give up on visiting the Northlands. And when Hannah mentioned that she'd quite like to go to the Inferno Festival in 2006, I was on the case in an instant. With the decision to make it four days in Oslo for the festival followed by a further four day jaunt around other bits of Norway, and with six of us on board in total, it required planning with military precision. Of course, everyone knows by now what a massive success that was. Every trip I'd even been on since (and including) Florida, where I'd been as a 12-year-old in the spring of 1992, and the second to last holiday I'd ever had with my dad still alive, was blown spectacularly into the weeds. It was expensive, but it was well worth it. And so, I decided to target Iceland once again. I knew that would be even more expensive – ruinously so, maybe. So there needed to be a huge time gap before it could happen to allow anyone who was interested in joining me to save enough cash for it. The target date was obvious. Iceland would be a fitting destination to celebrate my 30th birthday, in 2009. I didn't waste time. In 2007 I discovered Iceland Holidays4 and as early as December of that year I was already investigating the Iceland Grande Tour5 – seventeen days of fjords, glaciers and geological lunacy. I'd even spent an evening number crunching to see what the optimum number of people on the trip would be – it was three, if I wanted to keep the costs as low as was practically possible in such a 1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Iceland-Lonely-Planet-Country-Guide/dp/1741040760/ref=sr_1_6? ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252279097&sr=8-6 2 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Iceland-Landmark-Visitors-Guide-Harlow/dp/1843060388/ref=sr_1_9? ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252279066&sr=8-9 3 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reykjavik-Footprint-Pocket-Guides-Laura/dp/1903471591/ref=sr_1_1? ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252279080&sr=8-1 4 http://www.icelandholidays.com 5 http://www.icelandholidays.com/clickhols/icecircgr.htm 7 wallet-rupturing country. Despite the obvious financial strain, I knew I could afford to draw up a shortlist of people who would be interested and would appreciate the trip to its fullest extent. Hannah was still in, despite a horrific accident that put her life in danger, not just her participation in the holiday of a lifetime. Allan would be joining us, making this trip exactly half of the Norway Crew. It was going to work out well... wasn't it? In 2006 I could never have predicted the future (and I still can't). I could never have seen that the world's banks were going to go into meltdown in the spring of 2008 and threaten everyone's financial well-being – just as I was calling Iceland Holidays to see if there was any news of the following year's tour packages. The first solution was to drop back to the 14-day tour6 which missed out the very empty Western Fjords – I figured we wouldn't be missing much. Later on in the year, I went to Iceland Holidays' office in Crich, where I met Gareth, the brains behind the operation – although not his two loyal assistants, Gabi and Olivia. We had a lengthy discussion, and he gave me a lot of leaflets about accommodation, car hire, a DVD about driving in Iceland and a completely free Rough Guide Iceland Road Map7 which had half of the entire island on each side for long-distance planning. What a superb gesture. I knew I was in the right hands, so not long afterwards I started the booking process formally. Barely a few days after I'd put the deposit down, there was another bolt from the blue as relations between Iceland and Britain suddenly plunged.8 I refused to pull out, though, figuring that this was all blown way out of proportion. And as my preference for foreign travel information now sided with Rough Guides, I picked up their Iceland guide9 (now in its 2007 edition, and far more useful than the four-year-old-plus books I'd already got, plus it's far easier to extract the right information from) and spent an evening in the Sal picking out the best bits at each location while also attempting to find suggestions for bargain-basement accommodation. I'd also armed myself with the Iceland Road Atlas,10 which works in an ingenious way, telling us not only where we were and where we were going but also what to see along the way and all its myths and legends. Superb. Everything was going swimmingly again... ...but if any one of the other two was going to drop out, I hadn't expected it to be Allan – after I'd paid over £1000 deposit. Still I refused to panic... but it did mean finally accepting Facebook into my life, and I spent a whole day adding many and various people as "friends" even if we didn't usually exchange words. I figured there was no harm in dealing out a pre-emptive strike to those most likely to be interested, though, and the next day, Kit came up with the goods – who I've known for a decade and is almost as metal as me and equally interested in All Things Northern. And let's also mention she's been on a very special trip to Reykjavík before11 and was itching to go again to see the rest of the country. Facebook be damned, there was no way this ship was going to sink now.