The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (36 page)

We were off on the Golden Tour, which sounded vaguely dirty. Péter provided anecdotes about Reykjavík’s largest shopping mall, salmon fishing in the city’s streams, and locals going to Austria to ski, and then told a little joke about what we should do in case of an accident in which he was rendered unconscious. Whenever Péter got stuck for an expression in English, he gently slipped into Icelandic. Even in English, his accent was a bit thick, and it took me several guesses about “lovers’ tourists” to realize he was saying “lavatories”—not a mistake that anyone wants to make.

As we passed swaying purple fields, Péter trotted out his stories about lupines. He mistakenly told us that the plants had not been introduced to Iceland until the 1950s. They had rapidly become a pest, and in an attempt to combat them they were being harvested for use in the production of fertilizer. I think that Icelanders are a little embarrassed about the way their ancestors cut down all the forests, leaving just a few scrubby little trees. Péter told us that the birch and willow shrubs around us were native, but that everything else had been introduced from other nations with similar climates. The habitat struck me as stark, although Robin suggested the altogether better expressions “sweeping” and “rugged.” It was a lot of bare ground and sparse cover, and it left me wondering how much of it had been forested before the first human occupation.

We stopped for fifteen minutes at a volcanic explosion, Crater Keri, one of a chain of craters and the easiest to get to by bus. This crater was surrounded by the contents of eight tour buses. Keri had exploded some 6,500 years earlier and was half-filled with beautiful blue water. Having taken an antihistamine to counter the pollen-rich air of southern Iceland, I was feeling pretty mellow about the explosions,
landslides, and frequent earthquakes Péter told us were shaping the local topography.

We arrived at Gullfoss, which I gather means “golden waterfall.” In the distance, we spied a substantial icefield, and to the right was the eponymous waterfall, which isn’t the sort of thing you would go over twice. Broad and arcing with a two-step drop, it was all about noise and visitors. Water from the River Hvíta fell into a narrow gorge, which meant plenty of mist, plenty of happy moss, and a nice rainbow.

From there we moved on to a geyser field. The biggest of the lot, named Geysir, was old and tired. Although it was a real whopper when it went off, it did so with diminished frequency, saving itself for the aftermath of earthquakes. Despite its geriatric predisposition, every geyser in the world is named after it. Its smaller brother, Strokkur, erupts on the scale of Old Faithful in Yosemite Park at twenty-five to thirty-five metres, which it does every two to ten minutes. I sat on a bench and watched it erupt several times. Robin took lots and lots of photographs.

Just beyond Pingvallavatn, Iceland’s largest inland sea, we found ourselves at Pingvellir National Park, which is particularly significant to geologists. According to a plaque, “The junction of the tectonic plates is more clearly visible here than anywhere else in the world.” I was expecting some sort of fire-and-brimstone setting, the kind of place where you might throw an enemy to send them to hell. Not that I was disappointed exactly, but this meeting of tectonic plates was a groove in the Earth, five or ten metres across and about the same depth, half-filled with cheerful blue water. Bouldery to be sure, but not hellish. We were told that the American and European plates move apart by two centimetres a year, meaning that GPS calculations have to be updated once per decade. Robin’s reaction to the whole thing was “That’s brilliant, that is!”

W
HEN ROBIN HAD ASKED ME
to set the itinerary for our trip, he explained that whatever looked good to me would be fine with him. And so I checked to see where we could get to on Air Iceland
from Reykjavík. I read the description of each of the communities in a guidebook and chose two that were most likely to support lupines.

Most airlines have a great screaming infantile fit if even one passenger isn’t strapped into their seat forty minutes before the scheduled departure time. This does not apply to Air Iceland. Arriving at the regional airport in Reykjavík two hours before our flight, we were turned away from the check-in desk and asked to report back in ninety minutes. Five minutes before takeoff, we were summoned to the airplane. No metal detectors to walk through, no X-ray machines for the carry-on luggage, and the woman who checked our boarding passes saw no reason to ask for identification.

By coincidence, the Fokker 50 that had taken Lindsay and me around northern Ethiopia was the same model that took Robin and me to Heimaey on the Westman Islands off Iceland’s south coast. Same model but built in a very different era. Unlike the filled-to-the-brim planes in Ethiopia, there were only nine other passengers on the fifty-two-seater here. Robin had no trouble getting a window seat.

Heimaey is one of Iceland’s largest communities, even though it is home to only 5,000 people. Its airport is, in a word, cute. For the impatient traveller like me, it is possible to grab one’s luggage as it is lifted down from the hold. For those with more patience, a trolley with the luggage is driven straight into the departure lounge. Outside the terminal, the taxi rank sat empty, and no one stopped to give us a lift into town. It was time for a tramp.

Unfortunately, Robin was still wearing his camera around his neck, and as soon as he saw some interesting rocks, he stopped to compose a photograph. Twenty seconds later, he spied a rock with an interesting flower and stopped to compose a photograph. Fifteen seconds later, he spotted a mound he could stand on to compose a better photograph of the rock with the flower.

“Look, Robin, rather than standing around strapped to this very heavy backpack while you snap photos, shall we walk into town first?”

“Oops. Sorry. Yes … I, um, forgot about the backpack,” and although he didn’t put the camera away, he and his little suitcase on wheels did struggle to keep up.

We found our guesthouse and dropped our bags before setting off in search of adventure and food. I was distressed to find that Robin still had his camera around his neck and a pack full of camera accessories on his back. He went almost two minutes before pulling off the lens cap, but in the next ten minutes we didn’t move twenty-five metres. Or rather, I didn’t move twenty-five metres; Robin was fifty metres up a hillside.

Watching someone else take photographs is like watching them trim their fingernails while muttering about F-stops, shutter speeds, and depth of field.

“Robin, you need to get off the road.”

“What?”

“You are standing in the middle of the road, and you are about to get run down.” I snapped. “Robin, I’m going to leave you to it. How would it be if we met up in a couple of hours, say four o’clock? You have the key to the room.”

And then I marched off in a straight line to get some food.

I was well into an internal dialogue that featured Robin as a really poor choice of travelling companion. The dialogue changed to a consideration of Iceland as a poor choice of destinations. If this was, indeed, Iceland’s second biggest community, I had seen a good chunk of it in less than an hour, and there wasn’t a bloody lupine in sight. And when I found the so-called grocery store, it was about as well stocked as the top drawer of a nun’s bedside table and didn’t have a single carton of milk on the shelves. But after I stuffed back a banana, some yoghurt, and a bag of salty peanuts, the world started to seem a cheerier place. Robin wasn’t a buffoon; he was Robin, and it was as much his photo holiday as it was my lupine adventure. I felt like a jerk.

And Iceland started to look pretty good again. I spotted hillsides with patches of lupines and took the time to look at the soaring, volcano-created peaks around me. I watched children
who had just started their summer holidays. Some were kicking footballs, some practising their hopeless golf swings, some splashing in the pool, and some roped up on a cliff face. I started to examine closely the whimsical houses that made up Heimaey. One looked like a cross between a Scottish petrol station and a Nevada brothel. Another was based on a Swiss chalet designed by a blind Cuban architect who didn’t know where Switzerland was.

I walked by the town’s facility for generating heat for its homes. A plaque out front explained that heating oil had fallen out of favour after a series of nasty fires. After a volcanic eruption in 1973, someone got the idea of using the lava’s heat to warm homes and started a pilot project on five houses and the hospital in 1978. Ten years later, the lava cooled down. Now the island is heated by electricity from the mainland, supplemented by heat from the community’s garbage incinerator.

I walked to the edge of the town’s lava flow, the result of the volcanic eruption. I watched the ferry as it docked. I strolled along the harbourfront and watched a cliff of nesting kittiwakes. When I met Robin, I offered up a bottle of red wine and a package of cookies, and asked him all about his photographic ramblings.

A
FTER A BREAKFAST
gleaned from a slightly better-stocked grocery store, we trundled off along the island’s west shore, heading south. We followed a line of lava cliffs—not the sort that anyone would make a grand suicide attempt from, but death would almost certainly result from a misstep. Rough and jagged black lava stripped the tread from my hiking boots.

In terms of birdlife and plant life, an important ecological principle was demonstrated here. Close to the equator, you find lots of diversity but low abundance. Here, closer to the pole, lives a lesser diversity of form but in tremendous abundance. White Wagtails skittered everywhere, and oystercatchers and redshanks scolded us unremittingly. Robin took lots of photos of the lava and offshore sea stacks, and spent not an insubstantial portion of my day trying
to get just the right shot of fulmars soaring by the cliff edge. I lay on the grass while all this was going on, thinking pleasant thoughts.

We walked toward a series of tall wooden racks. They were obviously designed to dry something, but from a distance, we couldn’t imagine what. As we got closer we found, hanging from blue nylon ropes, many thousands of fish heads. Why in the world would anyone want to dry a fish head, let alone thousands of them? They certainly weren’t going to get any drier, so why hadn’t they been collected? Perhaps they make really good soup. The racks were close enough to town to be convenient, but far enough to keep down complaints about the smell. Resources from the sea. The coinage of Iceland tells me that islanders recognize and appreciate their tie to marine food. A cod is found on the 1-krona coin. The 5-krona coin features a dolphin, with a capelin on the 10 krona, a shore crab on the 50 krona, and a lumpfish on the 100 krona.

At the south end of the island, like a big blob of quickly drying paint, is a piece of land hanging on by a narrow isthmus, no doubt the result of some long-extinct volcano. Robin followed the roadway to the peak, but I circled from the periphery. This grassy peak, named Stórhöfði, hosted a lot of sheep. With sheep comes sheep poop, and with that come flies. They didn’t bite, but had no end of fun getting up my nose. I was puzzled by the wealth of small burrows in the hillside. I saw no evidence of rabbits. Then it occurred to me that the holes were puffin nesting burrows. The ground beneath my feet must have been full of growing puffin chicks, and I kept to the trails to minimize the risk of collapsing a burrow.

Back in town, Robin and I walked to the lava field. The ground underfoot was tortured and twisted, but also remarkably fragile. Somehow I expected cooled lava to be as hard as steel, but it broke and crumbled rather easily. Wherever a little ash had settled to make the beginnings of soil, lupines had established themselves. And I suppose that this was the point, really. They had been introduced to Iceland to stabilize the soil where nothing else would grow.

We took the most gradual route I could find to Eldfell’s 200-metre
peak. Beyond lupines, what vegetation did manage to get a foothold was very tiny. The stones underfoot were thumbnail-sized, and this made for a lot of backslip. It was a tough climb, but our efforts were rewarded with a stunning view. I have been up a lot of mountains, and the view from this one ranked highly. Grassy green hills and plains lay to the east and south. Lava fields to the northeast were sage-coloured from lichen and moss that bravely clung to the land. The town lay to the northwest. To the north across the channel were the peaks and glaciers of mainland Iceland, and all around was a whole lot of ocean stretching to infinity. The breeze blew from the east, and as it climbed the dark lava rubble, it warmed. Having been to the Westman Islands, I now have no need to travel to the Galapagos.

While we had been hiking, Heimaey had been invaded by a battalion of ten-year-old boys. It was something like
Lord of the Flies,
but on a much larger scale and with fewer spears. In a café, Robin and I were told that a three-day soccer tournament was about to begin, and that the island’s population had just swollen by 1,000 boys and their guardians. The café was filled with little people kicking toilet doors, trying to get their teammates to hurry up. Our server explained that the chef had “gone away to sea,” and that the items on offer were rather meager. Most of the beverages were gone too. The chef had probably run away at just the right time. We high-tailed it back to Reykjavík.

I w
AS IN GREAT ANTICIPATION
of the forty-minute flight from Reykjavík to Ísafjöður. It seemed a delightful opportunity to see the country from above, particularly since the skies were completely clear. Well, I can report that most of the interior of Iceland looks remarkably like the back of Robin’s head.

I tried to imagine the meeting between the Ísafjöður town council and Iceland’s Federal Aviation Authority when the application for an airport came up for discussion. “Now, let’s see if we understand you. You want to build the airport on the far side of the fiord from the town? Well, that’s up to you. Now, to get to the runway,
planes will have to fly down a particularly narrow valley with their wings practically touching the cliff faces on both sides, right? And to lose altitude, in a couple of places the planes will come within six metres of the ground before diving over the next cliff, is that right? And then, at the very last minute, the plane will have to bank hard to starboard to have any chance of snagging the runway? And you think that passengers are going to go for this? You do realize that planes will be able to land only during daylight? So in the middle of winter, that will be about ten minutes each day. Well, good luck!”