egilsstadir

Date traveled: February 21, 2017

Our second day in Iceland was mostly spent driving really slowing through those famous Icelandic blizzards. Two road closures took us the scenic route (though at times almost nothing could be seen), so we stopped briefly in some small town in rural east Iceland.

We also stopped for a roadside hike, during which time we spotted some reindeer and managed to get pretty close. I don’t think they minded much, but I was half-hoping they’d come say hello and lick my hands or something. They were kind of digging with their noses pushing away a thin layer of snow to get at the moss underneath, about ten of them. After literally chasing them around for awhile, later we discovered both that they (a) could viciously attack people and (b) were hunted in the area.

Walking on the terrain was pretty unusual because there were large bumps every step, so you could either step on top or between them. There was lots of hay growing too. It felt like at any moment you could go crashing through dozens of feet to a more stable bottom, like you’re walking on a thatch roof.

Once we finally made it to our destination – the capital of East Iceland (population 1900) – we went to the one restaurant and played Sequence in the motel. From what we could tell, the most popular thing to do there was take the ferry to Greenland that came once or twice a week that time of year. It reminds me of the one time I went to Port Angeles and there was a sign with their top 10 things to do and #1 was take the ferry to Victoria, where I had just come from.

I can’t describe the desolate beauty in the remote landscape on that far side of the island, and frankly my cell phone camera couldn’t either, but the drive was surreal. Glaciers next to large waves only feet from the small highway, sometimes dirt, no shoulder, just drifting into a clear greenish-blue (not a polluted green), hitting rocks along the way so they shot up in spurts. The reveal when coming from behind a bend was always like someone pulled a giant curtain to show a winter paradise, sometimes with abandoned grafittied farm houses for good effect.

The remote parts of a remote half-frozen island feel like another world. Driving through on no sleep, with an unreliable car and sleeping passengers more than once made me fear the worst, rolling over into a ditch, trying to flag down the occasional car once visibility improved.

In a time when I think we’ll see a reduction in world travel, not an increase, I’m going to mentally add ‘rural Iceland’ to the list of places I’ll probably never return to, and that’s okay. There are other places I could drive round terrified feeling like I’m on acid.

I like to imagine another version of myself would survive more than a week in cold desolation, playing with little horses and digging forts into the side of mountains to write rough poetry.