Day 8: Meeting People Who Aren't Strangers, Looking Round Vik Again and Heading off into the Wilderness

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10:00 PM

A strange thing happened last night. We were just cooking our tea, having finally got into the kitchen around 9.30, when a bearded bloke came up to me and said “Excuse me, are you from Wolverhampton?”
I was slightly confused as to how he might know this, so I gave him a look that said “Yes. Explain” and started chatting to him. It turns out that he is a friend of a friend of mine called Dan who I have met a few times. The last time I saw him I don’t think he had the beard, or at least he was in the early stages of bushy growth, which I count as a reasonable excuse for not recognising him until he actually told me who he was. It’s strange how we can come to a country that hardly any British people seem to visit, in fact until yesterday we had met only one, then you come to a tiny town with a population of nearly 300 and bump into someone who lives down the road from you.

By the time we had cooked our dinner (traditional Icelandic haddock), eaten it and washed up, it was 11.00 and everyone else had gone to bed, so we followed suit given that there wasn’t much else to do in such a remote place on such a windy, cold night.

This morning I awoke around 7.00 and noticed that nobody else was awake yet. I’m not normally particularly quick thinking first thing in the morning, but my brain was soon in gear and I realised that our floor had only one shower between around 20 of us, and I made a dash to get in there second, after Lyndsey, who had also had the same idea and beaten me to it.

The early part of the morning we spent in Vik, revisiting the beach in the daylight and having a look around the famous wool shop, which, unusually for Iceland, looked like it had been set up simply to rip tourists off. Around midday we left Vik and carried on our journey east. In the daylight, the cobbled stones along the road in Vik looked just right in the backdrop of this tiny village, but still seemed odd when you consider that this particular road is Iceland’s equivalent to the M25. Once away from Vik, the land started to flatten out once more, and the weather of the last few days left the plains looking icy, with miles and miles of nothing but white snowdrifts. Eventually, the road itself started to ice over, to the point where the left hand side was completely white and the right only had patches of road. I slowed down to what I considered a respectable speed, not wanted to test the snow tyres too much and genuinely worried that we could end up stuck in a ditch in the not too distant future. Along the way we decided to stop at one of the various parking spots dotted along the ring road designed to let tourists take pictures of the glacier and the mountains. John and Lyndsey had already been taking pictures as we drove, so the real reason for stopping was to build a snowman, but the snow was more like dusty ice that wouldn’t stick together, and in the end all I could manage were a few snowballs. Eventually, the road started to move away from the glacier and back into the flat farming land and river basins that head out to sea. While crossing the icy plains, we hadn’t seen a soul since leaving Vik, no towns or settlements along the road, no drivers trying to navigate the roads in the opposite direction. We stopped at the first town after Vik to get some petrol. Kirkjubæjarklaustur, or just Klaustur to the vast majority of the world’s population that wouldn’t have a clue where to start at pronouncing the full name, is the biggest town in the 273km between Vik and Höfn, the next major town on the coast. When I say town, I mean it was essentially a petrol station and a cafe with a couple of farm buildings next to it, but this was the most we had seen since leaving Vik or would see for the rest of the day.

After a quick stop off at another waterfall along the way, we arrived at the hostel in Hvoll in the middle of the afternoon. I’m not sure if Hvoll is the name of the hostel or the town, I had assumed the latter because it was named on maps, but once we had driven down a slightly dodgy gravel track off Route 1, we realised that Hvoll was a hostel with a farm building next door, nothing more. It seems a strange place to have a hostel, convenient for us as we travelled along the south coast, but right on the edge of the world’s biggest Sandur (a desert formed from sand and grit blowing off the top of the glacier) and 25km from the nearest petrol station, let alone the nearest town.

The hostel is Iceland’s 3rd biggest, and I assume it must be busy in the summer, but the 20 or so dormitories here are being used only by us and two other people. The place is deserted and feels somewhat ghostly at times, particularly as the reception is in the farmhouse next door, so the hostel doesn’t even contain any staff.

After a refreshing cup of tea we decided to have a walk around the area near the hostel rather than do any more driving today. First we walked along the river banks, which were fast flowing in places, completely frozen in others, which gradually led us towards the Sandur until the land became marshy and forced us to turn back. After this we headed in the opposite direction, back along the gravel road, this time accompanied by the farm’s sheepdog, who seems to have taken a liking to us.

Tonight we made a curry for tea then looked around the hostel for something to do, succeeding only in annoying the other two guests, who must have been out and about all day and were in bed before 9.00. We also discovered a bunch of board games that must have been left there in the 1980’s, and found that, despite the claim on the box, Spectrangle 36 is not the most exciting board game in the world.

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Photos

The Beach at Vik
In the daylight

Lyndsey Wears an Animal
That was hanging up in the wool shop

A Random Sign
Doctor. This way.