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Published: November 20th 2009
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The Dog Looks Happy
He must be used to the weather Day 10: 9th October 2009
1:30 PM
After a week of fairly good, if cold weather, with only the odd exception, Iceland has today given us a taste of the unpredictable extremes that we had read about. The winds that seemed pretty strong when they cracked Lyndsey’s head against the car door last night were, it seems, just the beginning.
After arriving back at the hostel last night, we decided to make tea out of the leftover remains of everything else we had bought, mainly because we were heading back to Reykjavik after this, stopping for a night in Vik to break up the journey, so it seemed wise to use it all up. As a result, dinner ended up as a traditional Icelandic/English/Chinese soup/stew, which tasted much better than it sounds. Three Americans, Joe, Lesley and Alison, turned up pretty late on in the evening. They had been driving all day, as they had decided to drive round the whole island in 5 days, which put our little trek around the south to shame, although they must have rushed through some of the sights a bit. We chatted to them for a while, drank the Viking beer
from the petrol station, then settled down for bed.
This morning the weather had taken a turn for the worst. Joe, Lesley and Alison had been due to go on a glacier tour on Skaftafell, but the guides had cancelled. It was easy to see why. The winds howled harder than at any point yesterday and rain was beginning to join the onslaught. The front door had a sign saying “Stop! The weather is bad for driving”. Not long after, Hannes, the owner of the hostel, turned up, saying that wind speeds were between 70-90mph in parts, although we found out later that in places it made it to 120mph, which is on par with the strongest winds of Britain’s ‘Great Storm’ of 1987 (the one that is famous for Michael Fish getting the weather forecast completely wrong). This, in itself, was probably enough to get us blown into a ditch, and knowing the icy patches on the road between Hvoll and Vik, driving was looking a bad option. Being on the edge of the sandur, the wind would be picking up plenty of sand and grit, and the nearby glaciers would be throwing more at us, enough
to strip the paint from the car, according to Hannes, who left us with his warning and said he would be back at dinner time with an update on the forecast. At first I thought Hannes was probably exaggerating to get an extra night’s accommodation out of us (and let face it, that would probably be the case if he was a British hotel owner), but after he said we could stay the night free of charge, I was convinced that he was probably telling us this because he was a nice man.
We sat talking to the Americans for a while (the two French people from the room next to us kept popping up every now and then as well, but they seemed to prefer their own company and mostly stayed in their room), until Hannes turned up again about 1.00 to tell us that driving to Vik (but no further), was possible, if not entirely safe. The Americans and the French took this as a signal to get going, but, in the way that is stereotypical of British people, we decided to hang fire and make a decision over a cup of tea. Now the tea
is gone, the weather seems to have gotten slightly worse, if anything, so we are still yet to make that decision.
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