Three weeks in a David Attenborough documentary - #1


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Europe » Iceland » Southwest » Selfoss
August 30th 2013
Published: August 30th 2013
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Our trip to Iceland didn’t start very auspiciously, with our flight being delayed for 2 hours because of French air traffic control strikes! We wriggled and fidgeted and worried until they finally told us we were going, but we were pretty lucky that they hadn’t cancelled our flight like a lot of others. In our spare time we did manage to buy a bottle of duty free gin as we had heard alcohol was very expensive in Iceland, so the time wasn’t totally wasted.

And before we knew it, we were touching down in Reykjavik. The sun was shining and it wasn’t unbearably cold, we couldn’t believe it! We’d been told that Icelandic people had been voted the friendliest in the world, and before long that was readily apparent. Some excitable and possibly slightly drunk locals befriended me in the airport while I waited for Pete to get money out. The airbus driver spotted us looking lost and walked us over to the right place, chatting animatedly the whole time about the weather. We drove through Keflavik, which is meant to be the ugliest part of Iceland, but I thought it was amazing. It is kilometres and kilometres of flat volcanic fields, dark earth lightly steaming in the sun. I felt like I could almost see the earth underneath us cleaving and groaning to create the land we were driving across. You can tell I was already a little enchanted by the place.

We were dropped at the bus station where two workers there gave us very detailed and helpful walking directions into town, including the ‘real McCoy’ map (their English is astoundingly good, they come out with funny sayings like that a lot). While walking, every single car we came near stopped to let us pass, even at places that weren’t pedestrian crossings. So friendly!

Reykjavik is the capital of Iceland, but it only has a population of HOW MANY?? So really it’s like a large provincial town. A lot of the houses are built of coloured corrugated iron with contrasting coloured doors and window frames, they are unbelievably cute. We didn’t want to spend long in the city, we were impatient to get out exploring the country! But we had a lovely night in the city, eating at a delicious vegan restaurant and wandering down by the water in the broad daylight of 9.30 pm! We had lucked upon another great apartment and decided to christen our first night in Iceland with a duty free gin. However Pete got a little over-excited while cutting the lemon and slipped, almost cutting off the top of his thumb! There was a lot of blood, swearing and a few shots of gin, but eventually we had him bandaged up and a little drunk. We decided to wait to the morning to see if he needed to get stitches, and distracted ourselves planning our next few days hiking! At 12:30 we looked out the window and the sky was just getting pink, sunset! But the sky only dimmed slightly and was completely bright again when I got up to go to the bathroom at 3am.

Liking to do things in a rather whirlwind fashion, the next day we raced around town hiring camping gear, going to the doctors (the thumb was fine), buying food, dropping off a bunch of our stuff at Pete’s Icelandic friends house and getting on a bus in the afternoon! We started driving and already I was awe-struck. The city ends very quickly and all around are great fields filled with crumbled rock, thrown there by volcanoes. Flanking the road all along are brooding cliffs wearing hats of thick cloud. It was stormy and a little rainy, but it made it all the more dramatic. It was still drizzling when we were dropped off at Skogar, our campsite for the night and the starting point for our hike. At the sight of an enormous waterfall plunging noisily off the cliffs right next to where we were camping we started giggling and skipping, not caring one bit about the rain!

We weren’t prepared for the hike at all. But we were happy to have an adventure, and the signs at Skogar said this trail should take about 8-10 hours. A fair slog with giant packs on our backs (filled with food, tents and cooking apparatus), we these things always over-estimated times right?

We ascended many slippery stairs next to Skogafoss, the waterfall, and proceeded to walk past over 20 equally magnificent waterfalls. It was misty with rain which made the deep valleys look even more magical. Great plumes of water plunged off the face of the rocks, which were covered with an impossibly green moss. Iceland has a very high percentage of people who believe in fairies and trolls, and I could see why. In fact there was a story that a Viking had buried magic treasure at the bottom of Skogafoss, that had managed to elude even the most daring explorers. The whole thing looked like a movie set, I half expected that underneath the moss, the rocks were all made of chocolate or honeycomb. There were a number of points that required clambering up slippery edges, something which terrified me completely, especially when I had a huge pack on my back. Pete was patient though and managed to coax me through it. The trail was not marked or particularly clear, but we were lucky that other people were more prepared than us, some English guys who were hiking just ahead of us had a map. The trail goes up 1000 metres in the first half and it got increasingly more difficult, but continued to be beautiful. Not having a map was actually a good motivator for moving quickly, we had to keep up with the English guys! About 5 hours in, we started to see patches of snow on the ground. At one point we had to cross the river and the only way to do that was on a bridge that started about 2.5 metres up. We had to clamber up the side to get onto it, but it was that or wade through a surging icy river.

By the time the snow got ankle deep, we started to think about breaking the hike up into two days. We had finally found a map that showed us that we were still a long way from the end point, but only an hour from a respite hut. The fog was incredibly thick now and you could only just see the next marker in front of you. Surrounded by fog and snow, it was eerily quiet. Our packs were feeling heavier, our feet were soaked (neither of us had expected snow!), the snow was slippery and steep and we were exhausted. Pete was my hero and carried my bag for a little of the way. Just when I was feeling at the end of my tether I stepped in some thick mud, and when I pulled my foot out, the sole of my boot came off almost completely! Only half way through a hike in the snowy mountains, this was potentially very problematic. English hikers to the rescue! The two very friendly and helpful men pulled gaffa tape and cable ties out of their efficiently packed bags and we all sat down in the snow to bind my shoe onto my foot. I couldn’t help but laugh. We managed to create some semblance of a shoe, but there was no way I was walking much further. When we saw the silhouette of a hut through the fog we cheered, I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see a place! We had planned to keep walking about another kilometre to another set of huts that were meant to be nicer, but once we got inside we knew there was no moving on. It was warm and dry, with a big communal kitchen space and a floor upstairs for sleeping. The four of us (Pete, me and the two English guys Vincent and Steve) stripped off our wet clothes and made hot dinners, which we wolfed down with gusto. They were lovely guys, probably in their late 40’s who did a hike together once a year! Before long other hikers started to collapse into the hut, equally bedraggled, some having come the same way as us, some from the other direction. I had started to feel like a woose for not making it the whole way, but was happy to see everyone else had had just as hard a time. Apparently the trail isn’t meant to have snow at this time of year, but it had been a very long winter! We all got chatting and actually had a really nice, cheerful evening. There was a sense of camaraderie in making it through a hard day. At one point someone came in to tell us there was blue sky outside and we all ran outside with glee, taking photos of the tiny patch! Iceland weather is a little like Melbourne weather, but in the arctic. Before long it had completely cleared and we could see the incredibly beautiful snow covered mountains completely surrounding us. We had walked up them and hadn’t been able to see a thing a few hours before! Needless to say we all slept soundly.



The next day was better. I had a lot of tape and string around both shoes (one as preventative) and we surged out of the hut into fog and snow thicker and scarier than the day before. It was really hard to see the markers but we had start-of-the-day energy and we just kept pushing up the steep, slippery hill. I was determined to get as far as I could before exhaustion kicked in. Throughout the morning the fog would suddenly clear to show us another breathtaking vista. There were huge mountains everywhere, crystal blue frozen lakes and ice melted in bizarre shapes. We came upon a large hill that was a startling deep red. We dropped our packs and clambered up it, realising that it was a huge mound of volcanic rock or lava. To our delight we discovered that it wasn’t covered in fog, but was actually steaming. The volcanic warmth was seeping up through the rock! We sat with glee amongst the warmth, burying our wet feet deep in the rocks.

There were still challenging parts up ahead, mostly a very steep downhill section covered in snow where we both fell over a number of times, not very fun with a huge bag, and Pete ripped his pants. But then up ahead we saw a tiny patch of green moss and mottled rock and we knew where we were. This was the pass between two giant glaciers Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökulland the part we had been looking forward to. Some walkers we had met coming the other way had told us that it was too foggy to see anything, so we weren’t expecting much, snapping a million photos of the tiny patch we could see. But as we descended, the fog just cleared and it was more beautiful than I could have imagined. On one side of the pass was a huge dark valley with menacing gnarled cliffs, a huge waterfall and steam rising out of the earth in Mordor like plumes. On the other side was fingers of ice creeping down through a stunning, gold and green valley, the glacier had carved a river through the enormous mountains. We stopped to have lunch there and just stare.

After that we felt like we had made it, even though we still had a few hours to go. But we knew the rest was downhill and we were ecstatic that the fog had cleared at just the right moment for us to see the pass. The day actually stayed clear, I took off my heavy coat for the first time and we couldn’t stop grinning and taking pictures as we wandered through the bright green valleys. The ice had carved the mountains in crazy gnarled shapes, something Pete dubbed “crag-city”. The path just got prettier and prettier and nature started to come back as we got lower, beautiful wild flowers and birds singing. The path was a little hairy at times, with some narrow ridges and downhill slopes where you had to scoot down backwards while holding onto a rope they had secured in the ground. Legs aching from such a steep descent, we finally made it to the bottom, to Thorsmork. It had taken us a day longer than expected but it had been so much more than we could have hoped it would be. The campsite there is very well equipped and we revelled in not having to walk anymore, eating mounds of pasta and going to bed early, politely declining party invitations from a very drunken CEO on a business trip.

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