The trip started with a bus ride to the town of Stykkisholmur about three hours from Reykjavik. There I waited for about four hours for he ferry that would take me to the island of Flatey where I planned to spend the night. So, for four hours I cambered up and down hills, lay in the grass on cliff tops and generally enjoyed the sun.
The boat ride to Flatey is about an hour and a half.
Flatey is grassland surrounded by rocky shores. There are about seven people, two families, who live there full time and have done so for well over a hundred years if not more. They are fishermen and they also collect the eider from the ducks to sell. In the summer a hotel runs and some people also have summerhouses. I stayed in a guesthouse with a family whose daughter I had met before. They invited me to have dinner with them and we had cod cakes, potatoes and seal meat. The seal was a dense texture, not very strong tasting—not at all like the proverbial chicken--but a very red meat. The seal had got caught in their fishing nets. “It had just died,” they said, “We knew it was good, so it would be silly not to eat it.”
They told me stories of their families who in last generations had emigrated too Canada when things were very bad in Iceland—only to find them worse in the freezing heartland of Canada. Of the twelve children born, six had died.
About eleven in the evening, I went for a walk in the evening sun, a long slanting light of color and haze. The island is full of birds. It has not real roads, only a gravel track and the birds sat in the middle of the track, not getting out of your way even if you clucked at them. I climbed a hill to see the view and when I tried to descend along a small path, the birds got furious, screaming at me and trying to dive bomb my head. “OK, OK,” I said. “I get the idea.” I turned around and walked back down the track. Behind the house where I was staying, a mother bird was tending her chicks. “They will leave tonight,” my hostess said, “You can see, they have white on them that gradually disappears. When it is gone, then the babies will leave.” And indeed, in the morning, just as she had known, they were gone.
The next day I took the ferry another hour or so to the ferry landing on the other side, on the West Fjords, planning to make my way to the town of Isafjordur three or four hours away over deserted gravel mountain roads. There is a bus in the summer, for the tourists, that runs three times a week. But this was not its day, this was Thursday and the next bus was Saturday. So it seemed that my only option was to hitch hike.
I got a ride to the junction with the mountain road with a Swiss woman and her mother. She was in Iceland working for a Swiss tourist agency and was in the West Fjords checking out the guesthouses they had in their guidebook—to make sure they really existed. This section of the coast road was paved but the mountain road turned immediately to gravel and twisted its way straight up a mountainside (hence its name…). And there at the junction were—two other hitchhikers! Oh on. And they looked quite scruffy. More hitch hikers than a day’s quota of cars, I thought. Not good.
“The hitch hiking is really crap,” one of them said, “We have been here since yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” I asked. “But yesterday there was a bus. Why didn’t you take the bus?”
“We thought we’d just try our luck at this.”
And you are even more stupid than I am, I thought.
“We spent last night in the forest.”
Forest? I looked around and could not see one single tree. I decided I just wouldn’t ask about that. They sat down on the road to eat their lunch.
I wandered up the road, realized that no one would pick me up there because they would not want to slow on the gravel, walked down again. Stood for about 45 minutes. One Jeep drove by full to the tip with gear. The occupants shouted a greeting in German. I decided to walk down again to the guesthouse where the Swiss women had headed for a coffee. They were sitting on the porch eating a pizza.
“Try making a sign,” the woman said. “Ask someone in the restaurant.” There was no one in the restaurant except them. “Take your sun glasses off so they can see your eyes. And have a piece of pizza. I can’t finish it.”
I accepted her offer, chomped on the pizza, drank my coffee and pulled out my notebook. “Isafjordur,” I wrote. I looked at the sign and then added in dark letters, “Please.”
I walked back to the junction.
“No one has come by while you were gone,” the man of the couple said. “So you didn’t miss anything.” They had finished lunch and were sitting on their packs.
I walked past them to just before where the gravel started and the asphalt ended, took off my sunglasses, held my sign on the ready and squinted at the landscape. After another half hour I heard a car. It slowed—and turned up the mountain road! It passed the two at the bottom. I gave the driver my biggest, most hopeful smile and held up my sign in a most tempting way I thought. The car slowed, stopped. Yes!
The woman driving said she was from Isafjordur and drove this road all the time. Her two children were in the back. As she zipped up and down the mountainsides and along the cliff ringed fjords, seeming oblivious to the sheer drops and crumbling talus slope above, she told me about her life, how she had met her husband when they were nine. How her husband was an actor.
“In Isafjordur?” I asked.
Yes, he worked at the hotel, but he also worked with the youth theater. She told how she and her husband had slid off the road once on the ice. So had her father but he had jumped out of the car before it crashed over the edge. She and her husband had presumably gone over a slope not one of the cliffs since she was clearly still alive. The road was closed in winter but they drove as long as they could until the snows came generally in September sometime.
Finally we hit the paved road and the first tunnel—more on the tunnels later—I arrived in Isafjordur to lounge in the sun waiting for my friends with whom I was going to stay for a few days.
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