February 2020

 I am so sorry folks - I had no idea that I had never got round to posting about my Icelandic adventure in 2020. I did write it all up on Facebook at the time. So to make amends - here it is, as I wrote it at the time: - 

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Hello, and thank you once again for joining me for the very first 2020 edition of An English Fool Abroad with his Sketchbook. Yes, finally I’ve arrived at the world’s most northerly capital city, the Bay of Smokes, or Reykjavik in old money. I say finally, because I was actually supposed to fly here last Sunday. However Storm Dennis put paid to that, and I can’t say that I really blame Easy Jet for cancelling the flight. Still, we’re here now, almost 5 degrees further north than Stockholm, the northernmost of all the capital cities I’d visited prior to today. How much of a difference those five degrees have made – well, I’ll come to that a little later on. 

Flying from Bristol at 7 meant arriving by the 5am mark if possible, which meant leaving the house at about half past three this morning. I’ve only slept a couple of hours since making that drive, yet I have to say that it’s a complete blur to me now, and feels as if it actually happened on a different day. As for waiting in the airport, well, you wouldn’t really have expected anything that interesting to occur, and it didn’t, although I did have a chuckle when an announcer over the tannoy made a last plea for a passenger, whose name now escapes me, to join his flight, in terms so overly polite that surely this must have been sarcasm. 

I don’t know if it’s because they cancelled so many flights last weekend, but EasyJet seemed to be in an awful hurry this morning. The flight information board said that we’d get gate information at 6:25. Au contraire. It was more like 5 past 6, and we were all on board by 6:40 – this, mark you, for a flight that wasn’t due to leave until 7:05. To cut a long story slightly shorter, this meant that for the second trip in a row, I arrived rather earlier than I was originally expecting. 

The flight was okay, even though I didn’t get a window seat. To be honest, you only really need to be close to a window for the last few minutes of the flight anyway. In some ways, this reminded me a little of my flight into Arlanda, Stockholm last year, as there was a lot of snow on the ground, but also a lot of dark, bare patches. This proved to be quite an accurate impression, judging by the bus ride from Keflavik airport into Reykjavik. They don’t go a lot on trees in Iceland at this time of year, and to be honest, even with the snow down the whole place looked a bit miserable. 

Which kind of matched my mood a bit. It’s a dangerous thing to jump to conclusions about a place and a people based solely on your first impressions. However, as I was reporting myself present and correct for my airport transfer, the lady checking in our names did try to rush me a few extra krona – well, quite a lot of extra krona, actually – because I hadn’t booked a door to door transfer. Well, I already knew that, and what she was offering was to drop me somewhere which was actually no closer than where I was supposed to be dropped. I dropped into clueless Englishman mode, and kept my money in my pocket.

I’ll be honest, everything she’d said had filled me with a sense of unease. This was not abated at all when the bus she’d sent me to came to a halt several kilometres outside the centre of Reykjavik, called, if my memory serves me correctly, Bakköfbjond. Everyone was then split up into groups for minibuses. Nobody had a clue which one I should be on, me included, so I asked the driver of one if he went into the centre of Reykjavik, and when he shrugged his shoulders then nodded, I got on the bus and said a little prayer.

Once we got into the centre, I got off as soon as the bus stopped close to the Hallgrimskirkja. This is one of Reykjavik’s biggest landmarks, and it’s the subject of the first sketch of the trip. It’s a bit of an acquired taste, so the guidebooks say. Built in the 70s it certainly isn’t to all Icelanders’ taste by any stretch of the imagination. But at least it was a convenient starting point.

 I used the maps feature on my phone, to direct me to a Tourist Information Office. I charged my phone up last night, but it decided to die on me at this point. Whether it was because of the cold, or just general cussedness I couldn’t say, but I could have done without it at this

point. Still, after a five minute walk I did come to the Tourist Office. Which had closed down. A sign pointed further up the street, announcing that the new office was a mere 150 metres away. Lies. By my estimate it was between half a kilometre and a full kilometre. Still, I did eventually find it. I explained my situation – ie – not really having many ideas at that precise moment of how to get to my guesthouse – to the guy behind the counter, and he immediately baulked at the challenge, and passed me over to his colleague. She, to be fair, turned out to be the first person I had so far encountered in Iceland who could give me a helpful, or at the very least straightforward answer to a question. She pointed out that the bus station was a mere 500 yards down the road, and that I needed the number 17 bus, and had to get off at the Sogavegur stop.

 

Lies? – well, no, to be fair, not really. Half a kilometre down the road there was certainly a place where a lot of buses stopped. A station, though? That would imply buildings, or at the very least a shelter, and
a place to buy tickets. No no no. Still, I did see a number 17 bus waiting to start the journey back to where it came from. I got on, asked “Do you stop at Sogavegur?”, and was told  “No, you want a number 17.” Now, please bear in mind that the bus was clearly a number 17 when I stepped on board. Apparently the 17s become 16s here, and the 16s become 17s. The helpful driver informed me that I could buy tickets from a grocery ‘just behind that green building you can see there.” Well, I was pretty sure that when I’d passed there a moment or two ago there hadn’t been a grocery, or anything vaguely fitting the description. I was right too, there wasn’t. Well, anyway, I slunk back to the bus stop after waiting for the 16 to leave, and a few minutes later a 16 pulled up. True enough, the driver changed the number to 17. I asked him “Sogavegur?” and he replied, “Sure, which one do you want? There are 4 stops. It’s a long road.” I showed him the number of the guesthouse. “Never heard of it.” He replied, and for good measure added, “no idea where that would be.” Of course he didn’t. I don’t wish to be mean, but you might forgive me for forming the impression that as well as driving 4x4 vehicles up the sides of active volcanoes, the other national sport in Iceland is giving misleading and unhelpful advice to clueless Brits.

Speaking of which, nobody has yet mentioned Brexit to me, so let’s be thankful for small mercies. My first trip, to Ieper in Belgium, was taken a matter of weeks after the referendum in 2016, and this is the first trip I’ve made since the legislation came into force. Nobody here seems that bothered. 

Going back to the bus, I opted for the second stop on Sogarvegur, and for once, ignoring other people’s advice and using my own common sense turned out to be the right thing to do. It wasn’t difficult to see which way the numbers worked on the street, and I arrived at the guest house, just as the proprietrix was on her way out. I can’t help wondering whether she’s not a native Icelander, since all the things she quickly told me about my room, the facilities, the keys etc, have all turned out to be correct. 

Well, now that I’m here, let’s put Mr. Grumpy back in his cage for a while, and make a few more positive observations. I won’t deny that I’m really excited to be in Iceland. For me, it goes back to University. In the London University English Literature bachelor’s degree course of the mid 80s, one of the options you could choose to make up the 8 options upon which you would be examined was Old Norse. Now, almost all of the Old Norse literature that we have comes from Iceland. I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure how it is that Old Icelandic literature comes to be part of an English Literature course – well, other than that the original Icelandic alphabet was brought to Iceland by English priests and monks. Still, I’ve never regretted studying it (although the fact that only 2 of us opted for it did mean that there was no hiding place in the seminars and tutorials) since the literature is quite unlike anything else. So Iceland has been on my bucket list for a while.

The weather is unlikely to rise too much above freezing all of the time that I’m here. However the sun did break through a number of times – which gives me just an outside chance of seeing the Northern Lights later. They have a daily forecast showing the likelihood of seeing the aurora borealis, on a scale of 1 – 9, with 9 being ‘ no chance of NOT seeing the Northern Lights tonight, even if you shut the curtains and pull the blinds down’ – and 1 being, ‘Don’t even bother putting your coat on’. Tonight is a 4, while tomorrow and Saturday are both 1s. Going back to earlier today, it wasn’t the air which was cold, but the wind. I shudder to think what the wind chill factor was. Here’s another thing (or should I say, þing –a little runic humour there) as well. In Stockholm last February I did remark on how low the sun was at its height. Today, and 2 in the afternoon when I left the guesthouse for a bit of an explore, the quality of the light was more like you get at about 5pm back home at this time of year. Yet, it stayed that way almost until sunset, without really getting noticeably much darker.

 There, see, aren’t I good? Almost to the end and I haven’t once mentioned how expensive it is here. Don’t worry, I’m saving it all up for you for a coming instalment. So, what highlights can we look forward to tomorrow? Well, before I left I booked and printed out a ticket for the hop on hop off sightseeing bus, so it should be an action packed day, hopefully. That’s if I can persuade the local bus driver to drop me off back into the centre of town. Watch this space, and góða nótt. Well, that’s how they used to say good night in these parts 800 years ago, and that’s góða nuff for me. 

Iceland 2

Hello, and welcome to episode 2 of An English Fool Abroad With His Sketchbook, Iceland edition. Today’s episode, well, today’s episode actually starts yesterday evening. After I posted the first instalment, I went into the sitting room of the guesthouse to chat with the owners, that being, I thought, the polite thing to do. Very nice they seem too. The chap is from the Netherlands as it happens, but the two ladies are Icelanders. As I said, they were very pleasant indeed, but the time we chatted did lend credence to a view I’ve heard expressed in the past, namely, that Icelanders of a certain age need absolutely no encouragement to talk about the Cod War. Well, fair do’s. They did make the mistake of asking me why I was visiting Iceland, and so I showed them my sketchbook, and explained that for the last few years I’ve been visiting and sketching various cities in Europe, and they certainly flattered my ego with their comments on the sketches from Vienna, Malta and Spain in the book. Then they asked me what I was planning on doing today, and I answered that I’d booked myself on a hop on hop off sightseeing tour. The landlady (I wish I could remember her name, but I was knackered when she told me so it went in one ear and out of the other, and I’m too embarrassed to ask again) looked at me over the top of her glasses, and made the observation,

“You will be a little disappointed, I think.” She paused for a moment, before qualifying this remark, ”We do not, I think, have so many sights you will be wanting to hop off for. “ There we are, then, I suppose we all tend to put our home town down. Heaven forbid if anyone else tries, though.

I was in the centre of the town this morning by about half nine, just in time for an Icelandic breakfast. It’s exactly the same as a continental breakfast, except that the croissants are smaller, and it’s about 5 times more expensive. Because whether we like it or not, gentle reader, it’s a fact that Iceland really is expensive. Bloody expensive, in fact. I have an idea why this might be, but I’ll say a little bit more about that later.

There was enough time between arriving in the centre of town and going to catch the sightseeing tour for me to head up to the Hallgrimskirkja, the church in yesterday’s sketch. It was a pleasure to get in out of the wind. It was an odd wind blowing in Reykjavik today. The air itself wasn’t at all cold, and for most of the time the wind wasn’t a problem. However, suddenly you get a full blown gust of wind which I can only think must have come straight from the North Pole. Inside the church, the fellow you can see in one of the sketches was playing with his organ, - every one a little gem, I thenk yow - and I sat down on a bench and made the sketch. Behind me, I could hear a couple of people with fairly strong Midlands accent saying,

“That’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, ‘tis. Bit dreary though. I wonder if he does requests?”

“What would you ask him for? A bit of Beethoven or Mozart?”

“Well, no, I was thinking more of the theme from the Benny Hill Show.”

I kid you not. I stifled a laugh. All of which illustrates a point that maybe this is unusual, but Reykjavik is bursting at the seams with Brits at the moment. Everywhere I’ve gone, the vast majority of what I’ve heard have been English accents.

So, on to the sightseeing bus. The voiceover on the tour several times reminded us that we could get off at any stop we wanted, or do the whole tour and then pick a place to get off, and then get back on later. I thought – with the price you’ve charged for this love, wild horses won’t be dragging my backside off this seat until you’ve been round the whole lot at least once. So I did the full tour, then stayed on back round to the National Museum, which was the next item on the agenda. As for the tour, well, I agree with the landlady that Reykjavik is not the most picturesque city that I’ve ever visited. Apart from anything else, much of it isn’t much more than 100 years old. I didn’t know this before today, but Iceland only gained full independence from Denmark in 1944.

 

Here’s a couple of other juicy little titbits I picked up from the tour. With a population of just over 360,000, it’s hard for the government to provide the excellent public services that they do, and so taxes are high, which may well be one of the reasons why everything is so expensive here. The other little juicy fact is this. You may be aware that the history of the settlement of Iceland begins with one Ingolfr Arnarson. Old Ingolfr, and a lot of those who followed, were basically refusing to tow the line to the first King of Norway - Harald Harfagra – or Harald Fairhair – who basically went around telling the chieftans of all the areas of what became the kingdom of Norway to either accept his rule or accept a sword up the jacksi. In Iceland, the settlers found a land where farming would be possible, and where they could live in the way that they’d always done without having to submit to any other man’s overlordship. The Iceland they found there was about 60% covered in forests. Within a few generations, so much of this had been cut down for building, fuel, and what have you, that this was down to something like 1%. 

The National Museum, where I finally got off the Sightseeing bus, took up this story. It’s actually a period of Iceland’s History I probably know better than I know any other period of Icelandic History, since much of the greatest works of Old Norse literature were written in the 12th and 13th century, looking back to the time between the 9th and 12th centuries, the settlement of the island at the end of the 9th century, and the coming of Christianity in 1000 AD. Compared to other Scandinavian countries, the conversion of Iceland to Christianity was an incredibly peaceful and civilised affair, a matter of consensus between leading landowners, which led to a couple of decades of turning a blind eye to the continuation of worshipping the old Norse Gods which gradually withered away.

I did make a sketch in the museum, of a great auk skeleton (labelled, I was amused to note, as a great auk’s egg) The great auk was known as the arctic penguin, and if you’re thinking that you’ve never seen one, well, you’re in good company. Here’s an interesting fact. The latin name for the species is Pinguinus impennis. Penguins were given the name Penguin due to their superficial similarity to the great auk. Sadly, it seems that the word penguin does not actually derive from the welsh pen gwin, for white head, but actually from the latin pinguis, which means plump. The last known pair were killed on Eldey Island, off the coast of Iceland, as long ago as 1844.

I enjoyed the Museum – well, let’s face it, it’s a museum, and there are precious few of those I don’t like. Mind you, that doesn’t mean I intend visiting the Icelandic Phallologial Museum which I walked past this morning, any time soon. Apparently it has the world’s best (and for all I know, only) collection of penises. Stuffed and mounted? (oh, come on, you know I’m far too much of an overgrown schoolboy not to make a comment like that)

Entry to the National Museum did at least grant me free entry to the Culture House Museum, part of the National Museum, but housed in another building about half a mile away. It’s in a building which has at different times housed the National Museum, the National Gallery and the National Library of Iceland. It was built by the generous Danes for cultural purposes, and it still fulfils this, with an eclectic collection of art reflecting the ways that Icelanders have viewed their world and their lives across the centuries. One thing it does bring home to you is just how skilful woodworkers Icelanders have traditionally been. Anyone now thinking – not surprised – they had to find something to do with all of those trees they cut down may congratulate themselves for having read my mind of exactly what I was thinking.

Tomorrow, then, I’m heading out of Reykjavik. I’ve booked myself on a Golden Circle Tour, which involves some of the Natural beauties of Iceland. Now, you know me, I’m a city boy, and the kind of person who tends to think that Nature’s all well and good in its place – (ie, not in the city) but this is supposed to be spectacular. And I get to see þingvellir, and that’s been a place I’ve wanted to see for ages. All in all it’s going to be a challenging day tomorrow as well, since my time in this guesthouse will be up, and I have to find my second one. I’ve already worked out the route – it’s a lot closer to the centre of the town. All of which is a roundabout way of saying it may be quite some time before I get to post the next instalment. So don’t wait up.

 

Iceland3

Hello, good morning, and welcome to this last edition of An English Fool With His Sketchbook, Iceland edition.

So, let me tell you about the Golden Circle Tour yesterday. Now, due to the circumstances of my original flight being cancelled and having to come later in the week, my guest house couldn’t put me up for yesterday night. So I ended up taking my bag and all my stuff with me on the trip. Which is another reason that I try to always travel as light as I can, good people. I did find out that yesterday’s guesthouse was literally a 5 minute walk from my tour pick up, so I walked up there to see if anyone was about who might let me leave my bag there. No such luck, but it was about the only thing which I could complain about for the whole day, so I’m milking it now.

Back down to the bus stop, and the tour bus arrived on time. Now, my thought as I boarded the bus was – this is no time to behave like a gentleman, so I plonked myself down on the front seat, so that I had a clear and uninterrupted view through the windscreen of the coach. And quite a view it was. Iceland, as I’m sure you know, is a place of great contrasts, the land of Fire and Ice, and I got to see a lot of those yesterday.

So, we had one pick up after we started, and I was filled with a sense of dread as our guide announced that every seat on the bus would be taken. So I hope you can imagine my relief when the seat next to mine was taken by a petite Japanese-American lady called Riko. So it began. Our tour guide announced her name, and for the first 45 minutes or so of the trip I laboured under the impression that her name was Asthma. It was only when we got off, and she wrote her name and the time we had to be back on a little board, that I learned it was actually Lasma. There you go. She sat with her back to us while telling us not to eat or drink on the bus – ironic really since I had a mouthful of Doritos at the time.

Similar silliness with names came as we made our first scheduled stop in a place called Hveragerði, which unfortunately immediately became labelled in my mind as Hurdygurgy. This was really just a convenience stop, but the place was interesting as you could see a crack caused by the splitting of the Eurasian and North American Tectonic plates. Get used to those words – they came up a lot during the day.

Our first real stop of the day was the Kerið Crater. This. . . well , it was a huge crater, basically. Very impressive as well, because of the steepness of the sides. Lasma expressly forbade any of us for stepping on the ice at the bottom of the crater. Needless to say, I have photos of merry Icelanders happily trekking across the ice, who obviously didn’t get the message. A group of ladies from Surrey, to whom I was speaking at the bus stop earlier, told me that they were going to wait and watch for a few minutes in the hope that one of them might fall in. I walked all around the rim of the crater, then stopped and made a phone call to the guesthouse, to tell them I wouldn’t be arriving till about 6. “No Problem,” said the proprietor, “Any time you like, just ring the doorbell.” And I think that it was at this point that I realised what it is with Icelandic people. They’re actually incredibly helpful. . . but you have to ask. In the couple of days I’ve been here, nobody has actually offered to help me, or proferred any useful information, until I’ve asked. Since we had another 10 minutes before we needed to get back on the bus, I rang the transfer company, and tried my luck by asking when they were picking me up for the airport, and where from. “No problem sir, I can tell you that now.” Thus emboldened, I even got him to change my pick up point to stop number 12, which is actually a 3 minute walk from the Guest House. “No problem, sir, is there any thing else I can do for you?” What a difference a couple of days makes.

So then, Kerið Crater – good. Next stop – Gulfoss. Well, actually, not quite. For Lasma noticed some Icelandic horses in a snow field by the side of the road, and asked if we wanted to stop. Sure, why not? Icelandic horses – well, put it this way, even if you took one out of its natural background, a good look would convince you that these tough little beggars are ideally suited for Iceland’s climate. 

After much petting, cooing and photographing had been done, Lasma shepherded us back onto the bus, and told us a couple of interesting facts about Icelandic horses. Apparently they were first brought to Iceland by Russian traders, and their DNA has been traced back to Mongolian ancestors. In order to preserve the purity of the breed, once a horse leaves Iceland, it can’t come back. I may have had that wrong.

What I didn’t have wrong is the story of how Gulfoss – a spectacular waterfall – was save for the nation. On the sign it proudly proclaims that the first person who tried to buy it for development was an Englishman – who was defeated (as they were in the Cod War! The sign didn’t actually say that, but I bet the person who made it was thinking it.) Then just over 100 years ago, some developers tried to buy the land including Gulfoss from its owner, Thomas Tommasson – apologies if I have the name wrong. He said that Gulfoss was like a friend, and he’d never sell it. So the developers got him plastered, and he sold it to them. Appalled, his daughter tried everything she could to have the sale declared illegal, eventually managing to engage Iceland’s first professional lawyer, and she succeeded, and it was she who passed Gulfoss on to the Icelandic Nation. It is absolutely stunning, but I have to say that it was the first time on this Iceland trip that I have really felt perishingly cold, which is quite something considering that I was wearing T Shirt, light jumper, heavy jumper, heavy coat, gloves, woolly hat, balaclava hood.

Cards on the table, it was worth coming this far to see Gulfoss, but even more was to come. The lunch stop was for the Geyser, Strokkur. The official line is that Strokkur erupts every five minutes. Hmm. I guess that it probably averages out at about 5 minutes. It is spectacular though. The steaming water of the lake rises momentarily in a blue hemisphere, then Whoosh! The first time I saw it, it must have risen close to its 30m maximum. Second time, not so much. Only after I’d seen and photographed the waterfall did I stop for lunch, overpriced fish and chips with far too much salt, and an argument in the queue with an Icelandic guy who pushed in thrown in for good measure. “Who won the bloody Cod War anyway?!” he didn’t ask, but this maybe because he was only about 25. Modesty forbids me from saying who won this small but important battle over queueing etiquette (me).

Look, I’ll be honest, Gulfoss and Strokkur were absolutely amazing, but the thing I was most looking forward to, or should I say, the þing, was þingvellir. Right, þingvellir is where the Alþing, Iceland’s parliament, was held from the 10th until the end of the 18th centuries. The area itself is situated where the North American Tectonic plate ends. There’s a lavafield of something like 7 kilometres before the Eurasian Tectonic Plate starts. I don’t know what it was about this, but Lasma really went to town about this, and frankly, I don’t really need to be hearing the words North American Tectonic Plate any time soon. We were given the choice of walking up the trail past where the Alþing took place, or staying on the bus. Which would have kind of defeated the object, in my opinion, but there you go. I loved it. What’s more, I refrained from giving my fellow travellers even the short version of my Old Norse literature lecture – the one which lasts about half an hour. Don’t even ask about the long one.

Back to the bus, then, and back to Reykjavik. What an absolutely fabulous day. I was still raving about it when I got to the guesthouse a few minutes later. I’ll be honest, wherever I’ve been I’ve usually found that complimenting hotel staff/boarding house owners on the beauty of their city or country usually goes down well. What a pleasure to be able to do so yesterday without lying. I’ll be honest, I’m a city boy, and usually immune to the wonders of geology and geography, but yesterday was absolutely incredible.

One slight drawback. Using the guesthouse wifi, I chilled out by watching a couple of Red Dwarf episodes yesterday evening, and ever since then I’ve had the flipping Arnold Rimmer song stuck in my head.

Well, that just about wraps it up for Iceland. Thanks for being with me.