This morning I asked John what he wanted to do today. “I want to see the volcano,” he insisted. “People will say to me, ‘You went to Iceland when there was an active eruption of a volcano and you didn’t go?’” I agreed that the pictures look pretty spectacular.
But I had no idea how to get there, so I suggested that we go to the nearby tourist office and ask them. The young man there was extremely helpful and drew us a little map of where to park and walk. “Just how long does it take?” John asked him.
In perfect English he responded, “Oh, it is at least two hours each way, scrambling over very rugged terrain. There is no path.”
We decided, dear readers, to just content ourselves with looking at the pictures of the eruption on the television. Our days of scrambling over rocks and shimmying down cliffs are over.
So what should we do instead? The guidebooks all suggest doing the Golden Circle first and then, if you have another day, driving up and down the south coast of the country to look at waterfalls and a black sand beach. This seemed like a day trip for elderly people to us, and since we are, sad to say, getting pretty old ourselves, we decided that it would be perfect. And, in fact, it was really rather wonderful.
The first hour of driving was pleasant but dull. We passed by lovely little farms, all of which seemed to have sheep or cows or horses peacefully grazing in the meadows. We went through a number of small towns, all of which seemed to have a large number of fairly new single family houses and small shopping centers with a large parking lots. They seemed clean, safe, and boring. I started to think I was in Central Point, Oregon.
But after that first hour, the landscape became more rugged, and the glaciers came into view. And that’s why it stopped seeming like suburbia and started to feel a bit more like Lord of the Rings. The southern ice field, the smallest of the country’s three major glacial areas, seems to brood over the farms and ranches below it.
As we drove further along, heading toward the town of Vik, the farms disappeared as the mountains loomed closer and closer over the highway, the ice so close at times I thought I could feel the wind blowing over it.
It was here that John and I made our only bad decision of the day. As we drove down, we saw a parking lot filled with cars and a tour bus or two on the ocean side. I thought, “If everybody is stopping here this must be a major attraction.” So we started to walk towards to water. And then, we walked some more. And then some more. And then we walked more, the terrain flat yet surprisingly rocky. And the ocean seemed to get farther and farther away with every step we took.
Both of us started to think of that famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia when Peter O’Toole scans the horizon endlessly until he sees a tiny movement. And, as he watches, that speck on the horizon slowly grows larger and larger until it becomes a regiment of soldiers on camels rushing towards him.
Except for us, Omar Sharif never arrived. Instead, as we despaired of ever reaching the water, a tour bus, the kind of bus you can drive through a river, with five foot tires and a suspension strong enough for a small bridge, came rumbling past us, headed towards the parking lot. John, tired of this endless march to the sea, stuck out his thumb. And the driver mercifully stopped and picked us up!
I learned later that the payoff for this miserable hike was to look at the remains of a World War II plane that had crashed just off the coast. Had I known that, or taken the time to ask people what we are all going to see, I would never had bother leaving the parking lot.
We finally make it to the black sand beach. Having seen several of these around the world, I did not expect to be particularly impressed … and I wasn’t. But it was a pleasant enough spot, and I was delighted to see how a young child, holding on to his father’s hand, was excited to see the unusual color on the beach.
I was also amused to see a caravan of tourist crossing the beach on horses. These poor old mares had done this trip so many times you could sense from 500 feet away how bored they were with the whole thing.
And as sorry as I felt for the horses, all I could think of was another classic movie, George Cukor's David Copperfield, and that great scene where Edna Mae Oliver grabs a cudgel as the tourists cross her yard in Dover, crying “Donkeys! Donkeys!”
On our way back, we saw dozens of waterfalls, the glacial melt cascading down the mossy green cliffs. We stopped a couple of them. The largest and famous of these is Seljalandsfoss. The water does not fall as far as it does in the Columbia Gorge, but what it lacks in height it seems to make up in sheer volume.
John was wearing a waterproof jacket, and he decided to get closer to the water for a good picture.
It was about five o’clock at this point, and we knew we had a couple hours of driving ahead of us to get back to Reykjavik. But we could not resist stopping at another waterfall or two along the way.
And that pretty much brings our little tour of Iceland to a close. There is a lot more to be seen in this island nation, and if we were forty years younger I think we might be up for the adventure of crossing ice fields or running to keep just ahead of a flow of lava. When William Butler Years wrote, “This is no country for old men,” was he was thinking of Iceland? Probably not, of course, but it still fits. But even for those of us well past our prime, it is still an intriguing and beautiful place to visit. I am glad we stopped here.
