Iceland: Day 4

04 January 2016

Emerald serpentine dreams were disturbed by sixteen squeaky mattresses and a drove of drunk Brazilians; but the worst of it was the all too familiar tune of my alarm at a quarter-to-five. Never enough sleep did I get while in Iceland; every ounce of my 04:45 mental state was willing my body back into its sleeping bag, but I was in early morning autopilot. I dressed, triple-checked under my bed for forgotten socks, checked out of The Capital Inn, and hobbled onto the 05:30 Fly Bus headed to Keflavíkurflugvöllur. I caught an extra 45 minutes of sleep as the bus made its way south towards the airport and was roused as a rush of cold air made its way down the aisle with the door having been opened to let passengers out.

The look of ecstasy upon the faces of Joey Dearduff and Ryan Liguori was only matched by their exhaustion, so I could tell that our first stop together was going to have to be Joe & the Juice for some lattes. While refueling and allowing Joey and Ryan (and admittedly myself) time to wake up, I shared with them the experiences I had had during my stay in Reykjavík, particularly of the Northern Lights with Christine. We also reviewed the agenda and traced the day's route on a map; our plan was to drive the entirety of The Ring Road without GPS in a week’s time.

If the car rental attendant was apprehensive after reading over the itinerary, having expected that we would be staying in the capital all week, then she was absolutely portentous when I slid a license from the relatively snowless state of Tennessee across the counter. After repeatedly reassuring her of my adequate experience of winter driving in Illinois, she handed me the keys with utmost unease. At 08:52, we were given reign of our white Hyundai i30, complete with lava insurance and ash protection. Joey found it covered in snow in Lot F, and we promptly threw our bags in the trunk, tested the winter tires, left the airport, and drove up the Suðurnes in what we thought was entirely inadequate for Icelandic terrain, the cage in which we might all perish.

I was to be the only driver. I would say it was because insuring one is cheaper than insuring three, but the real reason lies in my need for control. In a place where every kilometre presents a new life-threatening natural terror—whether as an active volcano, an icy lava field, or a white-out blizzard—I clung to every ounce of authority I was given. Oh, and "Yeah, I drove the full-length of Iceland’s Ring Road in the dead of winter" was a welcome windfall.

With a taste for adventure, a passion for the natural, and a good eye for road signs, Joey rode shotgun, as any little brother should. He has always been my best friend; but more importantly, I agreed with his taste in music. He spent the entirety of the Suðurnes drive in silence, staring out the window, trying to make out what magical lands lied just beyond the veil of night. I would bet that the imprint of his nose is still smudged into the glass of the passenger window.

The quiet, observant one sat in the backseat. Where I was the master driver and Joey the master DJ, Ryan was the jack of all trades: note taker, map reader, camera caretaker, and most importantly, snack provider. He didn't say much, but he probably took in just as much as Joey and I. Ryan spent just about every minute in the car nose-glued to the window, writing about what was beyond that window, or napping with his head leaned against it. So the three musketeers were off, on a journey over volcanos bubbling with fire, across wastelands whipped by maelstroms of snow and ice, through blizzardy mountain passes, under creaking blue glaciers, and to the corners of earth void of all life. This was our attempt at surviving the most destructive environment on earth.

We drove the same route north that I took a few hours earlier, missed our turn, and ended up just down the road from Harpa in the city centre. I pulled off into a Bonu$ parking lot, excusing our misdirection as an intentional stop to stock up on food—it was essential that we had some available in the car in case we ended up stranded in a ditch on the side of the highway during a tempest. However, the entire shopping complex was closed until 11:00. It being an "early" 09:30, Joey checked the map, Ryan tried to connect to some free wifi, and I dreamt of another cup of coffee. We backtracked about a kilometre, hopped onto the highway, and took our foodless chance with the weather.

Like a house on fire, the surroundings immediately changed from cityscape to landscape. Ripples of multi-coloured homes were replaced by a quiet and terrible blanket of white and gray. The looming silver giants of the Mosfellsbær range folded in around our smaller-than-ever dinky white Hyundai. And for the next 20 kilometres, we drove alone and in silence through the fissure of mountain upon mountain, passing only an occasional red-roofed house or roundabout. And just as quickly as the mountains ascended before us, they disappeared behind us. The rush of bearded giants exploded and were replaced by an ever-expansive, pure white plain laced with distant Morian-like peaks that were both suspended in air, apart of the clouds and anchored deep into the earth, feeding off her like bulging leeches.

The roads were coated in a permanent sheet of ice, but even with winter tires, we slid back and forth across the road as cascading flurries crashed against the side of the car. The speed limit was 90 kph but we went no faster than 70. This was okay, though, because not another soul could be seen anywhere across the endless horizon. We rode on for an hour before passing a car pulled over on the side of the road for pictures; we joined them. The Arctic winds whipped at our faces and filled our lungs with rich breaths of Icelandic air. The snow was up to our stomachs, but with enough grace, we could balance on top just long enough for someone to hit the shutter button for a group photo. Our backdrop was Þingvallavatn, a lake created by the earth's ripping apart. We were entering Þingvellir, a national park where the North American and Euro-Asian tectonic plates were being cleaved apart.

We shuffled back into the car and back into the warmth. But even with the temperature knob pulled all the way into the red, the windshield was quickly coated with condensation from our cold breath—but foggy glass and overcast skies look the same. We drove around Þingvallavatn before descending 40 metres from the North American tectonic plate onto Europe. The soft, snow white landscape was now disjointed by a jagged, sheer black cliff, which served as the only divisor between land and sky. A gentle breeze rolled off of the North American plate and into Þingvellir, much like the every-couple-of-kilometres frozen waterfalls that did likewise. We hiked up and down the rift, pretending we were in Game of Thrones (because everything Castle Black and north was filmed here!). In contrast to the continental grandeur of Mother Earth’s anatomy, nearby a small church and a few cabins slept under blankets of snow and next to a quiet stream. The scene was both fearfully and wonderfully made.

After shrimp sandwiches at the Þingvellir visitor centre, we descended into the national park on roads far-less traveled than those already crossed. Covered in ice and snow and hit by snow drifts that encapsulated the car, we gambled with our lives on unpaved portions of inner-Iceland as we drove onward and across the occasional mountain. A road sign pointed to what might have been another road—we couldn’t tell what with the drifts—and in black lettering, the name of our next destination had been written: Geysir.

Like with any geyser, the air reeked of sulphur. But with great relief, the heat let off from that malodourous geothermal water kept the snow at bay—bits of grass were a welcome change of view. While getting out of the car, I slipped on the ice and had to choose between landing on the camera wrapped around my neck or rolling over my knee. I chose the latter and limped away from the car as bolts of pain shot like lightening up my leg with every other step; yes, it still hurts to this day. The area around Geysir was no less dangerous: the heat was enough to melt snow, but it only made ice all the glassier. While the geyser bubbled just about every five minutes with a 10-metre plume, it has been considered “nearly inactive,” as it used to launch boiling water 70 metres into the air. And just as often as it bubbled, another visitor would slip and fall on the ice, and I would have to say that Geysir has seen just as many butts as it has feet.

A short drive further down the road, and another arrowed sign guided us onto an even less maintained road and along the side of a cliff to Gullfoss. This roaring waterfall teemed with life, and as winds whipped at our faces and pushed us closer and closer to the edge of the cliff overlooking Gullfoss, we anchored our feet into the earth only to find that it quaked with equivalent terror as thousands of pounds of glacial water plummeted over the three-tiered waterfall below us. Never before had I been in the presence of such a force of nature; I became meaningless, and that high-place phenomenon of wanting to jump but not wanting to die struck fear into my heart—if you’ve ever looked over the side of a cliff, you know what I’m talking about: “If I fall into these foaming rapids with water so powerful that I’m getting soaked even all the way up here, well, no one would ever find me. I would be gone forever and Gullfoss would just keep on roaring.” This was Power—both terrible and great—and Gullfoss earned and demanded my respect.

The road conditions worsened as we made our way from Gullfoss back to Highway 1. At points along the way, we took unmarked, unpaved, uninhabited back roads that seemed to serve as shortcuts. But with every turn, more and more snow slowed us down. It did not help that we were traveling alongside a white-water river, and one wrongfully-crossed patch of ice could send us plummeting to our deaths. But fortunately, out of the wasteland we came, and back onto Highway 1 we continued with great, great relief.

The sky became opulent with dark viridian and titian even though it was still the early afternoon, so we stopped at a small fuel station in Hvolsvöllur for coffee to prevent my heavy eyes from setting with the sun. But the long day had had an effect on all of us, particularly Joey and Ryan, as they were not given any time to treat their jet lag. Naturally, we became hysterical and spent the rest of the day laughing at the maddest of jokes. For example, an hour after Hvolsvöllur, we stopped at Seljalandsfoss (another waterfall), which we renamed “Snazel Nasel’s Nasel Drip.”

Albeit our slap-happiness, we revered Seljalandsfoss for her beauty. Less terrible than Gullfoss, she allowed us the safety to climb up behind her plunge pool, where we ended up soaked in icy water. Great speed and the ripping out of a dry fleece prevented the camera’s imminent water damage. We left with the moon’s arrival.

The ominous brunet shadow of Eyjafjallajökull watched carefully as our little Hyundai zoomed around the small blip of land between its swelling ice cap and the ocean. Our final stop for the day was Skógafoss, an Eyjafjallajökullian weir. She was hidden by the dead of night; only the sound of her mighty cascades made her presence known. I set the camera up, pointed in the direction of the cataracts, and left the shutter open for 30 seconds. It was like lifting a blindfold from our eyes—the photo tore away the veil of night, putting sight to sound and showing us in perfect detail just what lie beyond the obscurity. So the three of us stood in the wake of a volcano that covered Europe in ash just six years prior, alone in the pitch black of 17:45 Iceland, just listening to Skógafoss’s rage. And in that moment, if Eyjafjallajökull were to erupt again, we would have had no chance of survival. Our hearts beat faster, synchronous with the bubbling magma below our feet. We hopped back in the car only after losing the feeling our fingers and drove half an hour up and down braes and around screes to the small town of Vík.

We lugged our bags up to a very small, third-story corner room decorated with an amateur painting of a man and his horse. Our first night together would be spent in a hostel converted from a home at the end of a still street in a quiet village with no more than fifty residents hidden from the rest of the world in the loom of a volcano on the southernmost point of the most beautiful country in the entire world. There was no receptionist, only a key in a locked box and its password emailed to us a week in advance. It was called Welcome Puffin Hostel.

Having only had shrimp sandwiches, we drove to a grocer and stocked up on coffee, cookies, bread, peanut butter, and porridge: our food for the next week. We also bought a pizza and a bag of frozen corn for dinner. The drive through town was warmed by Christmas lights. We made dinner and ate together at a small folding table, like family, laughing and chatting about the day’s great success, all in a kitchen that has been stuck in 1960s—nothing but simple smiles tonight.

After cleaning up our dinner and leaving the washed dishes out to dry, I fell into a deep sleep in our small third-story corner room until midnight, at which time Joey woke me to take our chances with the Northern Lights. Unfortunately, the sky was just littered with millions of stars—there were no greens, no reds, no dancing overhead. Defeated but dog-tired, the three of us collapsed into our toasty warm beds and slept soundly through the night at Welcome Puffin in Vík, Iceland.