A Day-Trip

I cannot drive. However, I can read a map. Lots of people who live on my floor, such as Branislav the Slovak and Keir the Californian, can drive, but have only a tenuous grip on where they are. So, we rented a car for six of us and took a day-trip. We decided to travel up towards the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, in order to look at the Snæfellsjökull icecap. This, I was convinced, because of a certain amount of geological ignorance, was a glacier inside a volcano. In fact, it is a glacier on top of a volcano. So sue me.
The first thing you notice when you leave Reykjavík is that people are very small and mountains are very large.

Little houses, all with red corrugated iron roofs and white plastered concrete walls, are settled down in the middle of fields, with giant volcanic outcrops above them.
They have built a tunnel under five kilometres of the sea, across the Hvalfjördur (Whale Fjord) in order to smooth off some of the crinkly edges which are so nice to look at but difficult to navigate. We decided not to take the tunnel, but to go round the side of the fjord. This was for two reasons. Whale Fjord is apparently full of cheerful whales joyously bouncing around in baline glee. We thought we might see some whales. The large whale-processing plant at the base of the fjord seems to have scared them away. Secondly, and much more reliable, is Glymur, Iceland's highest waterfall. You park your car at the bottom of a valley and walk up a hill. It is not very far, but it is quite confusing. The path leads through a cave

and across a river with no obvious bridge. And then up a hillside with no obvious path. Circumstantial evidence, I know, but maybe we were in the wrong place? But no: perseverence up the pathless scree slope leads you to the waterfall, which sometimes looks Japanese

and sometimes looks like the sort of phenomenon John Ruskin would write screeds about if his mind was on art and not the other thing.

Up, down. I didn't fall over on the downwards journey. Others did. Back to the car and onwards to Borgarnes. This is a small and extremely cold town where they keep greenhouses and gnomes, apparently with little saving irony.

We parked the car by the seaside and had a picnic of the kind I remember with fondness from my childhood.

We drove on, with the increasingly weird landscape looking down on us all the time. Mountains

and lava fields

and things that were probably petrified trolls.

Then, finally, we got to Snæfellsjökull. We stopped at Sönghellir on the way. This is a cave which apparently was so full of echoes (bergmál, 'mountain talk') that people thought it was a haunt of dwarves. Presumably, dwarves who only spoke while they were being spoken to, in precisely the same words in which they were addressed. Oh well. I can confirm it is very echoey. I choose to illustrate it with a photo of what you can see from the cave, because caves themselves aren't all that photogenic.

But upwards, upwards, always upwards. We drove up towards the top of the mountain, startling the merry snow buntings as we drove, in order to gaze across the majestic icecap that stands so proudly above the plains below...etcetera, etcetera. It was foggy. We saw nothing. We had to be content with the view back down into the valley.

We turned back, and thought we'd roll around the edge of the peninsula and then head home. So, we went to Hellnar, a fishing village which is apparently full of nesting birds in the summer. In October it has little to see apart from a fine breakwater built to protect the harbour. Every so often water splashes over the edge of the breakwater, and hits the unsuspecting people who stand on the breakwater looking out to see the sea. That is, us.

Then we went to the lighthouse at Malariff, which I thought was boring, and where I did not take photographs. Marian has recently finished reading To The Lighthouse: about halfway through, she turned to me and asked, 'Do they ever go to the bloody lighthouse?' Well, today we did, and I opted out. But while they were at the lighthouse, the clouds cleared over Snæfellsjökull.

On to Dritvík, which I think means Guano Bay. But it is in fact resolutely unshitty. A perfectly smooth and washed pebble beach, with occasional outbursts of harder rock that you can climb or just marvel at. The sun was setting, and there was a good view of the Tröllakirkja - a little outcrop that people thought at one time was the church for the trolls.

And the setting sun also made the Snæfellsjökull a lovely pink.

And as we got back to the car, a huge harvest moon, like a buoyant marble, was coming up from behind the mountain.

Oh, and we saw the Northern Lights on the way back. But maybe we can afford to be a bit blasé about them now.