An interesting character

I awoke well-rested but very hungry. Today would be a day of stuffing my face, and catching up with the digital world.

But first: Laundry! I washed my unmentionables in a bathroom sink, then hung them on the guylines of the tent to dry. It’s practical, and also a sort of theft deterrent, like hanging up a sign that reads: “Keep out, a gross person lives here!” Gross people are unpredictable.

Icelanders may be honest, but other Icelandic tourists? I do not trust them any more than tourists anywhere else.

I had to put more air in the front tire, but the leak was still too slow to patch. What worried me was not the leak, but something else: The tire felt warped. I could feel it bumping along even on perfectly smooth road. All that churning on gravel had torn something inside it. I could patch a tube over and over, but a ruined tire was a much bigger problem. Would I be dealing with that soon?

Along the way I noticed a building I hadn’t seen in yesterday’s gloom. A funky modernized convent!

Settled in at the restaurant, I looked ahead on the map for places to stay. I needed to lay out some stepping stones. There was one AirBnB with a free room, but I would have to spend an extra day here in Kirkjubæjarklaustur to line up with it. I decided to cash in some “points” from another travel website and get a fancy room for that night, at a deep discount. That done, I started processing my backlog of photos and notes.

Out the window I saw a guy pull up his bike next to mine. He was clearly on tour, and his gear looked very worn-in. On top of a windbreaker he was wearing a fluorescent construction vest, and had a look about him that Billy Connolly would call “windswept and interesting”. When he came in, he noticed my helmet resting on the table and asked, “Is that your rig out there?”

“Yep!” This led to the standard couple of questions about what it’s like riding a recumbent.

“Hmm, flat accent,” he said. “I’m guessing American.  But from where?”

“Oakland, California! Right across the bay from San Francisco.”

He introduced himself as Paul, from Minnesota. A teacher of social studies, to 5th grade kids.

“I’ve been on the road for three weeks.  Started in Keflavik, and I’m going clockwise. I’ve got a week left.”

This meant he’d managed to go almost entirely around the island in three weeks, and here I’d only barely crossed a third of it.

“I did the Westfjords,” he said. “All the way out to the edges as far as I could, in the north and northwest. I wanted to get off the beaten path.”

We chatted about our routes for a while and I described my detour through the highlands.  He listened enthusiastically.  I told him how easy it had been to cross the rivers.

“I was expecting big rushing things, like in the midwest after a storm.  Like, take all the bags off the bike and hold it up over your head and wade across.  But it was nothing like that.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “A couple of the locals I talked to said this was a drought year for them.  Some places are just dry.”  He pointed to a spot on the north side, using the map on my screen.  “Like, there’s no river here at all right now.”

“Dang.”

“Yeah, they used to say you didn’t need to carry water on this whole route because you could just get it out of the river.  This time they warned me to take my own supply.”

Paul was definitely a tougher, lighter traveler than me. “I ride in a pair of sandals, with no socks. No raincoat. I don’t care if I’m wet or not. I just go!”

We talked some more about weather and traveling through Iceland in general  He mentioned that he’d visited the country nine years ago. I asked what had changed since then.

“Oh a lot.  When I came here in 2012 it was on a layover, so I didn’t have a lot of time.  They really wanted tourism, so they had this deal where you could do an extended layover and they would throw some stuff at you for free in a tour package.  I did that for a day and went to The Blue Lagoon, then I left the tour and rented a car.  There was one car rental place in the entire country.  I had a day left, so I drove up to the Geysir and parked close to it.  There’s a visitor center there now but back then there was nothing.  Nothing there; nobody around.  I popped the rear hatch of the car and slept with it open, facing the geyser.”

“Wow!  That must have been surreal.”

“For sure.  It’s kind of crazy coming back now and seeing how different it all is.  But, they did what they wanted.  They wanted tourism, and they sure got it.”

I nodded.  “Yeah.  And they’re running with it.  All the signs outside every town with the little symbols on them, all the guides and maps…”  I pointed at the screen again.  “This bicycling map here is incredible.  I’ve never seen a map like this of a whole country.  And they not only mark the hills on it…  They mark two different kinds of hills, and they mark them in both directions!”

“And the people are helpful too!” he added.  “On this trip, I was at a restaurant, and I asked the waitress if she knew what the road was like up ahead.  She didn’t know, but she got on the phone and called the visitor center in the next town and asked them, and translated for me.  All her idea.  Wonderful!”

“Totally!  That reminds me of this sign I saw a few days ago…”  I flipped through pictures and showed him the one from the “Mountain Mall”, with the sign hanging behind the counter.  It read:  “BE NICELANDIC!”  And scrawled beneath it in smaller letters:  “Don’t be an Iceland dick!”

He chuckled at that.

He was curious about my work situation. Was my boss okay with me working so far from home?

“It actually works better,” I said. “My whole department was exiled from the building so the company could meet COVID restrictions. Since we’re all remote, the total occupancy of the building stays down. Now the scientists can set a regular schedule, and get in to run their experiments. Also, the time zone difference is an advantage because most of the other software developers live in Europe!”

I patted the laptop on the table between us. “I just have to make sure this thing doesn’t break. I’ve got backups of the info on SD cards and stuff, but it would be really hard to get a new laptop out here.”

He laughed. “Yeah. I used to bring a laptop with me. A Macbook Air, one of those really light machines. But the department said they would get me an upgrade, and I thought about it, and asked them for an iPad instead. I just do email and lesson plans and stuff. Works great. And I’m not working on this trip, so I didn’t bring a keyboard or anything.”

“Awesome! That saves a pound right there!”

“Yeah! There are things that bug me though. Like, I have one of those Garmin devices like you do, but it needs the Garmin Basecamp app. Well, they don’t have an iPad version. So I can’t put maps on the device. And for this trip, I said okay, I’ll load the Iceland map in advance, no problem. Then I got here and there was some glitch and the map wasn’t on my Garmin. So for three weeks I’ve been able to track where I’ve been, but without the map I’ve had no idea what’s coming.”

“So every day is a surprise!”

He laughed. “You could say that…”

“So, you’ve been in Iceland for three weeks… Is this part of a larger trip?”

“Well my plan is to ride all the way around the world, in segments. So, I have Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China and then I’m done. This summer a lot of stuff was still shut down, so I flew to Seattle and went east across the US, and there was time left before school, so I tacked Iceland on the end.”

“That’s amazing! And a lot of ground to cover.”

“Yeah! I’ve learned a lot. I started each trip with a little less gear. Now there’s not much I could strip out. I have one pair of shorts. I have one shirt. People say ‘you pack your fears,’ so at this point I guess I don’t have a lot of fear. I used to bring food for days, and now I pack maybe one meal. People are generous, and it’s nice to get a free dinner, but I don’t rely on that. I just get to the next place quickly enough and I buy a meal when I get there.”

“That sounds like nearly the opposite of the way I travel.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I pack so much stuff. I don’t know how much is based on fear. Maybe a lot. Like, I must be afraid of getting a bad night’s sleep, because a huge amount of my weight is sleep related.”

“Like what?”

“Well there’s the tent. It could be smaller for sure, but I have this giant sleeping bag. And the sleeping bag has an inflatable mattress that’s like two pounds just by itself. And I have an actual down pillow in a stuff sack. I tried a few inflatable pillows but they felt awful. I could use my laundry as a pillow, but I already use that as a body pillow and hold it against my side while I sleep, because I have to be a side-sleeper to deal with my sleep apnea. Oh and I have long johns and socks just for wearing in the sleeping bag. And a mask, and earplugs…”

I gestured outside at the bike, parked by the window. “See those huge bags on the back? That’s all sleeping stuff. Sleeping bag on one side, tent and everything else on the other.”

“Huh!” he said. “Yeah, I think my version of that juts fits in one bag.”

“Yep, yep. So, there you go: I live in fear of a bad night’s sleep. I also bring a lot of gadgets, because I love gadgets. I don’t think that’s a fear thing. Maybe fear of boredom?” I shugged. “But I can definitely say, I have a lot less fear about the whole idea of bike touring, and being on the road, and improvising. My fears are smaller than they used to be, for sure.”

“What’s the biggest change?” he asked.

I thought for a bit. “My fear of other people. Well, actually, something more specific about that. My fear of people in places that I only hear bad things about in the news back home.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” he said. “You wanna know what my favorite country in the whole world is?”

“What?”

“Albania! Who do you know back home, who has some vacation time saved up, and says, ‘I want to go see Albania’? Nobody.”

“Yeah. Former USSR country, right? I only hear about that region when there’s some kind of war going on.”

“I know, right? But… The country is just beautiful. I’ve never seen so many gorgeous mountains all crammed together. And the people are so nice. There’s a cultural tradition of giving hospitality to travelers. I swear, I went from place to place and people would ask what town I came from, and it was like they would compete. ‘Oh they fed you? You stayed for free? Our food here is better. Our house is better, come stay in our guest room. We’ll show you what real hospitality is. Tell us your stories.’ It was the most amazing travel experience. Day after day of these really kind and curious people and beautiful mountains.”

“Huh! And from what we hear back home, I would expect to be shot or kidnapped if I went there.”

“It’s ridiculous. Good luck trying to change anybody’s mind. They’ll never go. But I don’t want to overstate it. I mean, there’s also stuff going on there. Like, initially I wanted to go north. I thought I would go into Romania and then Ukraine, and keep going east from there. And I actually got near the Ukrainian border, close to Moldova, and I met up with some people on the road. They had guns. And they weren’t threatening exactly, but they told me I probably shouldn’t go into Ukraine, because things were messy there. They were rebels.”

“Oh dear.”

“Yeah, their tone wasn’t angry, but they said ‘There’s nothing for you there.’ So I took the hint.”

“Uh, yeah. Good idea.”

“I went back, and down into Bulgaria, and went east into Turkey instead. Through Istanbul, and along the northern coast.”

I excitedly showed him the scrapbook of routes I’ve been gathering, including a zig-zag through Turkey and Georgia. He traced out the roads of his own journey, and I asked him questions.”

“How much of a language barrier did you have there?”

“Well, I speak some Spanish, French, and German, and that got me by, until about here.” He put his finger down on Istanbul. “After that, it was harder. The World War II generation speaks some German, but with the youth, I mostly spoke English to them and that worked better. I don’t know any Turkish or Greek.”

I felt encouraged by that. I told him about my ongoing attempt to learn Russian, and he said that would definitely help in Georgia. “I think it’ll probably be good that you speak Russian with an American accent,” he said.

“Yeah…” I said. “You didn’t have any trouble being American there, did you? Did you have to tell people you were Canadian or something?”

“Oh no. No trouble. But I didn’t go that far north. There’s an area the Russians invaded in 2008. I passed by that. And it’s weird; it’s not like America where everyone is kind of on the same page with current events. There were parts of the country where it just didn’t seem to matter who I was. And parts where there was just nobody around.”

“Like, open country?”

“More like, small towns, and structures that nobody cared much about — or policed anyway. Like, I remember coming to this ruined Byzantine church. It could have been 500 years old, or it could have been 2500. Nobody in it, nobody around for miles. I set my sleeping pad at the foot of the altar and spent the night there.”

“That must have been surreal.”

“Oh yeah. I remember looking around at all the tiles on the walls and thinking about how vibrant they must have been, like, a hundred years ago. And about all the ceremonies and the words people spoke, and how many times the building was reconstructed in the same spot, maybe for thousands of years. I had this massive feeling of how temporary everything is. How temporary I was. I mean, we’re here and we’re gone in the blink of an eye, and we barely even get to look around. Most of us never get the chance at all.”

“Yeah… And I wonder, what would those people a thousand years ago have thought, if they could see into the present, and see the church fallen into disrepair, and then this one cyclist coming along with a sleeping pad…”

We pondered that for a moment in comfortable silence.

“Well,” I finally said, “you must be starving, eh?”

“Ravenous. I’m going to order some food and then let’s keep talking, yeah?”

“Sounds good! I’ve got lots more touring questions to ask you.”

And I did. The conversation was slower because Paul was devouring several dinners at once, but I got a lot more information out of him.

Eventually Paul rode away to find a campsite. A few minutes later, I realized that we never shared contact information. We might see each other again in town, but then we’d be heading in opposite directions. Darn!

The remainder of the day was photos and writing. I had dinner in the same seat where I’d eaten breakfast. Then it was back to the campsite to take my laundry inside and crash.