Kitchens And Curves
Another fine morning on the farm! It took only a moment to pack up, and then I had to zig-zag all over the property to find someone who would accept my money. I finally found an old man tending some laundry machines, in a battered wooden building at the end of a long gravel driveway. He spoke only a few words of English but we communicated enough to establish that the price for overnight camping was about six dollars.
I handed him a bill and he handed me some change. The price was so low I wanted to push the change back into his hand and say “keep it”, but we had enough trouble communicating already. He was more interested in his laundry than in being paid.
From there I drifted over to a very unofficial-looking guesthouse with a couple of tables and some kitchen appliances inside. While I was poking around, another man wandered in and told me he could make a grilled cheese sandwich and heat up some tomato soup, for about five bucks. I jumped on the offer, since it was probably the only hot meal I would get today.
I charged my gadgets at the wall socket while I scarfed my food, and thought about the ambiguity of my situation.
Back home in the big city, there’s a wide gap between a restaurant – with signs and menus and rules – and a personal kitchen in a private residence. You can’t mistake one for the other. But here in the Icelandic outback, a kitchen in a private home could easily be a restaurant at the same time. I assume there is a list of government regulations that applies to any establishment serving food — so how much of that list applies here, in this kitchen? And how much attention would Icelanders pay to such regulations without any enforcement?
At first it seems like the solution is to apply all the restaurant rules all the time. But that would be a huge burden for people who just want to make a little extra money serving meals for a handful of tourists passing through. A random kitchen open for business is great for slow travelers like myself and it would be a shame if regulations prevented it. But if the operation is too casual, like some farmer comes in from tossing hay bales around and makes me a grilled cheese sandwich without washing, there should be a way to hold them accountable…
I hadn’t seen any such thing, of course. The little kitchen around me was ragged and cluttered, but definitely clean. I was wondering about the general case: How much food safety is just hand-waved in Iceland, with people relying on the good hygiene of their neighbors? Do the regulations apply according to size, with bigger places getting more oversight?
As I paid my bill I considered asking the man to shed some light on the situation, but then I realized it was probably very rude to start a conversation about kitchen cleanliness with the person who just made my sandwich. I let the questions disperse and got back on the road, ready for a long day of cycling.
I had to backtrack about a mile to highway 1, and the intervening road was dirt and gravel. Last night I had imagined fields of grass on either side, out in the airy darkness beyond the reach of my headlight, but this morning all I could see was a rough dry plain, not useful for farming or ranching.
Ahead of me, there was exactly one place I could stay that was within my current range, and split the distance to the next major city: Guesthouse Skjöldólfsstadir. It was 45 miles of easy climbing with a chunk of steep downhill tacked onto it. Pretty long, but I was confident I could make it. I poked some buttons on my phone to make a reservation ahead of time and then turned my attention to the colorful, rocky landscape spreading away from me under wide bands of rain and shadow, and pedaled into it.
A few hours along I ate the last of my food: A Prince Polo candy bar and a beat-up hunk of cheddar cheese. I had plenty of water at least, which I drank constantly. That inspired me to write the following Very Important Quote in my notes for later:
“If you’re far from town, and you have to pee, there’s really no better place than the middle of the highway. You won’t kill any plants, you won’t cause any erosion, and the sun exposure will erase the evidence of your bad manners. Just listen for cars!”
Me, just now.
(Of course, in the middle of the Icelandic plains, you can hear cars from several miles away. Your local results may vary.)
I lost a lot of time on some very steep hills, and began to feel frustrated at my lack of food. Without new protein coming in, my muscles were basically eating themselves to keep going. Not good situation for a style of travel that relies on endurance more than any other physical ability.
Night fell and the road kept going. I had an email exchange with the guesthouse, and the clerk said my room key would be waiting on a hook near the reception area. At long last I reached the top of my all-day climb. I pulled aside and took a celebratory pee, and stomped around next to the road for a while just to use some different muscles. Ahead of me I could see the road drop sharply down into vast open darkness. Cloud cover had erased the stars.
“Well, here goes,” I said, and pedaled another 30 meters. Then gravity took over and I surged forward, my headlight snapping to full brightness from the added wattage. The side of the road lunged at me, so I corrected, causing the other side to lunge at me, and I began to put steady pressure on the brakes just to keep under 35 miles per hour. The road was snaking down the side of a long valley, and without daylight I couldn’t see anything beyond the next curve, so I couldn’t plan ahead. The danger was that I could already be going 35 miles per hour and then drop down an incline so steep that it overpowered my brakes, and my choices would be, crash into a guardrail and possibly fly over it into who-knows-what, or lay the bike down sideways to make sure the guardrail caught me entirely — and put horrible scrapes up one side of my body from the pavement.
So I gripped those brakes.
After about five minutes I had dropped over 300 meters (1000 feet), in hair-raising irregular surges. The road leveled out and I passed a cluster of lamp-lit buildings, then a wide bumpy driveway. I eased into that, and there was the guesthouse. “That was exciting!” I said, a bit too loudly. Again I was thankful for my windbreaker and pants, because without them I would have been shivering violently while I tried to navigate curves.
The room was small but I didn’t care. I stripped my things off the bike and carried them upstairs in a few loads. Since there was no visible structure suitable for locking up my bike – not even a water pipe or a railing – I just locked the rear wheel to the frame and left it sitting there, outside, next to the row of trucks and SUVs owned by other guests. If someone wanted to steal my bike all they had to do was lift it up and toss it in their truck, then cut off the lock at their leisure. If I was parking this bike anywhere else in the whole world, I could consider my decision extremely foolish. In Iceland, I was thinking, “why am I bothering to put on the lock?”