Hunkered Down In Höfn

Long story short: It took about two weeks for the new tire to arrive. That meant two weeks in Höfn, rambling around town, doing remote work, and trying every restaurant and snack shop at least once. Not a bad life, though my feet were itchy the whole time.

When the AirBnB stay was done I grabbed a patch of grass at the local campsite and paid a few days in advance. I had plenty of work to do but it was too cold to sit outdoors with the laptop, so I rotated between a couple of cafes, a gas station dining area, and the common area of the campground.

The staff at all these places got a little tired of me in the second week. But I was spending money, so…

I explored the town from end to end, checking out the paths, the information kiosks, the local art, and so on.

One of my favorite areas was the shoreline, which gave an amazing view of the glaciers nearby. For example, Heinabergsjökull:

As an aside, while trying to figure out the name of that glacier, I found it was actually pretty hard to find a modern map with enough labels on it. I eventually dug one out of a scientific paper named “Non-surface mass balance of glaciers in Iceland“:

One of the retaining walls along the main street had been turned into an art gallery by local students. By the end of the second week I knew them all. The old dude in the boat was my favorite.

Also I saw some odd bones on the pier, and had to ask my nephew about them:

There was one errand I could do while waiting: Laundry. This was my first chance to wash everything in a real machine for many days.

Unfortunately, no amount of washing will get highway tar out of sweatpants. My frustration inspired a short poem:

Tenth day of cycling
The stench hits you like a truck
Time for sink laundry

Hot highway blowout
Sitting down to fix the flat
Ass covered in tar

Hey bicycle guy
Looks like you pooped fireworks
Sink laundry again

I had a pair of regular pants that I was wearing around town, but when I got back on the road I would have to wear those revolting sweatpants again. I consoled myself during the endless work hours with snacks:

The gas station snack bins helped bring my food expenses down, since all the restaurants were super fancy.

While I stayed in place, other tourists came and went all around me. The campground filled up and emptied out in waves.

Höfn is a fine town and I have nothing against it, but the sensation of valuable travel days slipping away made the time I spent there kind of unpleasant. The day I’d arrived, I got in touch with the postal depot in Reykjavík, and in the back-and-forth with them over the two weeks I learned that my package had taken only three days to travel 6000 miles and arrive in Iceland, and the additional twelve days got consumed by the customs inspection and the 280-mile (450km) journey around the country to get to Höfn. It was frustrating, but I knew I had no alternative to waiting.

There was only one 20-inch bike tire in the entire country, and it was in a box headed my way.

A River Of Ice

Sleep was good. I managed not to worry about the tire most of the night. I found another thing to worry about in the morning though: The hotel had no food, and my supplies were low again.

I had a Prince Polo bar, so I chomped that while I moved my gear back out the window and reassembled the wheel. I brought it to half the usual pressure, hoping to slow the abrasion of the tube.

Then it was back on the road, with some atrocious dried fish snacks and a small can of Pepsi for calories. Sure, the food ain’t great just now, but the views… Amazing!

For most of the day the wind was against me. The coast flattened out into a series of plains separated by arms of rock pushing the road close to the sea. Eventually I hauled myself around a curve and was rewarded with Fjallsárlón glacier:

For an hour or so I pedaled closer to the ice sheet, then alongside it. There was a tourist place around here offering boat rides up to the face of the glacier, with a restaurant attached to it. My stomach was churning by the time I rolled up: The Fjallsárlón Frost Restaurant. Packed buses and rented cars were streaming through the parking lot, but everyone was going for the boat tour, not the food. That was fine by me…

It was overpriced of course but I was desperate. The server hid in the back, only peeking his head out every five minutes or so to check if anyone was in line. Next to the register was a big overstuffed tip jar.  That guy back in Keflavík would be appalled!

There was a salad bar (wow!) but all the lettuce had been plundered, except for a few bits floating in a half-gallon of water. (Boo.) Instead I heaped a plate with fish and meatballs.  The fish was impressively bland – no seasoning, and steamed for too long with no oil or garnish – and the meatballs tasted like ketchup and nothing else. Nevertheless it was protein and calories, and I cleared my plate twice.

On the way out I bought a slice of chocolate cake wrapped in plastic. It was almost eight dollars, but it would prove to be every bit as delicious as the previous meal had been bland. The dessert highlight of this entire stay in Iceland, in fact. (Okay that might have been the hunger talking.)

On my way out from the restaurant I looked back and took one of my favorite photos from this trip:

With the cloud cover, it looks like there are three separate horizons happening here. It really conveys the sheer volume of ice stacked up behind the glacier.

Lots and lots of slow pedaling in to the wind.  I put the phone on random play and it started They Might Be Giants, so I hooked up the speakers and belted out lyrics for a couple miles.

In time I arrived at a bridge, spanning the river that connects the Jökulsárlón to the sea. Lots of little icebergs were sailing around in it, broken off the tongue of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier that forms the northern edge of the lake. Every now and then a chunk would get too close to the river and go rolling down it, passing under the bridge and eventually getting washed out to sea. Some of them would get marooned on the beach, or stuck on the riverbank instead. It was absurdly photogenic. People were all around, waving cameras, festooning the bridge, walking in the sand, pulling their cars in and out of the gravel parking lots.

So of course I pushed the bike to the shoulder and joined them for a while!

I took some shots with the camera and then got back in the saddle. Once I drew far enough away from the crowds again, I shouted some more They Might Be Giants lyrics at the road. After a while I got too out of breath, and started to lose my voice. Plus the air was rather cold. So I removed the speakers and packed them away again, and began listening to an audiobook series called “Warlock Holmes.”

It’s a collection of short stories that rolls with the premise “what if Sherlock Holmes had magical powers and was a bit of a looney?” and it did a great job keeping my mind off the damaged tire. Hours passed, with more gorgeous landscape scrolling by, and I went through a bunch of them. By the time I drew close to the area where I’d booked my next hotel, I was on “Warlock Holmes in The Adventure Of The Unpleasant Stain.” Funny and gory in equal parts.

I pushed the bike up the road leading to the Reynivellir guest house, and then got confused because the map marker was pinned to a vacant patch of hillside. Back down the road were some industrial-looking buildings and up the road was a two-story thing that might have been a private residence, or perhaps my hotel.

While I stood around slack-jawed, a man wandered over and asked what I was looking for. I told him about the hotel, and he pointed at the two-story thing, but then said “You need to go down to the office and check in to get the key. That’s further along.” He pointed east, down towards the highway.

I called up a map and he helpfully poked at the approximate spot. It was two miles away, on the opposite side of the highway by the shore. I shrugged, thanked him, and rolled carefully downhill. I hated backtracking and I especially hated pushing my bike up the same hill twice, but there was nowhere else to go.

The road leading down to the office was quite steep, so I parked the bike at the top and walked down it instead. The area had a restaurant and some tourist-oriented warehouses and safari vehicles scattered around, plus a museum shaped like a long bookcase that I would have marched right into if I wasn’t so hungry.

While I lingered outside the restaurant, I was a bit startled to hear a loud voice talking in Icelandic, even though I didn’t see anyone around. The voice was slightly too loud as though it was amplified.

Eventually I traced it to the side of a big rock a few meters away, and saw a speaker grille built into it, painted to blend in. The rock was partially hollow, and somewhere inside was an amplifier, a media player of some kind, and probably a buried power cable going to the museum. How amusing! If only I could understand a word of it…

Half a mile down the slope I entered the office and checked in, and the attendant gave me a tiny hand-drawn map, indicating which building I should go to.

He said “We have key boxes at the guest house now, and you put in a code to get your key, so usually people don’t have to come down here.  But since you booked through Expedia it looks like you didn’t get all the information.” You don’t say!

He wrote a code down on a post-it and stuck it to the map, and handed both to me.

They’d obviously had trouble with this before, because next he held up a large laminated photograph of the building, and from that I could finally confirm it was the one I’d seen.

I walked back up the hill and guided my bike down to the restaurant.  The wait for a table inside was 20 minutes, so I bought an “Iceland” sticker and slapped it on the bike.

Then the waitress said it would take even longer, and apologized, and then she and a couple of other staff pulled a small table out from the back of the restaurant and plopped it in among the others, then decorated it with cloth and silverware, making me an instant table for one. Nicelandic!

I had asparagus soup and buttered bread, then breaded fried lamb steak, with chutney and potatoes.  After that I was too full to get dessert.  I paid the bill (something like $80 bucks – damn!) and got on the bike and rode slooowly back the way I came, and up the hill again.

I kickstanded by the front door, then tried to open it, only to find it was blocked on the other side by a small table, which I shoved out of the way.  In the foyer I beheld a row of lockboxes, one per room. I found mine and extracted my room key. So far, so good.

I grabbed my backpack off the bike, then tried to shut the front door and realized it didn’t shut.  That’s what the table had been for.  So I wedged it back in place, paying the confusion forward to the next guest.

Around the corner was a kitchen, with about a dozen middle-aged men and women sitting around, all talking and laughing loudly in Italian. I waved, then went upstairs and unlocked my room. Down and up again a few more times, to ferry my bags in from the bike. Then I arranged my bike against the outside wall, trying to give it some shelter from possible rain.

Back to the room, and I exploded my luggage. I grabbed the towels and marched over to the shower at the end of the hall. Good thing I had two towels, because the floor was unpleasantly wet. I laid the first one across it. A moment later I discovered that, damn, all the hot water was gone!

I was impatient and tired, so I took a tepid shower, and dried off standing on the towel. Then I scooped up my dirty clothes and headed for my room, only to find that whooops … it has automatically locked.

“Huh,” I said. I took inventory: “I’m in a hallway, locked out of my room, with a bundle of clothes, but no shoes or socks, and no phone or wallet. I suppose the first thing to do is put these dirty clothes back on.”

I did that in the bathroom. I dropped the towels outside my locked door, then trotted downstairs to the kitchen area. Feeling like a comic relief character in a sitcom, with a studio audience ready to throw in some mild laughter at my situation, I walked up to the closest person – an Italian man in his late 50’s – and asked, “Are you all part of the same group?”  As soon as I spoke English at him, the rest of the room fell silent, interested in what this rando American stranger had to say.

The man nodded and said “Yes!  All one group!”

“I’ve accidentally locked myself out of my room.  Do you happen to know who I should talk to?”

“Me!”

He walked over to the foyer and pointed at the row of lockboxes.  “There is a spare room key in the box!  You just need to enter the combination.  What room are you in?”

“I’m in 59.”

He found the box for 59, then started messing with the first dial.  It seemed like he was expecting it to be only one digit off from opening, but I had absent-mindedly spun the dials when I closed the box earlier.

“Actually,” I said, “I already got my key from there.”

“Oh, you mean you got the second key too?”

“No, there was only one.”

“Yeah but it’s the spare key,” he said.  “Didn’t they give you a key when you checked in?”

“No, they just gave me a combination to open that box.”

“.. Ooooh,” he said.

He shrugged.  “Well, there’s a number you can call.  It’s here on the instructions.”  He pointed to a sign by the boxes.

“That’s good,” I said, “And I’d call it, but my phone is in my room.”

“No problem; use mine,” he said.  He wandered back into the midst of the crowd in the kitchen, then came back with his phone, which he unlocked and handed to me. Nicelandic!

I called the number.  A woman picked up and said something in Icelandic, to which I responded, “Hello, I’m here at the Reynivellir guest house and I’ve locked my key in my room.  It’s the one I got out of the lockbox, with the code I got at check-in.”

She said, “Oooooh, well okay, here’s what you do.  Go to the service panel at the bottom of the stairs.”

I walked over to the stairs and spotted a rectangular outline in the wall, with a tiny handle sticking out of it.  “I see it.”

“Okay, now open that up and you’ll see a master key hanging on a peg.”

“You mean this key with a pink tag on it?”

“That’s the one yeah.”

“Got it.  I’ll unlock my room and put this back on the peg.”

“Good; thank you!” she said.

I ended the call, and the man walked over to reclaim his phone.

“Did you work it out?” he asked.

I pointed at the peg, inside the little closet.  “Master key,” I told him.

“HAH!” he shouted.  “You are one lucky guy!”

“I know it!  I’m also very lucky that I talked to you!” I said.

He grinned, waved his phone, and then walked back into the crowd.

So hey, if you want to get into a specific room, you need a code from the office two miles up the road. But if you want to get into everyone’s room, just grab the key behind the little door.

Just another of those “Okay, now what?” kind of travel logistics days. You get them sometimes. But, as usual, keeping a cool head and being friendly has made all the difference…