Headed East

Time to leave civilization for the rugged frontier of slightly less civilization!

For almost a week I’d been staying at Birgir’s AirBnB place on the north side of town. We had pretty different schedules, but when we did collide we always had fun conversations.

Since it was my last day I had to pack all my gear on the bike, but before I did I asked if he wanted to give it a test ride, since he’d never tried a recumbent.  It wasn’t adjusted for his height (Icelanders are such tall people!) but he bent his legs awkwardly and managed to go 50 meters, then turn around without help. He said it was pretty cool but not his kind of ride: Not aggressive enough!

I rode to my habitual coffee shop and enjoyed the mocha for the last time, and assembled my final set of visa paperwork. I had a decision to make: Should I go to the print shop in town today, or try and find one later so I’m not hauling a stack of paper across the country? My plan was to submit the papers at a government office in Egilsstaðir, near the ferry terminal. Could I rely on a city that size having at least one printer I could use? Probably.

Next, I rode up the peninsula to the hardware store and bought two batteries for my speed and cadence sensors.  The clerk thought I’d purchased different batteries at the store a day ago, and apologized for “the trouble” of me supposedly having to come back because I bought the wrong ones.  Did I have a doppelgänger wandering around? It was too late for me to correct him; I’d already paid and was on my way out.

And that was my last piece of business in Reykjavík. I went north again, winding along the upper edge of the city towards highway 1. So far I was on the same route I’d taken two years ago, but that would change.

I stopped at a fast food gas station joint and did some tourist watching.  The olympics was on the TV.  I got a “Memphis” burger, which turned out to be a cut-rate fast-food style burger with barbecue sauce added.

Honestly, it wasn’t bad! And it checked the protein and calorie boxes.

I was able to use good bike paths almost all the way out of the city. Geese and rabbits lingered in the parkland on either side.

So many rabbits! I guess that’s the thing about rabbits: Where there’s a few, there are soon many.

The weather was glorious. For a while the path followed a riverbank. I stopped at an intersection and discovered a free water fountain, and a collection of bike tools hanging from wires. How thoughtful!

The path ended at the highway. I passed fields full of horses, and people on horseback. The highway was legal for bicyclists but I didn’t like the noise, so I tried to escape onto a parallel road for a while, which suddenly turned into dirt and loose rock. Whoops!

Along that road I was passed by a large group of young women riding horses. There was no place for me to pull aside because the bushes were quite thick, so I just stopped. They went about 200 meters ahead, then shuffled to a halt where the road got even worse, and chatted for a while in a low cloud of dust. Slowly the whole group turned around, and soon they passed me again going the other way.  I stopped and waited again as they went, just in case some of the horses were nervous. Many of the women waved and nodded or said hello, always in English. It was obvious I was a crazy tourist.

When I went ahead I saw just how uneven the road was.  Passable for a horse but not very fun for a packed-together group. I cycled along with a leg out for balance, wiggling around the largest rocks. Soon I found the main road again.

It went up and up for hours, following a pipeline on the side of the road. What was in there? Hot water maybe?

I paused many times, and ate a bunch of leftover fish.  The wind pushed down on me and I ranted out loud to the sheep that since I was saving money on hotels I could spend extra money on fish.

The going got steep and wiggly, but I wasn’t bothered. I listened to lots of Goon Show and podcasts.

At the 1300-foot mark it finally peaked, and I wiggled around through a couple of high valleys.

Just before the road pitched downhill, I stopped and ate a few more snacks. My destination was a campsite called the Úlfljótsvatn Scout And Adventure Centre. I was worried because it was getting late and I’d never been able to confirm that walk-up camping was available. Perhaps I could sneak in at the edge of a group?

The descent to lake Úlfljótsvatn was monstrous.  I was very glad I didn’t need to climb it.  The road was striped with tire marks, some of them moving alarmingly around the road.  People overcorrecting, or lane-wandering, or perhaps being surprised by sheep.

I passed a hot spring with a sign warning about the extreme temperature. The water was weirdly inviting, but I decided there was no time for another stop.

Eventually the hour grew so late that it got dark. I found the camp and wandered from one building to the next, hoping to find an official who could tell me where to put myself. No luck. I did see a mowed field near a long stand of trees with campers gathered on it, so I rolled the bike over to the fringe of the crowd, pretending like I knew what I was doing, and quietly set up my tent.

I was almost done moving things around inside the tent, when some older guy with a daughter waved a flashlight at me and went “Weeeooo weeeoo, it’s the police! Haa ha ha ha hahahaa!”

I scowled at him.  Then I picked up my tent and moved it further away.  No one likes to be messed with at night, and this guy looked like the kind who would do it.

I wiggled into my sleeping bag and poked at maps for a while on my phone. In about an hour the camp grew quiet, as the last of the revelers turned in. A decent end to a solid day of riding.

Exploring And Working In Reykjavík

This was definitely a work-cation, and I took advantage of that mobility to explore. But I also needed consistency to stay “in the zone”, which meant working at my new favorite cafe most of the time.

I did visit the one I liked from two years ago, just to get that odd twitch of nostalgia that comes from walking back into a place that I’d etched into my memory only because I never thought I’d see it again.

It was a lot less crowded than two years ago, which made sense because of the pandemic. For the first time I sat on the bottom floor, within easy view of my bike, and had a chance to do some people-watching. The people watched me as well — or at least they watched Valoria the recumbent.

I wrote code without headphones for a while, and the conversation from the next table drifted in. It was a man and a woman clearly having some kind of mandatory socialization meeting for their jobs.  They were both contractors for an international company and the man was newly stationed in Iceland, and still finding his feet.

They were digging down trying to find anything to talk about that wasn’t the usual “Where have you gone; what was it like; where are you going next; blah blah blah”.  I felt sorry for them both.

After a while I wanted to lean over and suggest other topics, just to cheer them up. “Hey, there are 20 things right here on the coffee shop walls that are fun to talk about!  Look at the cover story on the New Yorker sitting right next to you.  Look at that Icelandic woman with the tattoo of Betty Paige getting shot full of arrows on her arm.  Talk about the logistics of sourcing Peruvian coffee out of Iceland in a pandemic…”

They eventually defaulted down to complaining about Donald Trump. Always a lively choice… And a strong reminder for me just then, that where you are on the planet doesn’t matter half so much as where your headspace is.

When tourism shut down last year it was like turning off a money faucet for almost the entire country. Many things have re-opened, but some did not weather the drought. For example the kitschy, vaguely insulting store I saw two years ago on the main street, called “I DON’T SPEAK ICELANDIC”, which was previously full of souvenirs pitched at the more wealthy and less discerning tourists, was now a dusty, empty glass box.

The city didn’t feel any less inviting for it though, and the weather was nice. But I’d only booked this much time in Reykjavík because I wanted to get work done, and potentially see the Directorate of Immigration. I wasn’t interested in the bar scene and didn’t want to do the shuttle-based excursions.

What I did want, was fish:

I also had time for local cats, of course. There were plenty.

Writing code for hours is often taxing to the brain, and leaves me in a state where I want to ride my bike or take a nap afterward, even when I’m in a city with live music, friendly people, and museums full of curious exhibits. I really should have checked out more indoor things, but I mostly explored via bicycle seat and took photos.

The economy has slowed for the nordic tchotchke business, but it’s still going!

Like last time, I mailed a pile of weird candy to the nephews back home. I did not include a middle finger sculpture.

Glass bottles don’t ship well, otherwise I would have included this funky drink. The translation app made the usual amusing hash out of it.

My “coffee, work, and explore” routine continued in the city for another week, and the most traveling I did was switching to a different AirBnB. Every now and then I would spot a cycle tourist, or an advertisement, or a map printed on a wall, and remember that I had an adventure to continue.

Soon! Soon I will head into the hills.

Returning to Reykjavik

After a long and confusing trip through slumberland where I kept opening doors and walking into different rooms and gardens and basements and tunnels, I opened one more door and found myself awake in the hotel bedroom at 6:00am.

I only knew what time it was from checking my phone, since the light in the windows and the quality of my sleep said nothing. But it was good sleep and I felt ready to start biking again, even at this early hour. In most urban places an early start would be a good idea to avoid the traffic, but there isn’t much traffic anyway even in this most dense part of Iceland, and I would be on bike paths for most of the route.

Despite the huge buffet from yesterday, I was protein starved. I made a note for when I hit the first supermarket: Buy eggs, peanuts, and of course, MORE OF THAT FISH.

Lots of interesting sights, including a statue of Þorsteinn Erlingsson, a poet from the late 1800’s. Generally speaking, I like being in places that have monuments to poets in them. Good priorities!

Yes, I know it would be better for the world if I ate less of that fish… But ever since the last visit, Icelandic fish been sneaking into my daydreams.

For about seven years of my life I’ve been vegan, in a handful of big intervals, but it’s been many years since the last interval and at this point I don’t know if I could pick it up again. My digestion seemed to work better in the first four decades of my life. But I still think about it, and everything I learned about the impact of fishing and ranching along the way. Iceland is a hard environment for vegans. Almost everything green and tasty needs to be imported from a place that gets more sun.

You’d think that a place with ’round-the-clock sunshine for part of the year would have an excellent growing season. But even though the sun is out for longer during that time, it’s not as bright.

As an aside, I didn’t realize it until I saw that chart, but: There is no place anywhere in Europe that gets as much sun as my home state. Not even close.

I was headed for exactly the same neighborhood I stayed in two years ago, on almost the same route, but I feel like this time I saw a lot more anachronistic viking stuff. I can’t tell how much of this is to impress tourists, and how much is to amuse locals.

Back home, on the border between Oakland and the neighboring city of Berkeley, there are two giant metal sculptures, right next to each other. One is huge metal letters spelling out “HERE”, and the other, on the Oakland side, is huge metal letters spelling out “THERE”. It’s a reference to the activist history of Berkeley and something the author Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, and it was built by a local artist named Steve Gillman. It looks an awful lot like something meant to impress tourists, or make a statement to them, but it’s not. It was commissioned to please the locals.

I think of that, and I wonder: Even if these fake Viking decorations look like they’re here for visitors, even if I think the locals find them abrasive or hilarious, maybe there’s just something going on here that I don’t understand. Maybe this isn’t about me.

Absurd, right?! Whaaaaat!

Well, whether it’s about me (a tourst) or not, I think this stuff is awesome.

Painting the rocks though… I’m honestly a bit confused? I’m going to go ahead and assume that these colors are all non-toxic, because Icelanders.

Some of the art installations look a little less … official … than others!

This piece is pretty cool. It must be really good stainless steel – lots of chromium – to keep from rusting into poop, out in this climate.

My surroundings got urban enough to have a bakery and sandwich bar I could just roll up to, so I chomped a big breakfast.

That kept my stomach busy all the way to the AirBnB. Before I checked in I lounged at an outdoor cafe to eat chocolate, since the weather was good. Outdoor cafes are not common in Iceland for obvious reasons.

I think there’s some politics I’m missing here. Did a group of Russian hackers dig up incriminating stuff about the Iceland government, and earn the appreciation of protesters? I poked around online for context but only found things that would make Icelanders angry at Russian hackers: Stuff about them knocking websites offline, ransoming emails, et cetera.

I shrugged and checked into the AirBnB, which took a while since I had to lock my bike up on the street and haul my bags up several flights of steps.

Keys in foreign lands are always interesting to me. Convergent evolution at work.

I got a tour of the building from the manager, who pointed out the laundry room in the basement, and a back door at ground level that I could use to get the bike off the street.

The room itself was just a bed and four walls. Thankfully the bed was big enough that I could stack some of my gear on it and still sleep.

If this was a more committed AirBnB, they would get rid of some books to free up a shelf or two. It’s probably a more difficult choice in Iceland though, because, where would they go?

There’s only a half-dozen or so used bookstores in the entire country. If you left them on the curb they’d be destroyed before anyone took them. They’d have to go in the trash, which is an unpleasant end for books. Or you’d need to burn them; but Iceland does not have fire pits at campsites, or wood-burning stoves in houses. So… Books accumulate.

Books in Iceland are also an example of the weird, circular nature of a tourism economy. There are plenty of bookstores selling new ones, including books on Icelandic history, guidebooks, and cute books about Vikings and local creatures for kids. All of these were printed elsewhere and shipped in. Tourists will pick them off the shelves, drop them into suitcases, and carry them back out.

…But probably not these books. This collection really looks like stuff that nobody needed.