September 7, 2021 Filed under Curious
A fine sunny day for some light riding.
I appreciate the intention here, but this map is actually really confusing.
I adore any store that sells a carrot cake with four layers.
Once again I'm the only diner in the restaurant. The tourist season ends really abruptly here...
One more bathroom stop before the road...
Local lore on display.
Nice spot to run a local government from.
It's pretty cool seeing all these little kid toy sections in restaurants.
YESSS!! Greens!
Shout-out to Glen, giving his trailer a trial-run on this Iceland tour!
The back of the bike: Table, coat rack, extra hand, clothesline, and occasionally even a work desk.
This could be a clear day or a cloudy day, depending on your perspective.
This side of the rock was constantly getting wet from streams of water and then quickly drying out from the wind, over and over.
Having a good time in the rain!
Hills hiding behind hills.
Just how much mist is an excessive amount? Iceland has no such limit!
A ribbon of road, making this travel possible.
Fjardabyggd:. More than just that thing you shout when you stub your toe: It's also a town!
The aurora, vaulting up behind the clouds. I did not expect to see them this time of year.
Is something wrong with my lens? Nope. It's the northern lights.
Look at all that exploded luggage!
September 5, 2021 Filed under Curious
Pretty dang cute. I am amused!
Cute curtains in the barrel house.
Little tiny two-room barrel house! YEAH!!
Another great day for riding!
A nice day on the bay.
Small monument to Hans Jonatan, former Danish slave and the first known person of African descent to settle in Iceland.
What a cute looking calculator!
Don't those buttons look so jolly and candy-like?
Outside the Steinasafn (Stone Museum) in Djúpivogur.
The fellow who built the Steinasafn.
September 4, 2021 Filed under Curious, Happy, Introspection
In the morning I went to settle my camping fee, and discovered a Nicelandic setup: Pay in the kitchen!
Didn’t get a chance to pay for your spot? Be a good citizen and leave some cash.
Today would be a quiet day, spent snacking along into a mild headwind. Headwinds are never nice, but this one did interesting things to the sea:
I switched between music and books all day, giving myself room to think. My mind kept coming back to the scene of the accident from yesterday, and the behavior of the people involved, especially the victim.
Aha! I think I found the Icelandic version of Pride Rock!
The young woman had not yelled or cried, or expressed any anguish at all — just a shell-shocked quiet. As a fellow introvert I knew there was a storm inside her head of course. It was just thoroughly walled in by learned social behavior and disposition. I wondered if that expression would come later – days or weeks from now – ambushing her in a safe isolated place, or perhaps somewhere embarrassingly public. If I was dealing with people back home in California I would anticipate that. But could I expect it here, with Icelanders? Perhaps the stoicism I see around me on the surface goes all the way to the core, and this young person already lives inside it, with no role models for something else.
It would be silly of course to extrapolate a single personality onto an entire country. But it’s still possible, and interesting, to talk about averages, and why those could exist. As I rode along, snapping the occasional picture of the rugged coast and forbidding mountains, I wondered if there was a geographical influence at work.
How much does this terrain influence the people living on it?
This bay is protected by a long thin arm of land that smooths the waves on the ocean.
I thought about the young woman, and her entire age group. What must it be like, spending your teenage years in Icelandic terrain?
I amused myself by trying to puzzle it out. For one, the population here is either super-concentrated, or sparse. There aren’t a lot of suburbs around. If your family does farming or ranching, there is plenty of kid-appropriate work to be done. This makes me think that Icelandic kids are not likely to hang around together in large groups unattended, away from the grounding influence of adults.
The setting may be rural, but it’s not big enough to be anonymous. You can’t drive for half an hour and be among total strangers. Iceland is a small country and most of your socializing destinations are on a line, up or down the main road. So if you engage in some embarrassing young-person shenanigans, it’s very likely your parents will get wind of it, because they probably know some other parents over there by name.
So fluffy!
Your parents are probably quiet people. Farm work isn’t a dialogue-driven process. There isn’t a big dancing or singing tradition relative to elsewhere, though you do get a lot of wickedly funny verbal humor that you’ll appreciate more as an adult.
I wondered about this, actually. In rural places where the winter is harsh, there’s a long chunk of time where people are trapped indoors with each other. Being quiet and polite is a good way to avoid expensive conflict, but don’t people also need an outlet? Like, a tavern down in the middle of the village, where music is playing, and people are drinking and shouting over the din, and getting some chaos out of their system? Maybe a bit of dancing?
But if that exists here, what about young people? They wouldn’t have their own youth-oriented places to carouse. They’d be mixed in with the adults. And the adults would be watching.
Got a piece of cardboard? Maybe you can slide down!
It’s funny to contemplate the idea that a place apparently made of quiet wilderness could also be socially confining. But the terrain seems to push that way. You need to be prepared, and people need to know where you’re going. You can’t go skipping down to the beach for a roll in the surf and some sunbathing. You can’t go wandering into the woods, where the cover of trees gives you easy isolation, because there aren’t really any woods.
A cool panorama along a bend in the coastal road.
Now, I shouldn’t get carried away. Young people are going to find outlets wherever they are. I hear popular indoor activities for kids here are video games, D&D campaigns, drinking, playing in bands, chatting online, drinking, having movie nights, going to shows, drinking, endless flirting with potential romantic partners, and going on joyrides to any place where there’s a bit of privacy, even if it’s just a 24-hour mini-mart. That overlaps a whole lot with what my friends did back in Santa Cruz.
And sure, you can’t do casual outdoor stuff, but you can still be outside. There are field sports when the weather’s good. Get your legs working and the cold doesn’t matter so much. And anything that you can do on ice, is available in Iceland.
There’s also something to be said for the isolation of the country from its neighbors. It’s pretty hard to leave. You can’t hop in a car and drive for a while, and end up in Mexico, or go through an undersea tunnel and emerge in France, where people speak a different language and there is serious anonymity and weirdness. In Iceland you’re more likely to be exposed to other countries via incoming tourism, and that isn’t usually a positive filter. I mean, if my community back home was just comprised of the entitled action-hound subset that went on international vacations all the time, I’d probably be a serial arsonist. Let them all stay abroad, thank you very much.
That tourism – all those loud rude people coming in and setting a bad example – probably makes Icelanders want to double-down on their stoicism. Most of them, at least. And that’s another way geography contributes.
This pressure probably goes in another direction as well: If this terrain doesn’t fit your personality, then you can emigrate. The way is open, by the big airport and ferry terminal.
I had fun pondering all this, then switched to some Skyrim for a while to reset my brain.
A while after that, the sun broke through the clouds, and I rearranged my layers. It felt like an autumn day back home, and I felt a bit nostalgic. To feel connected to things in my home country I started listening to a news podcast. That sent my mind in quite a different direction.
Grateful for the sudden sunlight.
A column breaking through the clouds.
Awww, don’t run over the dude! He’s just walkin’ here!
Whole lotta symbols in the next town. Not sure what a bunch of them mean…
If you don’t dry your frillies on the radiatior, some other camper will come by and do the same.
The morning was cold enough that I wore my rain pants just for the insulation, even though it wasn’t raining. This had a useful side-effect: No one could see just how alarmingly stained my sweatpants were. Highway tar does not look good on anything.
The view in the campground was glorious, and as I struck camp I paused for a while to take a video of the tumbling clouds.
When you gotta dry your pants…
Daylight revealed big splats of mud on my walk-around jeans, so I rinsed them in the restaurant bathroom and roped them to the bike. The dry wind would do the job the weak sunlight couldn’t.
Across the bay from the viking settlement — a radar station!
Before joining the main highway, I rambled back down to the end of the road I’d been walking last night, and saw a cool radar station that had only been a row of blinking lights before.
The landscape was even weirder during the day. I could see why it was popular with photographers.
Just before the highway, the rockslide got so dramatic that I had to pause and take this brain-bending photo with the camera tilted:
Hmm something odd about this landscape but I can’t quite figure it out…
The late morning mist was really working today, adding dramatic layers to rock and sea.
Strange coastline near Höfn
Pretty shpooky!
Lighthouse near Höfn in the morning.
When I reached the highway, the tunnel was visible again. The first one of this trip. (I’d been through a few on the northern side a few years ago.) This would be fun!
The closer I get, the more majestic it becomes!
An Icelandic mining operation.
Do I look ready for my first tunnel of this tour?
I’m definitely an old nerd, because when I see this sign, I think of a video game console.
The tunnel turned out to be a modern one, with a decent amount of space on the side for bicyclists.
This one is nice and modern.
Further in I saw a few spots that were already in need of repair. I wonder if volcanic eruptions cause the ground to quake enough for this? Or is it just the ordinary free-thaw destruction of harsh winters?
Okay well there’s a little wear and tear, but still pretty modern lookin’.
Enjoying tunnel!
Alas, the tunnel wasn’t a long one. I emerged into daylight regretfully.
Out of the tunnel, into the fresh air again.
To amuse myself and contrast with the serene landscape, I cued up an ancient radio show by The Firesign Theatre, The Big Internet Broadcast Of 1996. I wondered if the Icelanders around me would go for such absurdist humor? I might be making the day’s experience less Icelandic, but, … a geek’s gotta geek.
“We’ve got a lot of everything out here.
The Firesign Theatre describing America
And a lot of places to … put it in.”
I think this sign is saying something about city versus country speed limits, but it’s way too complicated.
So, you should have headlights if there’s no road, or a road but no city, unless you’re a bus, in which case go various speeds. But if there’s mixed company, then … go the same speeds? Thank goodness I can ignore this, since there aren’t any bicycles.
Around the corner I found a nice place to sit:
Tired of traveling? Take a rest, in the big red random chair.
And further on – good grief – the terrain just got ridiculously photogenic.
Even the hay bales looked amazing in this light. When it comes to golden-hour light, it’s hard to beat Iceland.
Hay wrapped up for later chomping. Gotta have that when the weather gets as bad as it does in Iceland.
Then my afternoon changed. I was biking along an S-curve, and ahead I noticed a car hurtling along, approaching the other end of the curve. I was a bit concerned that it was going to take the corner pretty fast. Then it didn’t take the corner at all.
Instead, the car went down the embankment on the outside of the curve, then up another embankment from a perpendicular road. It flew almost 15 feet into the air, tilting downward from the rotational force of the front wheels being first to leave the ground, then it came down with a heavy thud just on the other side of a fence, see-sawing back up into the air throwing a large dark object out behind it. It landed again, the airbags deployed, and finally it ground to a stop in the grass.
Witnessing all this, I pedaled faster to get around the S-curve to where the vehicle had landed, certain someone was seriously hurt. Less than a minute later, a young woman opened the driver-side door and got out, standing unsteadily. By the time I drew close with my bike, on the other side of the wire fence, she had walked a circle around the car, apparently inspecting it for damage, and then sat down heavily on the grass by the open door.
I looked ahead towards the first impact, where I’d seen a giant object come flying out. There was a large rectangle of bare earth, and a long blanket of sod the same size beyond it. The impact of the vehicle had ripped it out of the ground all at once. I was quite relieved it wasn’t a mangled body, human or otherwise, and that I didn’t have to try and triage some horrifying injury while waiting for assistance, since I wouldn’t be very good at it.
The first impact dug up a big chunk of turf and flung it to one side.
The rear wheels came down in the same place just after the front ones bounced up.
I asked the woman if she was alright, and said I would call emergency services. I had a feeling she wasn’t confident enough in her English to answer back. I took my phone off the handlebars and realized I had no idea what the number for emergency service in Iceland was, or even if my phone would connect to it.
Before I could start puzzling this out, another car came along. It slowed for me, then slowed dramatically when the driver saw down the embankment and noticed a car sitting on the wrong side of a cattle fence.
The car parked, and the man who emerged was a local farmer, fluent in Icelandic. I told him what I’d seen and he immediately began attending to the young woman, who looked no more than 17 years old, and was clearly in shock. He called for the highway patrol, and with a few minutes to wait he turned to me and gave the woman’s side of the story, as she remained shell-shocked in the grass.
“She was up really late, trying to drive home from the other side of the island,” he said. “She fell asleep at the wheel. When she woke up, the car was in the grass. She doesn’t remember anything about the accident, just waking up with her face in the airbag.”
The car, where it landed.
A few minutes later an SUV marked as law enforcement pulled up. Two officers talked to the woman, and a third came up to me and asked for a retelling of the incident, since I was the only one who’d seen it. I walked him over to where the car left the road, and to the embankment where it vaulted into the air. The car had missed hitting a metal sign embedded in a concrete footing by only a few inches, then had flown just far enough to avoid having the rear end come down on top of a fencepost. That would have turned the car sideways and possibly thrown her from it. Or, if she’d been going slower and come down in front of the fence, the steep angle would have plowed the post upward and sent it through the windshield.
I was gobsmacked at how absurdly fortunate she had been — and how incredibly well the airbags had done their job. Holy crap do those things save lives. The extent of her injuries was a bruised ankle and some PTSD.
I stood around texting for a bit. The young woman got moved to the back of the SUV. The farmer sat next to her, providing company for the ride home. It turns out he knew her father, a fellow farmer. I leaned in the window and told her: “You’ve very lucky. Think of all the time after this as bonus time.”
She nodded and smiled weakly.
There was nothing more I could contribute, so I rode on. By evening I’d found a campground, and set up my shelter.
Another fine camping spot.
The place had a cute little common area, making a pleasant island of light. I sat around for a while listening to a few other campers chatting about their hike.
Pretty cute spot!
As my mind settled, it conjured up a haiku:
Cathedrals of ice
Hold unbroken twilight mass
My spirit rises