A visit to Iceland

I just returned from 10 days as a tourist in Iceland. It was not my first time there. Years ago I went on a cruise which included two stops in Iceland, one in Reykjavik and one in Akureyri. In each case there was a short bus tour to see some typical sights – a waterfall, a geysir and a volcanic region with bubbling mud and hot springs. This time I had a chance to see a lot more. I enjoyed the cruise a lot but I had the impression that the majority of the people on the ship were very bored. The main antidote to the boredom offered was lots of food. One day I got up from the dinner table and went on deck. There had been no indication that there might be something interesting to see. When I opened the door I was confronted with a beautifully conical volcano covered with ice, Snaefellsjökull. (I will come back to the interesting issue of Icelandic pronuciation later.) This was one of my strongest impressions from the whole cruise. The volcano is at the end of a long peninsula to the north of Reykjavik. This time I learned that this volcano is the esoteric centre of Iceland and that it was the starting point of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. This was not really a point on the programme of the tour this time but it was clearly visible with binoculars from the hotel in Rekjavik where we spent the last two nights. I had one view of it which was monochrome due to the light conditions but where the sharp edges of the crater stood our clearly.

One attraction of Iceland for me was the bird life. It seems that the country has claimed exclusive rights on the puffin. The numerous tourist shops in Reykjavik are called ‘puffin shops’ due to the number of representations of that bird they sell. I also saw puffin offered as one of the constituents of a special menu also including whale and horse meat. We spent one night in Vik and I discovered two stranded fulmars on a grass area not far from the hotel. These birds can only take off from an elevated starting point like a cliff or from water. If one lands on a flat area some distance from the sea then it is doomed unless it gets help. I rescued two of them by carrying them (ten minutes walk including crossing a road with significant traffic) to the sea. Since there had not been a big storm I suppose they had come down during their first flight after leaving the nest. (There were fulmars nesting on inland cliffs on the other side of the hotel from the sea.) Fortunately I still knew how to catch them and pick them up without hurting them or being the victim of their defence mechanism of spitting foul-smelling oil when feeling threatened. I enjoyed seeing a few glaucous gulls in the harbour in Reykjavik on the last day. Probably the last time I saw any was on the cruise I already mentioned. It was also nice to see and hear many whimbrels. The first one already welcomed me at the airport when I arrived.

I felt at home in the natural surroundings in Iceland and after a few days I thought of one explanation. There are very few trees in Iceland and this is just as it is in Orkney where I grew up. The first time I was on the mainland of Scotland when I was four years old I said ‘I don’t like this place – you can’t see anything for trees’. There are many areas in Iceland where there is only sand, rocks, water and ice. I had the impression of seeing what the Earth is really like, without the veil of green which we usually see. I also got an impression of what it is really like to live next to a volcano. I was in a museum close to (and devoted to) Eyafjallajökull, the infamous producer of ash with the complicated name. I learned that one US journalist just called it E15, due to the number of letters. There was a film showing in the museum explaining what people living near the volcano experienced at the time of the last eruption. Coming back to the name, the pronunciation of Icelandic does seems to be a difficult question but also an interesting one. I would like to spend some time understanding it better. There are nice videos on the pronuciation of Eyafjallajökull here and here. The final double l is the really tricky point. There are points of similarity between the Icelandic language and the dialect I grew up with. This is due to the influence of an extinct language called Norn which was spoken on Orkney and Shetland in past centuries and which is related to (Old) Icelandic. For instance the oystercatcher is called tjaldur in Icelandic and chaldro in our dialect.

I also had some culinary experiences. At breakfast in the hotels there was always a bottle of cod liver oil on the table. I remember this liquid from my childhood as a threat used on young children. ‘If you do not behave yourself I will give you a spoonfull of cod liver oil.’ Due to persistent encouragement from Eva I tried a little and found it not as bad as I expected. Our guide also gave us some pieces of Greenland shark to try. He gave  us a warning about the taste and some of the alcholic drink called the black death to wash it down with. It tastes of nothing at first but chewing leads to a strong taste reminiscent of urine. In fact the flesh of the shark is poisonous due to its content of trimethylamine N-oxide. In Iceland it is treated by first burying it for several weeks and then drying it to get rid of the poison. The result is considered a delicacy. The Greenland shark is interesting because of the fact that it was recently discovered that it can live to be four hundred years old, only becoming sexually mature when it is 150. I want to read more about it.

As a final comment on Iceland: the weather was much better than we expected!

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