Iceland Cycling - day 2
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The next morning we set off towards the famous Geysir. Anyone familiar with the realities of Icelandic tourism has probably already realized that at this point, our route overlapped with the famous Golden Circle, the first part of which includes Thingvellir park, the Haukadalur geothermal valley with the Strokkur and Geysir geysers, and the Gullfoss waterfall.
For now, our path ran along asphalt, through civilized, albeit unpopulated places. If necessary, we could easily ask for help from the numerous car tourists, but cyclists were not an uncommon sight either. Although, I must admit, it seemed like there should have been a lot more of them, since we saw only a few two-wheeled steeds a day.
The weather continued its dreary autumn song
The vegetation is still lush for these parts, we haven't driven far from the coast
Andrey is cheerful and in high spirits, a true traveler doesn't care about the rain
Most of the time on the move we were accompanied by a fine drizzle, settling on our jackets and glasses as tiny droplets. It didn't bother us much, but it did mute the charm of the colorful hills around us. Curiously, on the grassy lawns here and there, we could see working sprinklers — what's the mystery there?
Another quote from "Independent People":
It was even harder for them to understand the Great Flood, which was caused by rain lasting forty days and forty nights — here, on the heath, there were years when it rained for two hundred days and two hundred nights almost without stopping, and there was no flood.
At the campsite in Thingvellir we chatted with an older married couple from Australia, who looked like seasoned backpackers, sturdy, tanned, and wrinkled. Their camp stove was all soot-stained, scratched, and dented, clearly having survived and seen a lot in its lifetime: just like they had. Our stove, on the other hand, had been bought just that morning and hadn't even been tested in action yet, and we ourselves had never undertaken such a difficult journey on our own before. Gathered at one table were people and things of different generations, but with a single goal and a single dream: to understand and feel the harsh and beautiful spirit of this country. We — emotional, a bit shy, and prone to panicking over little things — choked down instant porridge with canned fish, while they hadn't been too lazy to whip up a beautiful mix of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine, with couscous, pieces of fried meat and veggies, and spices. As you can see, even in the spartan conditions of a camping trip, one can enjoy life, but that requires periodically popping back out into civilization for supplies, which was something we couldn't afford to do.
During our calm, pleasant, and unhurried conversation, it turned out that before our arrival, the sun had been blazing like crazy all over Iceland for two and a half months, and there had been an almost desert-like drought.
On our way we saw a sign named Laugarvatnshellir. My innate linguistic intuition told me that hellir means "cave". After rolling a couple of kilometers down a dirt road, we saw info boards and dark gaping holes in the rocks, which you can see in the photo. As you may remember, the day before we had also unexpectedly turned off the asphalt onto a dirt road, but this time it wasn't in vain.
People were still living in the caves at the beginning of the last century: a guy and a girl for half a year, and a few years later — a carpenter and his wife, for a whole three years. During that time they had several kids, with one girl born right in the cave, and she's still alive today. And once, even the Danish King Christian came to visit, they treated him to the local yogurt (Skyr). He must have liked it, because he left 30 krónur as a gift for the family.
The info board talks about Huldufolk — the hidden people. Icelanders believe that its inhabitants still live among the inhospitable rocks in the interior of the island, and trying to argue with that can end very badly for you. I'm serious.
Icelanders regularly see elves, newspapers print photos of people next to huge rocks where they've seen elves. Wolfgang himself talked to various people who told stories about such encounters — the audience was shown a photo of a raver kid who, tumbling out of a disco, flirted with a girl on the street, and then she vanished, and it got cold and damp all around. And he realized who he was dealing with.
In the Reykjavik city council there is a special lady — a civil servant, that is — responsible for contact with elves. Anyone who has problems with the invisible inhabitants of the parallel world turns to her. In the past, such matters were settled by a shaman or a sorcerer, but today — by the city bureaucracy. What kind of problems? Well, before building anything on your plot, say, digging in a bench, you need to make sure that an elf road doesn't pass through that spot.
This is what Andrey Gorokhov once said about Wolfgang Müller's album. Like all of Andrey's work, it really resonates with me, and it's right on topic, so give it a read.
Along the way we saw quite a few rivers, some easily 10-20 meters wide, or even more.
From the caves, we decided not to return to the highway, but to keep riding along the dirt road. The plan in general was to take the dirt road right away for a bit, but I chickened out. A well-known recipe against this is to put yourself in a situation where there are no avenues of retreat and there's no wriggling out of it. If you look at the big picture, with Iceland we managed this brilliantly: we went just the two of us, with no one else to rely on, we headed into the interior, the difficult part. But on this specific little stretch, we slacked off a bit.
On our way we came across our first ford, of which we were promised quite a few ahead. But it was embarrassing to even call it a ford: while we were pondering the crossing and I was trying to build a bridge out of stones, an Icelander and his son overtook us, calmly driving right through the stream without even stopping.
We later caught up with them in a small village down the road, where there was a store and even a pizzeria, meaning the places were still quite civilized for now. While I was eating a tiny sandwich for another insane price of 5 lats, I got to talking with a Polish couple. They shared that they too had initially rushed into the Interior — the inner part of the island where we are also heading. But due to being unprepared for the harsh conditions inside, and having unsuitable bikes, they took a bus from our destination — Landmannalaugar (spelled from memory, by the way) to the other end of the island — Myvatn. The ticket cost 100 euros, and the ride took 9 hours, but it's very beautiful in Myvatn, so they had no regrets.
I emphasize once again: striking up conversations with people you meet is useful and honorable. Especially since doing it with fellow cyclists is very easy and pleasant, because they have the exact same problems and concerns; who else could better understand our rebellious souls?
I'll pause on a somewhat pensive note: where do the girls who share a passion for travel come from, especially for its less comfortable forms, like trekking and bicycling? I've almost never met any back home, I'm afraid it's an extremely rare bird. And for a strong and persistent girl to also be into culture, music, festivals, and contemporary art, in short, everything that my soul leans towards — I'm afraid such a higher being simply cannot exist in nature. I won't even mention looks and having liberal views, or they'll call me a snob, an aesthete, and tell me to get real.
Meanwhile, in Iceland, M+F cyclist couples delighted us with their presence constantly. There are, then, women in European villages who would stop a moving jeep. The search continues, beep-beep. However, I write this in vain, because I've long realized that all the above doesn't matter, the main thing is for the "magic" to happen, aka the mechanism of falling in love kicking into its full, terrifying chemical power, and then life itself will put everything in its place.