Land of Fire and Ice

“It is fatal to know too much at the outcome:  boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot.”

Paul Theroux

Hello from impossibly scenic Iceland!

I don’t remember how it happened exactly, but at some point in the last year, I agreed to fly out here with my friend and co-worker, Vinny.  Not all the guys I work with are willing to hang out with me in public, let alone spend an entire week traveling with my vagabonding miserly ass, so Vin definitely deserves some credit here…or he is insane…actually, I can safely say it’s a little of both.
Not a lot of plans were made, aside from having a vague checklist of things to see like geysers, hot springs, glaciers, northern lights, puffins, elves, you know, Icelandic stuff.  A few weeks before leaving on the trip, we met up with my friend Mike, who visited Iceland a year or two(?) ago with a friend and brought back some pretty epic stories involving couchsurfing with a Museum of Sorcery-owning viking who drove them out into a snow storm and sent them unattended out to sea on his boat.  Mike advised renting a car, and not spending too much time in Reykjavik as it was so small.  I got online and rented a Yaris…maybe not exactly the rental he had in mind, but cheapest by a mile, er, kilometer.   Before confirming the booking, I called Vinny and I asked him if he could drive a manual.  He said it had been a while, but sure, he could do it.  GREAT, because I can’t and the only rental cars in Iceland are stick.  Apparently.

We met up at the airport, where I was talking to my mom on the phone.  He asked to be put on and they began speaking, I think about the prospect of seeing the northern lights.  From my end, I only heard,

“You want to see them too?…..Well come with us then!!……Why not?! Work?  Work is stupid, fuck work!”
“Vinny!  Don’t curse at my mom!”
“Sorry.”

If you’re just passing by, Vinny cuts an intimidating figure.  Burly and uh, indelicate (or brutally honest, depending on your point of view), he curses unabashedly in otherwise quiet places and heavy-handedly lowers drinks onto tables, one after another, New York to the core.  But though he was born and raised there, his parents are both native Filipino, something no one can ever quite seem to nail down.  It leads to a daily barrage of questions like, “Where are you from?” (New York)  “No, where are you really from?” (New York!), and draws quite some attention in Nordic countries, where he has spent a considerable amount of time traveling.  In part because he enjoys the misconceptions so readily leveled at him, he is usually found wearing a trench coat, combat boots, and his piece de resistance, an black leather Australian cowboy hat.  For me, it is endlessly entertaining to watch people as they run into him at the threshold of a door, fear-stained wariness crossing their faces for a moment and giving way to outright relief when he holds the door open and says politely, “after you”, or “bless you” anytime someone sneezes, or he reaches down to retrieve a toy dropped by a baby to its frightened but grateful mother.  He literally gave the Metallica Master Puppet shirt off his back to someone during the course of the trip… the point is, he might be loud, but his mama still raised him with some fucking manners, goddamn it.  Something you might guess without getting to know him is that he self-identifies as a metal head, but what you might not guess is that he’ll also just as easily hold impassioned discourse on Stravinsky and how the syncopation in Rite of Spring changed his life and the trajectory of music forever.  Just ask him.

The flight landed early morning in Reykjavik (that is the first time I’ve spelled it correctly without spellcheck) and we went straight to the hostel.  I fell asleep, because that’s what I do.  I slept so long Vinny and a long-faced Canadian named Spencer also staying in the room thought I was sick.  When I finally woke up, it was near dinner time, and so I agreed to leave the hostel in search of the only thing I enjoy as much as sleep: food.  Turns out there was an awesome whiskey bar just down the street from the hostel, Dillon’s, and we became fast friends with the bartender and a couple of locals.

I spent most of the time in Reykjavik “working” (the quotes are because I’m not getting paid for it yet….if anyone has any contacts in the manufacturing business, please let me know.  Seriously.)  After 2 days, we walked to the rental place, a company named “Sadcars”, which is a weird thing to name your rental business, but appropriate because they dealt in exclusively 10+ yr old cars, namely of the 2-door-euro-compact-but-someone-took-it-off-roading-anyway variety.  We finally found the poorly marked office in a warehouse district after a bit of searching, with two muddy and rather gloomy Yari parked outside, and a note on the locked office door with a number to call if by chance you’d come to, say, rent a car.  When he finally arrived, we did a small walk around with the Sadcars guy to confirm that the car would be returned the exact piece of sh*t that we found it as.

“There’s a bit of trouble with the back lock”, he mumbled as he jiggled the key in the hatchback, trying to get it to open.  He sprayed some WD-40 on the lock, jiggled it some more and said, “That should be fine.”  Back into the office.  I ran after him.
“The check engine light is on.”
“That’s ok,” he said, a bit exasperated, “they’re all like that.”

When I was in high school, I was given lessons and even grew proficient(ish) in driving stick shift.  But that was a long time ago, and without practice, that knowledge has now completely dissipated into incompetent smack-talking.  Still, the knowledge that I once had the knowledge convinced me that now would be a good time to re-learn this invaluable skill so that I can re-forget it again a few months from now.  Vinny got us off the lot and out of town, but shortly thereafter pulled over at a gas station and presented me with the keys.

And so, in the Land of Fire and Ice, it was to be trial by ice.  Happily, there is only one major road in the entire country -Highway 1- and it runs along the coast, so directions to and from cities are pretty straightforward, and once I managed to jolt and crap out and burn the clutch off the parking lot, it was smooth sailing.  Sort of.  Without any sleeping arrangements reserved, armed only with our sleeping bags and crape paper tent of a vehicle, we set out towards the northeastern peninsula and town of Holmavik, to see a viking about a sorcery museum.

Until next time…