Travel planning is a curious thing. It’s remarkable how easy an adventure can seem while one is excitedly plunking internet buttons from the safety and comfort of ones couch. It usually starts with a statement of such nature: oh, we’ll be in better shape by the time the trip comes around, or, you know what? I don’t think we need more than 3 hours of sleep, or, I’m pretty sure I did that once at summer camp, I’m sure it’ll come back to me. Iceland, in the midst of the frigid North Atlantic, with a landscape that is formed by the churning of glaciers/cataclysmic clashes between volcanoes and ice, where the lineage of just about anyone can be traced to a murderous clan of Vikings, is altogether too eager to punish you for your overly ambitious trip planning. Our first ever glacier hike, on the magnificent island of Iceland, would prove to us that we would never again feel safe planning anything from the safety of our couch.
After an appallingly short night of sleep, we were retrieved from our hotel by a silent woman who also appeared as though she may have been formed by glaciers or possibly some other kind of tectonic plate movement. Without a word, we were dropped in a parking lot with a mismatched bunch of weary-looking outdoor enthusiasts standing silently facing away from the icy, whipping wind. A bus wheeled into the parking lot, at which point I recalled that the night before, upon learning of our intended trip, the concierge at the hotel had said something in regards to “monster truck busses”. I had sleepily dismissed this as his lack of grasp on the English language and inability to differentiate between motor vehicles that crush other motor vehicles in dusty arenas and just plain old big busses. As I watched the bus pull in, I realized that Icelanders understood the nuances of the English language just fine.
The balding, cigarette smoke enriched bus driver clamored off the oversized bus and the rest of the group, as if downloading from a shared invisible source of information, began piling on. Before we launched our ascent into the main bus cabin we reasonably inquired to the tobacco encrusted driver if there were bathrooms on board. "They no work. Only 4 hour ride," he said, as he impatiently gestured us onto the bus with his smoking hand. He must have deduced from our blinking silence and lack of movement that more information would be required (holding it in for 4 hours seemed slightly unreasonable), so to finally coax us onto the bus he added with a slight air of judgment and a not so slight disdainful look: "We stop 100 km." And so, our bladders breathed a sigh of relief and off we went.
The bus waddled through the streets of Reykjavik and we enjoyed our first daylight glimpses of the city until we finally met the highway and begun the journey to the glacier. Awed, we absorbed the ever-changing and ethereal terrain as we worked farther away from civilization. The trouble though, with sightseeing, is that one, generally speaking, needs to be awake to see. It would turn out to be, after arriving late the night before, and achieving a mere 3 hours of sleep, a losing battle. Occasionally one of us would awake in a drowsy burst to look around and nudge the other who would drunkenly slur … ohmygod, itsssso priddy… and nod back off again.
We arrived eventually at a sleepy gas station/rest stop and I glanced at my watch which blinked “10 am” and relayed to my weary partner that I had a sinking feeling this is what the website had meant by “a stop for lunch”. Not wanting to interrupt the bus driver’s smoking with any more of our asinine questions, we ordered two hot dogs with everything which we feverishly devoured and realized that Icelandic gas station hot dogs were unequivocally the best hot dogs we’d ever eaten, and ordered two more. The website had also promised that at the end of the day’s activities we would be treated to a “warm waffle”. I was quite uncertain as to how a waffle would fit into the day’s events, but a waffle, I reasoned, in most circumstances would generally improve things.
After several more hours of driving, and a brief stop to transfer to a rattling yellow school bus, we jostled and bounced our way to the trailhead of the glacier. The spectacular, slow-moving ice loomed in the distance where a bunch of emboldened clouds clung to it like a gang of villainous sidekicks. The hike to the immense icy tongue was relatively brief and we when we came to the ice, our guide emerged with a litany of safety instructions and noted that it was time to put on our crampons. As if waiting for their cue, the clouds sprang into action, unleashing frigid torrential sheets of rain. So, this was Iceland. And there was no going back now.
My hands shriveled and frigid water invaded every crevice and stitch in my apparently barely even water resistant clothing. What concerned me the most was that the guide seemed completely undeterred by the weather. He pressed on, stopping to lecture us enthusiastically on Iceland’s geographical novelties despite the fact that he looked as though someone had thrown a bucket of ice water in his face. I stood there shivering and smiling and nodding politely, wanting to scream that I’d had enough of the glacier and the rain and the increasingly irritating Italian couple who insisted on snapping picture after picture of each other in ridiculous action poses that resembled nothing that we had done so far. I wanted shout for someone to take me somewhere indoors and to (for christ’s sake!) bring me my waffle. The fear of being viewed by the chiseled Icelander as another squashy American waddling and pointing around his homeland coupled with, ultimately, his handsomeness, prevented me from saying anything at all.
I did take some solace in that there appeared to be other, more woebegone individuals among the group. There were two women who we had nicknamed Toronto, who was from Toronto, and Tippy Toes who never could quite get the hang of the crampons and tittered around on the ice like an oversized drunk ballerina. The former apparently had been either unable or unwilling to observe the fact that 99.8% of the people on the bus ride to the glacier were in fact resting or sitting quietly so others could rest and had decided that her entire life story should be relayed to her fellow passenger in voluminous detail. Now, she stood shivering and soaked, without even a proper coat, all of the gusto and gregariousness getting systematically sucked out of her through her flimsy, sopping white tennis sneakers. The latter handled the cold and wet with more resiliency, though her instability appeared to increase proportionally along with her level of saturation. I began to hope that perhaps one of the annoying Italians would fall and break something so that there would be at least the possibility of us being helicoptered to safety.
The reason the Vikings never bothered with the phrase “what happens in Iceland stays in Iceland” was because they were pretty sure that if you weren’t careful, you’d end up frozen in the depths of a glacial crevasse anyway. They knew that Iceland was neither the time nor the place for shenanigans. Fortunately, we did not end up in a crevasse. Instead, the sun came out and we were led off the glacier and were presented (in the truest instance of delayed gratification I’ve ever experienced) with our delicious waffles. We devoured every last magnificent morsel while sitting at the edge of a brilliant, glimmering glacial lagoon, where icebergs the size of a monster truck bus broke away and floated from the glacier out to the Atlantic. So this was Iceland. Travel planning might never feel safe again, but once you’ve walked with Vikings, anything is possible.
