Day 7, 17^th July – Akureyri

This was a momentous day. The day we first set foot on Icelandic soil.  The husband had wanted to visit Iceland ever since watching Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a film we’d both loved.  The film was shot in many Icelandic locations, one of which was Grundarfjordur, a small town which featured on our cruise itinerary.

We’d pre-booked a 3-hour excursion at Akureyri, called ‘Leisurely Akureyri and Godafoss Falls.’ I’d chosen this one because the word ‘leisurely’ was in the title.

We boarded the coach at 1 pm and our tour guide, a young lady, who had emigrated to Iceland from Hungary, began giving us her excursion spiel. We first stopped at Akureyri Botanical Gardens. Our guide made it clear we had 30 minutes to get round the place and must be back on the coach on time – or else.  ‘And the coach number is twenty-five! she screeched, pointing to our coach amongst several others. ’Twenty-five, see? and she pointed to a bit of paper taped to the coach windscreen. Twenty-five! She bawled at us, as we headed off to the gardens, making triply sure we got the message.

She’d previously informed us that there were ‘restrooms’ in the gardens, but they were coin operated, only accepting krona, but this was waived for tourists. Wondering how you opened and locked such loos without krona; envisioning getting trapped inside an Icelandic bog, and being left behind by our strict tour guide, I avoided going. The loo situation on excursions was to be a major trauma, given the ‘tight’ timetables we were given. There was always the gnawing fear that if you queued up for the loo, you’d a) miss the sightseeing bits or b) suffer abandonment if you didn’t make it out of the public lav on time.

We rushed round parts of the slightly underwhelming gardens. To be fair, apparently it was a bit of a miracle that Iceland has a botanical garden at all, given its volcanic nature, and we were so pressed for time that we didn’t stop long enough to properly appreciate everything.

Back on the coach the driver set off and, ten minutes in, our guide informed us that we’d be taking the scenic route to the Godafoss falls, rather than the tunnel through the mountain to our right; whereupon the great, black, yawning mouth of a tunnel, at the base of a huge mountain, hove into view through our coach window.  The scenic route was, she assured us, much the better option, being it went via a mountain pass, through spectacular scenery. It was going to be wonderful.

I nearly fainted.

Nowhere in P&O’s literature on this leisurely excursion had there been one single mention of tunnels through mountains, or mountain passes, else I wouldn’t have booked it.  I must sue P&O I thought wildly; for false advertising; for getting me into this perilous situation.  Clearly somebody at P&O doesn’t understand the word ‘leisurely.’   ‘But at least we’re not going in the monster tunnel’, I muttered to myself in a hysterical fashion. ‘What?’ asked the husband.

‘I want to get off, I want to get off,’ I began whinging. ‘You are not getting of,’ the husband whispered. ‘If you get off, you’ll be stranded, and I’m not stopping the coach so you can get off anyway.  And we’ll look like idiots. It’ll be fine. We just have to go with it. RELAX.’  

Now, the really interesting part here is that the husband did not ask why I wanted to get off.  Therefore, the husband must also have been suffering the heebie-jeebies due to the tunnel/mountain pass scenario.  He then grabbed my hand, as much to say, if we’re going down, then we’re going down together, whereupon the coach suddenly veered to the right and headed straight for the icy depths of the Eyjafjordur, the mighty fjord in which Aurora was currently docked.

Let’s press the pause button.  Re-living the leisurely excursion from hell is giving me palpitations, but I also need to give you some background information dear Blog.

You will have gathered by now that I’m not a fan of man-made transportation, and that includes the coach. I’d thus far miraculously survived 6 days at sea, although the toll to my nervous system was evident from the fact I’d lost weight, despite continually stuffing my face. Early that morning I’d looked out of our cabin window and, owing to my super vision, had spied a long, snaking bridge that went from one side of the fjord to the other. It then joined a road that wound up into hills. Was it a bridge? I’d thought, for it looked far too low to the water and there appeared to be no walls or barriers. I could see miniature cars rushing across it (for the bridge was a very long way away.)  I’d asked the husband what he thought of it. Thought of what? he’d said. ‘That bridge over there,’ I’d said. What bridge? he’d said and had had to get out his crappy binoculars.  ‘I really hope we don’t have to go on it,’ I’d said to the husband. ‘Why would we go on that?’ he’d asked. ‘Well, for the excursion maybe? I’d replied.

And there we were, hurtling towards what turned out to not be a bridge, but a narrow road which seemed to be built on nothing but mud and rock, with an alarming absence of barriers, and was just inches above the water. The watery depths of the icy fjord rose up towards us on either side. 

I closed my eyes, dismissing visions of our coach swerving off into the fjord because it maybe failed its MOT, or its driver might suffer a heart attack, thus submerging us in a watery tomb. I opened them sometime later to find we were climbing upwards between two hills.

The guide had said the drive to the falls would take 40 minutes. I looked at my watch (analog, £12, bought specifically for the cruise) and willed time to move forward 40 minutes.  As the drive progressed, I concentrated on employing relaxation exercises my singing teacher had given me. ‘Send lots of pics,’ she’d said, ‘and I’ll be with you in spirit.’  I closed my eyes and pictured a safe place (back at home on the couch) and breathed in and out slowly, repeating my teacher’s mantra: ‘I am safe. I am calm…………….it didn’t work.

What did work, was discovering that the mountain pass was a wide, two-lane road bordered on each side by low metal railing. The pass wound its way between mountain ranges and not, crucially, up a mountain.

Our guide chatted on. ‘The Godafoss falls,’ she informed us, ‘are so called because a long time ago a Viking leader threw his Norse God effigies into the falls, when the great Christian Conversion happened’ (i.e., when the Christians forced everybody to give up their own gods and worship theirs instead.)  Icelandic for God is also God, hence Godafoss falls. ‘You are very lucky seeing the falls today,’ she continued. ‘We’ve had no sun here for many days and the falls have been a muddy brown colour, and today the sky is blue, and the water is a lovely aquamarine.’ 

She pointed out various isolated buildings along the route, one of which was a boarding school, standing alone at the bottom of a mountain. She then waxed lyrical on the Icelandic horses which are about the size of a pony.  ‘They are a special ancient breed,’ she told us.  ‘They must never leave Iceland, and it’s illegal to import other horses’. ‘Oh, look’, she exclaimed, ‘there’s a group of them over there.’  Away into the distance, as if on cue, we saw several horses running together along the side of a mountain range.  I imagined our guide texting some Icelandic bloke on his isolated farm, ‘right, get the horses ready, we’ll be passing in 10 minutes.’

The husband is all about comfort zones at the moment, as in getting out of them. He believes this to be beneficial and not, as I view it, a place to be avoided at all costs. In this case he was right. The scenic drive to the falls was the highlight of the cruise – I swear I saw Gandalf and company striding along beside us.

And then it ended at Godafoss falls, where the sky was blue, and the water was aquamarine. The photo in no way shows the aquamarine, both our phones are old with pretty dodgy cameras. Our guide gave us 40 minutes to look round.

A bit of Godafoss Falls

After taking photographs, I walked away from the falls, far enough so that the noise from the waterfalls faded. I stood on flat, stony ground, which continued into the near distance until it met the mountains. Despite its similarity to mountainous Wales and the Lake District, the landscape here had a quality I’d not seen anywhere else. Darkly volcanic; ridged and rugged but on a manageable scale.  Clearly our cruise was ‘taking in’ the more easily reached bits of the Icelandic landscape and, if this was what the tourist bits looked like, I couldn’t imagine the more extreme places on offer.

The Godafoss Falls area seemed devoid of life, other than clusters of trees growing midway up the mountains, and intermittent patches of green.  There were no birds as far as I could see or hear.  No animals. Just a few isolated wooden houses dotted around the landscape – I counted three. The immensity of this landscape all around me, and the almost crushing silence, was overwhelming.  I suddenly felt that humanity didn’t matter at all. We were just an excitable blip on Earth’s radar. A problem for cruel Nature to solve.

This landscape was from our planet’s primeval past. It had seen all Gods come and go. Had witnessed generations of settlers and generations of wars.  I’m anthropomorphising here, but there was a real sense of eternal majesty and power that emanated from the hills and mountains. But also, a stark strangeness; an alien quality.  We could have been on another planet. I understood why mountains played such a key role in early religions. How they might appear to be gateways to other realms.

Yes, mountains rock (as well as being actual rock.)

Day 8, 18^th July – Grundarfjordur

We arrived at Grundarfjordur, population 800+, in the early morning. Two tender boats were used to get us from Aurora to the tiny harbour. The tender boats were a new excitement. They moored at the side of Aurora, deck 5, and we were asked to perform a ‘step test’ before being allowed on. This was to check you wouldn’t lose your balance when boarding the boat from the ship or exiting the boat to the port on the other side.  The journey back in the tender boat is something I won’t forget, as Aurora loomed up ahead of us, as large and impressive as a mountain.

Grundarfjordur was again deserted and silent, except for our fellow cruisers. We spent two hours ambling around under a Mediterranean sky, the husband wondering which bit they’d used for the Walter Mitty film.

And I found your typical Icelandic church, which made me very happy.

I noticed a rock jutting up from a mountain that looked just like a wolf howling at the sky. ‘That rock looks just like a wolf!’ I squealed at the husband. ‘What rock,’ he said.  Curse the husband’s vision. I instructed him to put his specs on and he still couldn’t see it. I had to take a photo and show him the photo, englarged. He denied the rock was a wolf. I was just about to argue strongly that it was a wolf when a fellow cruiser behind me suddenly shouted, ‘that rock looks like a wolf!’  and then everyone started taking photos.

Photos didn’t do it justice, and our phones are ancient camera tech-wise, but it was a remarkable and huge likeness, when you were actually there.

Well, Blog. This is hopefully my penultimate post.  I’m sure you’ll be as relieved as I am to know that only the final chapter now awaits.

To be continued…