Iceland 9: to Hvanngil

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Thursday 1st September 1977

Our walking holiday in Iceland continues. 

Leaving Strutslaug - the hut is in the mid distance on the left

On the road again, or rather, up a frozen river in a snowstorm and a slide down a glacier. Today, we skirt the southern edge of the Torfajökull ice cap and move to Hvanngil.

Paul and the ‘bridge school G.T. boys’ in the distance, leaving us behind yet again

Neville boasts of being an expert ice slider on account of his skiing experience. Bridge School Mike is entirely the opposite. At least that’s one thing he can’t do. As I follow Neville by sliding down on one foot keeping perfect control by punching the ground with mittened fists, Mike shoots past head first on his back at about fifty miles an hour. Still, he seems to be enjoying it. 

We shelter from the weather in a snow cave to eat our sandwiches.

Later, we have to cross a stream. Steve and I are too close to each other with one rock common to both our routes. He gets there first. I fall full length but escape with only a wet leg. By then the snow, which had turned to rain, has stopped and the wind soon dries my trousers, but only after Paul takes full advantage of the opportunity to make sardonic comments. 

Today I am carrying the billy cans. They jingle-jangle constantly behind me against my metal mug. Now I know how cats must feel with bells on their collars. Everyone carries their share of  the equipment and everyone does their share of the housekeeping – washing up, making sandwiches, burying rubbish and fetching water. Paul does all the cooking on a primus stove. Perhaps the main selfishness, which I have only just caught on to, is in arriving at huts as early as possible and bagging the best sleeping spots.

The countryside gradually turns greener as we get nearer the enormous Markarfljót river. My day off yesterday at Strútslaug has paid off. In the afternoon I zoom along with Paul and arrive at Hvanngil first, but as it is the most comfortable hut so far, there is no real advantage.

Ed is once more a long way behind. He really should have rested yesterday, too. He struggles along, but his feet are now worse than mine were. He has bad blisters and swollen ankles, and must be in awful pain. Somehow, he keeps going and will not let anyone else carry his share of the equipment.

Someone jokes that his injuries have been imposed by the killjoy Icelandic government. They run a country in which only low alcohol beer is permitted. Despite being the size of Ireland, there are only eight shops allowed to sell spirits. Paul says they do permit the sale of home-brew beer kits, but insert a leaflet warning it is against the law to put any sugar in. Blisters and swollen ankles are decreed by statute. 

The Hvanngil hut

Hvanngil (pronounced “Kwanngil”, possibly meaning water ravine) is massive. It has two floors. Upstairs, accessed by ladder, is equipped with tables, chairs and mattresses. It is also very warm: in fact too warm for super-acclimatised Paul who decides to sleep downstairs in the horse food trough. This leads to speculation about what his house in Newcastle-under-Lyme is like: stable downstairs, corrugated iron roof, Karrimats instead of beds, food cooked on paraffin stoves and eaten with spoons out of mess tins, a shovel outside the back door for digging convenience holes in the neighbours’ gardens, leaky and draughty windows, no heating, mugs and toilet rolls hanging by strings from hooks in the walls. 

Notebook Pages

Late at night as we are going to sleep we are awoken by heavy footsteps outside, with shouting and clanging pans. It turns out to be a group from the tour organisers bringing provisions. They are trying to make us think we are under attack by drunken Icelandic revellers. Some manage to sleep through the commotion. The group consists of Paul’s wife Judi, another walk leader called Jenny, and the elusive Dick Phillips himself. As they come up the ladder, Mike wakes up and asks Jenny if she is the legendary Dick Phillips. Gavin then wakes up and asks Dick whether he is something to do with the Dick Phillips organisation.

The real reason Paul went downstairs to sleep in the horse trough only occurs to us later. From her broad accent, I spot straight away that Judi is from Leeds. 

Dick Phillips is every bit as formidable as his photographs suggest, frighteningly serious and knowledgeable, confidently in command of all around through thick dark beard and equally thick dark spectacles. In the morning, I catch the flash of his piercing gaze observing me critically as I dawdle languidly over a late breakfast. I quickly finish and start tidying and washing up. Bang goes any chance I had of being invited back as a walk leader.

(next part)
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Iceland 8: Still at Strútslaug

links to: introduction and index - previous day - next day

Wednesday 31st August 1977

A week since we flew to Iceland. 

The Strútslaug Hut

Strútslaug-14, as someone has renamed it, was built by Dick Phillips for his own tours. It is cold, cramped, and the floor is volcanic gravel. Most of us sleep on the gravel but there is room for three ‘athletes’ on a seven-foot high sleeping platform. Getting on to it involves a stomach-wrenching reverse-somersault technique. Of course, only the Bridge School G.T. boys have strong enough stomach muscles to do it.

Yet, they are the ones most likely to have to go outside in the night. There must be some correlation between the strength of one’s stomach muscles and the need to pee. Perhaps strong stomach muscles exert greater pressure on the bladder. As we continue to drink big mugs of cocoa each night, those on the sleeping platform have to jump down in the dark. It is not a good idea to sleep directly beneath the edge.

In the mornings there is a well established order of getting up. I am told that Ed and Neville are always first. I really don’t know because I am always one of the last. I compete with three others for the Rip van Winkle award.

We are staying at Strútslaug for two nights to allow a day’s walking on the Torfajökull ice cap. It lies on an extensive volcanic cone known the ‘high rhyolite’. However, because of the red-raw state of my heels, it seems fairer to the others if I take the day off, so I stay at the hut. The complaints about the frequent stops to wait for me the previous day have got to me. Ed should really have done the same because his feet are as bad as mine, but he goes off with the others.
 

Geothermal pool at Strútslaug

After they have gone, I go down to the geothermal pools for a long soak. The strong mineral content works wonders on my scabby blisters. Not only does it heal heels, it is also mentally therapeutic. To tell you the truth, I am not very good at spending all day and night, seven days a week, with people I don’t know. It is hard enough with people I do know. I would have been hopeless in the army. Back at the hut I read a book of D. H. Lawrence short stories. I enjoy the day on my own.

Obsidian, a heavy, black, glassy igneous rock, lies all around. I pick up a piece to take home. Gavin has collected about five pounds (2.25 kg) of the stuff. Rather him than me carrying the extra weight. I’m glad I’m not on his Christmas present list.

I still have mine:

Obsidian from Iceland

The others return having had a superb day. Below is Neville’s picture of Paul, the leader, overlooking one of the views I missed. However, I am informed we will be walking part of the same route again tomorrow.  

Even for just a day’s walk, Paul still takes his carrying frame, albeit not as heavily laden as usual. He has a rope and two ice axes for emergencies. I think these must be stored at the Strútslaug hut because I haven’t noticed them before, even though he always carries far more weight than anyone else, including fuel for cooking. The sturdy frame appears to be constructed out of angle irons. I suspect it incorporates scaffolding poles and a couple of rolled steel joists as well. 

This Icelandic saga is turning out to be even longer than anticipated. We are now half way along the route, east to west, north-east of the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, with four more days walking to go:

(next part)
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

George Orwell: The Road to Wigan Pier

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair):
The Road to Wigan Pier (4*)

This is very much a book of two halves.

It begins with Orwell’s account of the terrible living conditions in the industrial north of England during the nineteen-thirties. He writes first-hand after staying in lodging-houses, and living with miners and the unemployed in Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield. I enjoyed this half of the book enormously, mainly because I can relate to it. Parts remind me how things still were in the fifties. Even in the seventies, echoes of the thirties were still around, despite much having improved by then. 

The second half advocates socialism as a means of improving these conditions. “Why aren’t we all socialists?” Orwell asks. It is interesting and clearly-argued, but I struggled to get to the end. It is not what I wanted to read (which has nothing to do with any political leanings I might have). I’ll say little more about this part other than to suggest that gains in living standards after the war were due to socialist policies.

Here are some of the things that struck me (page numbers may be inaccurate as I was using a Kindle).

Orwell writes of the thousands of ‘back to back’ terraces (they had no back doors because other houses adjoined the rear) “… which are all of a condemned type but will remain standing for decades.” (p48). They did. I lived in them in the Brudenell and Royal Park area of Leeds in the nineteen-seventies. Most had by then been modernised with damp courses and bathrooms, but not all. Across the road, we used to see inhabitants walking out in their pyjamas to the communal lavatories in the middle of the row. Those same houses are still there today, although the lavatories have been demolished to leave enclosures for dustbins. 

Older black and white photographs give a better idea of how dreary some of these streets were, such as this one, the communal lavatory with wooden seat in the middle:

My grandma had an earth closet as late as the nineteen-fifties, not a communal one, but it had to be shovelled out and burned.

Obviously, Orwell says a lot about class:

“… the real secret of class distinctions in the West … why [even a bourgeois Communist] cannot think of a working man as his equal. ... The lower classes smell. That was what we were taught… It is queer how seldom this is admitted.” (p119)

Remember the days before it was common to shower and wear clean clothes every day, and rub deodorant on all over? My mother used to say “clean shirt and socks every two days, clean underwear twice a week, and a bath once a week”. Many people were identifiable by their individual smell. Not all were pleasant. There was the man I tried not to sit near on the train who kept his suit in a fusty wardrobe. There was another who dried himself with a dirty towel. You could detect these things. Smokers were unmistakable. Sometimes you knew when women were having their periods. There were lots of smelly feet and armpits, or maybe poorly washed clothing. Goodness knows what their underpants must have been like. This was life in the cities as late as the nineteen-seventies.

Differences between north and south are central to the book. Staying in a dreadful lodging house above a tripe shop, several beds to the room, Orwell shares with a commercial traveller who is more used to hotels.

“He caught my eye and suddenly divined that I was a fellow-Southerner. ‘The filthy bloody bastards!’ he said feelingly. After that he packed his suitcase and… [left]”. (p13)

The unrelenting nature of working-class labour is detailed, and the enormous debt owed by those living cosseted lives to those toiling in the mines and factories:

“In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. … all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to the poor drudges underground…” (p30)

So it still is in principle. We can’t all work at home on computers.

I found the first half of the book fascinating, and could go on about unemployment, the state of working-class teeth, poverty, and so on, but will end with a few more quotations (it’s easy to cut and paste from a Kindle, and the book is out of copyright):

An example of Orwell’s forthright views (it is almost worth reading the book just for these):

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” (p161) 

He’s nearly as entertaining as Adrian. On Yorkshiremen:

“There exists in England a curious cult of Northern snobbishness. A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior.” That the South is inhabited “merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has ‘grit’ … the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy…” (p101)

Too true. And one for any Sheffield bloggers that may be out there:

“Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World … it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village … And the stench! …” (p98)

 

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Walking In Iceland 7: to Strútslaug

links to: introduction and index - previous day - next day

Tuesday 30th August 1977

Yesterday, on our walking tour in southern Iceland, we reached the Álftavötn (Alftavatn) hut. It is another step up in the world, the biggest hut so far, with an upper storey where we can sleep on the wooden floor.

The Álftavötn hut

It must be a strange life for Paul, the leader. He spends his summers in Iceland, and, since finishing his degree at Keele, his winters working in the Staffordshire potteries. This is his fifth season with Dick Phillips and he hopes to be offered a partnership. His deadpan manner continues.

“Would someone please dig a rubbish hole?” he asks.
“Where shall I dig it?” responds Neville.
 “Preferably in the ground.”
“Where in the ground?”
“Preferably outside.”
“Where abouts?” asks Neville. “In front of the door?”

With that, Neville gets a serious answer. In 1977, most packaging would have been bio-degradable paper, so burying it would have been acceptable.

Paul then describes the next hut in the itinerary, Strútslaug, delivered as always in his inimitable, sentence-pause-sentence style.

“There are hot springs there – And pools in which you can bathe – Unfortunately, one has to cross a glacial river to get to the hot pools – There is, however, a bridge over this river – Unfortunately, it has been swept away – We are going to replace the bridge – Unfortunately, someone has to wade across the river to anchor the bridge at the far side…” 

And so on. He still “can’t guarantee” anything. 

Surprisingly, he does not have mountain leader qualifications. He got the job after visiting Iceland before university when he helped Dick Phillips build the Strútslaug hut. Dick then invited him back the following year as a walk leader.

We set off from Álftavötn to Strútslaug : from Swan Lake to Ostrich Pool as they implausibly translate. We begin by crossing the natural bridge again – the one that those who shot off in front yesterday did not know about, so had to wade the river. I’m glad I doubled back and didn’t need to. They were lucky to get away with it.

I am at the back from the start, abject and pathetic because of rubbed raw heels. The maddening thing is that it’s my own fault. If I hadn’t gone out in new boots before coming here I would have been all right. The others have to wait for me several times. It must be a change for Dennis, Debbie and Ed not to be back markers for once. I am told later that some of the bridge school “G.T. boys” are complaining about the frequent stops and implying that some of us are not fit to be there. 

There is persistent drizzle and it is boiling inside waterproofs, but I do feel better when I take off my overtrousers. Fortunately, the Strútslaug hut appears unexpectedly quickly, the walk today not being particularly arduous.  Even the river Sydri-Ófæra – the southern impassable – fails to live up to its name. In spring and early summer, the only way to cross would be all together, sideways, with linked arms, bare feet in boots to keep socks dry, and preferably wearing gaiters for protection against the sharp, painful, leg-abrading debris carried by the fast-flowing water.  

As soon as we arrive, everyone rushes off down the mountain to the hot pools, undresses and gets in. The friction between the fast and slow walkers is beginning to find expression in banter which has a rather nasty sounding edge to it. Debbie and Dennis are reluctant to get in. Dennis says he has not brought a towel. Tony says he can borrow his. Later, when Dennis gets out, he begins to dry his lower parts. A couple of the “G.T. boys” start up: 

“Hey, Tony, he’s drying his cock on your towel. When you said he could borrow your towel, you didn’t say he could dry his cock on it. And he’s got skid marks in his underpants. Does Debbie know he’s got skid marks in his underpants? I bet she wouldn’t let him unzip their sleeping bags at night if she knew he had skid marks in his underpants.”

Whether or not they do, I wouldn’t care to know, but Debbie did take off her clothes and get in the pools with everyone else.  

(next part)
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Strange Brew

Back In Time For The Weekend Episode 3
(first posted 18th February 2016)

Watching Giles Coren savour a pint of home brew in Episode Three of Back In Time For The Weekend brought it all back. I think it was down to the slightly cloudy, pale, urine-like appearance (the home brew, that is, not Giles), which looked so authentic I could actually taste the stuff. Boots Home Brew Bitter: it had a kind of thin, floral, and, well, bitter flavour.

We used to brew plastic dusbins full in our shared house in Leeds. One housemate, Nick, would urge us to make it as strong as possible in his own inimitable way:

“Get some f---ing sugar in. It doesn’t matter what it tastes like as long as it gets you pissed.”

Here are two views of our front room in 1974 with the red plastic dustbin fermenting away in the left hand corner, filling the house with a farm-yardy, malty, yeasty smell. There are empty bottles underneath the television and fag packets on the mantelpiece. That dimple pub-glass on the chair arm is mine, just like Giles Coren’s. I’ve still got it. It’s indestructible.

Most of the time we bought the Brown Ale kit. The darker the brew the more drinkable it was. Bitter was fairly nasty. Lager was beyond disgusting. Brown Ale was passable. Stout had a roasted dandelion and burdock flavour. 

Going by the numbers of empty bottles, it looks like we were fast running out and desperate for the dustbin to get a move on. Just a small number, the ones with red plastic push-on tops to the left of the hearth, remain to be consumed.

We used to sterilise and rinse the bin, dissolve the malt extract and add sugar and yeast to make the ‘wort’, check the specific gravity with a hydrometer and then leave it to brew. It was ready when the specific gravity fell to below 1008. It then went into sterilised bottles (we had a large collection waiting to be sterilised) which were sealed with the red push-on plastic tops, taken down to the cellar to finish off, and stood in three groups: mine, Nick’s and Brendan’s.

There were usually around thirteen bottles each. As fermentation came to an end, the pressure in the bottles slowly increased so that sometimes the tops would blow off to discharge the contents all over the cellar wall and floor. If this happened to one of your own bottles you could try to swap it for someone else’s, but the sticky mess left behind tended to give you away. In any case, Brendan put a stop to this practice by marking his bottles with secret symbols.

You were supposed to leave them in the cellar for at least a couple of weeks to clear and mature, preferable longer, but Nick and Brendan had invariably drunk all theirs well before the couple of weeks had passed. They would then, of course, start on mine. Rarely, if ever, did I get my full share. They thought it hilarious that I believed holding out for two or three weeks would make it taste better.

There was always a layer of sediment at the bottom of the bottles. It was almost impossible to pour undisturbed: hence the cloudiness.

Brendan didn’t care. He just used to drink the sediment as well. He didn’t want to waste it. His party piece was to open a bottle, put his thumb over the top to seal it, and shake it up. He would then put both the neck of the bottle and his thumb in his mouth and release the pressure. I swear you could see the back of his head balloon out like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Although the brown ale kit was best, it never came close to the real thing. If you like cocktails, I can thoroughly recommend a bite of Cadburys chocolate flake mixed in the mouth with a swig of Newcastle Brown.

Walking In Iceland 6: Eldgjá and Álftavötn

links to: introduction and index - previous day - next day

Monday 29th August 1977

Another journal extract. Neville and I are now well into our guided walk, trekking in the south of Iceland with ten others. Today we move hut again, but by a roundabout route. Our walk goes from Skaelingar to the top of Gjátindur mountain (3,068 feet, 935m), then down through the Eldgjá canyon to Álftavötn (or Alftavatn). The canyon contains the 130 foot (40m) Ófærufoss waterfall. These features can be seen on the map. The huts are marked kofi (shelter).

The first thing we have to do is cross a river. Now this and one crossed yesterday are easy, but soon we come to a larger river which necessitates the rolled-up-trousers, bare-feet-in-boots technique to keep your socks dry. This causes me concern because my soft, canning factory, Wellington-boot steamed heels now carry sticking plaster which soon rubs unstuck when wet. I should have done more walking before coming, but there wasn’t time. My one practice day was not helpful because I wore new boots, so my heels had blisters before I came. I brought my older boots to Iceland, but the damage is done.

Ascending Gjátindur, we leave the rock pillars and green of Skaelingar behind, and crunch up through gravel to gain height. We see another group in the distance, the first we have encountered so far. Paul, whose job it is to know who else is in the area, says it is a party of Germans. Whilst we, hardened rucksack-carrying explorers, have trekked overland on our own legs to get here, it amuses us to hear they have travelled to within a few miles by bus. Mockingly xenophobic remarks from nineteen-fifties war stories are heard, including the term “schnitzel-eaters”. Paul then admits that Dick Phillips runs a similar trip called the Walkers’ Motor Tour in which participants are able to bring luxuries such as spare socks. This too is scoffed at, the ‘L’ becoming an ‘N’.

From Gjátindur we see distant views of ice caps and volcanic cones, and below, the extraordinary ‘fire canyon’ of Eldgjá, the largest volcanic canyon in the world. Apparently, it just opened up several hundred years ago. It is nearly 900 feet deep (270m), between a quarter and half a mile wide (600m) and 25 miles long (40km). Its first recorded eruption in A.D. 939 is thought to have caused temperature drops of 2^oC as far away as Central Asia. The ash cloud made the summer of A.D. 940 the coolest in Europe for 1,500 years. 

Eldgjá from Gjátindur

“Eld” translates as “fire” and “gjá” as “canyon” – hence “fire canyon”. “Tindur” is “peaks, thus  “Gjátindur” is “canyon peaks”. “Skaelingar” might mean “skeletons” which seems to make sense with the rock pillars. Google translates today’s destination, “Álftavötn” or “Alftavatn”, as “Swan Lakes”, which surely can’t be right, but “vötn” or “vatn” does mean water. We seem to be getting somewhere, except with “Sveinstindur”.

Four of us, oddly the four that went on our own road trip on Thursday, are having camera problems, evidenced by the blue lines on the pictures. When I try to rewind the film, it breaks inside the camera. Later, after dark, I open the case inside my sleeping bag, rewind the film by hand and manage to slot it back into the cartridge, but much of it is ruined. For pictures from the floor of the canyon, I again have to turn to the internet.

Gjátindur from Eldgjá

We descend the thousand-foot scree slope to the valley floor and begin to walk its length. It is flat-bottomed with near-vertical sides, just like a geomorphological diagram. After some time we reach the Ófærufoss waterfall which flows in from the side in two steps. Above the lower step the water has eroded a natural bridge around ten feet in diameter and twenty feet long. We climb up to walk across [it collapsed in 1993]. 

Later we stop beside a round mound around thirty feet high. Bridge School Mike climbs up to look and discovers it is hollow. We all climb up to look.

Suddenly we turn down a dark, steep-sided passageway between five and fifteen feet wide and thirty feet deep, perhaps the course of an old river. It is a very strange volcanic landscape.

Because of the indirect route taken, with its ascents and descents, today is the longest walk so far. By now we are stringing out. Paul decides to wait near the top of a hill in a bitterly cold wind for everyone to catch up. He tells us the Álftavötn hut is visible from just over the top and that the front runners have gone on ahead. I am walking quite slowly with blistered heels, but come across Neville waiting about a hundred yards ahead of Paul.

“Watch it, he’s ruthless. He doesn’t care if you go wrong,” Neville reminds me, but I decide to risk it and limp slowly on. About half an hour later I see Paul and the others overtaking me high on a ridge to the right. What he has not told us is that there is a river hidden in a gorge between where he had been waiting and the hut, and that there is a natural bridge about a mile upstream. I double back and eventually catch up with Debbie, Dennis and Ed the translator at the back just before the hut. They are even slower than I am. 

Meanwhile the bridge school “G.T. boys”, as Debbie and Dennis call them (do I detect slight hostility?), have had to wade the river. It is wide, deep, and fast-flowing, and they get wet. Moral – don’t go off in front. That’s the second time I’ve said that.

(next part)
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Walking In Iceland 5: to Skaelingar

links to: introduction and index - previous day - next day

Another extract from the journal: Neville and I are on an organised walking tour in Iceland, backpacking with ten others and a walk leader. We spent all day yesterday cooped up in a hut because of gale force winds and hailstones. Not the best start to the walk.

Sunday 28th August 1977

The morning begins with light drizzle, but yesterday’s impossible wind has gone. The day gradually improves until by evening there are sunny periods.

At last, some walking!  After yesterday’s forced incarceration we are moving from Sveinstindur to Skaelingar, a trek of about ten miles. We set off up a long hill. I find myself easily at the front, with lots of stamina after the summer in a canning factory. Twelve-hour nights spent cleaning machinery have boosted me from student infirmity to super-fitness.

A small group we now refer to as “the bridge school” shoot off ahead, almost missing a river crossing and change of direction. I keep in sight of Paul, the walk leader, as he is the only one who knows the way. “If they’ve got the energy to go off in front, they’ve got the the energy to come back,” he mutters. Moral – don’t go off in front. 

We come to a steep slope down to the edge of a lake. The surface resembles ball bearings on a corrugated iron roof. I descend rather more quickly than intended. Neville watches hopefully, camera at the ready, but my canning-factory hardened hands control it without injury. Later I tread carelessly and fall, bruising my hip, which does not bode well for restful nights. After then dropping behind the front runners for a while, I put on an hour’s sustained speed to catch Paul and the bridge school just as we near the hut.  

Skaelingar

How superb it is compared with Sveinstindur. In fact, Skaelingar is two huts. We use the smaller one for cooking and eating as it is draughty but with a wooden floor. The other hut, the stable, is palatial, with a comfortable mossy floor, so we use it for sleeping. There is plenty of room to spread out with wide spaces at both sides of your sleeping bag to avoid second-hand bad breath. Water is available from streams running into the nearby River Skaft. I even wash my hair in the evening sun. The cold produces a force-ten headache.

Rock pillars at Skaelingar

All around Skaelingar are strange, knobbly pillars of rock, many of them hollow. They can be eight feet high and three or four feet wide (2.4m x 1m). According to local folklore, they were left from a war between trolls. They were actually formed underwater by lava seeping up from a lake bed, possibly as recently as 1783 when volcanic activity created a temporary dam.  

As well as better weather, the climate has improved socially. Everyone now gets on like old friends. It is a well-educated middle-class group. In addition to me and Neville, there are three chemists, a factory inspector, a landscape architect, a Brussels translator, a medical researcher, a personnel administrator and two other students one of whom is a mature teacher trainee. Paul, the leader, also did languages at university. Three are in their thirties, the rest of us in our twenties.

The landscape architect works for the Forestry Commission. What a break for him: an island with no trees.

The only girl in the group, Debbie, is here with her boyfriend, Dennis. She must be finding things very awkward. As I round the corner of a lava pillar, I see her with pants down. I quietly retreat.

One of the chemists has been calling Dennis, ‘Des’, having misheard his name when Debbie said what they are. Being cautious, I hadn’t been calling him anything. I’d thought she said their names were Debbie and Dilys

Some gentle teasing is starting to occur. The four we call ‘the bridge school’ seem completely unaware of anything beyond the cards. Someone suggests they need a portable card table that folds down from the back of a rucksack so they can play as they walk, oblivious the wonders of the surrounding landscape.

When it emerges that four of the group are from Manchester, someone goes into a long story about being there and watching vandals shave the paint off parked cars. “What, with a razor blade do you mean?” someone asks. “No, with an electric one,” someone else suggests.

Thrown together like this in remote, overcrowded huts, it is becoming clear there is plenty of scope for for getting on each other’s nerves. One good way to irritate others is to pontificate erroneously about chemistry in front of three professional chemists who cannot get a word in edgeways. Another is to bullshit about languages in front of linguists. Sveinstindur does not mean ‘pig mountain’. But the best way of all, bearing in mind that in the dark we only have a weak camping light, is to wear a reading torch that straps to your head and blinds everyone you look at. 

(next part)
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Walking In Iceland 4: Stormy Weather

links to: introduction and index - previous day - next day

Saturday 27th August 1977

Yesterday, the first proper day of our guided walk in Iceland, we arrived at the Sveinstindur hut near the western edge of Vatnajökull, Iceland’s largest ice cap. We are to stay here for two nights. 

Just after arrival at the Sveinstindur Hut

Today’s itinerary directs that we ascend the remaining 1150 feet (350m) to the top of Sveinstindur mountain (3585 feet, 1093m), one of the most magnificent viewpoints in Iceland. It boasts panoramic views of Vatnajökull and five other ice caps, the twelve-mile-long lake Langisjór, winding rivers, hundreds of mountains, volcanoes, and distant horizons in all directions.  

Unfortunately, yesterday’s bitter wind has brought terrible weather. Paul, the walk leader, reluctantly declares the day to be a ‘holiday’. The weather really is awful. We stay inside the hut where it sounds even worse because of rain drumming on the corrugated iron roof. Fortunately, nowadays, I can turn to the internet to pinch pictures of what we missed. 

This is a total surprise to me. I had absolutely no idea what it could be like up there until I saw these. Even if we had made it, visibility would have been nothing like this.  The first picture looks east towards Vatnajökull, the second in the opposite direction.

Views from Sveinstindur

The hut is small for the incarceration of thirteen people, but we have to accept that Paul knows best. At one end, a bridge school has started. Others read books. Some, complaining of a restless night, go back to sleep. One by one, even those who are awake get back in their sleeping bags to keep warm.

I join in card games for a while, and then, for something to do and to escape the state of lethargy into which most have fallen, I go for water, twice. This involves a ten minute walk each way, up a hill, down again and then across a kind of beach beside some flooded mud flats, and then over another promontory to a trickling stream.

Ascending the hill takes no effort, you simply sail up in the wind, but returning is a step by step struggle against flying hailstones. Frequent back-to-the-wind rests are needed. On the final descent down to the hut you have to keep sitting down so as not to be blown away. It is the strongest wind I have ever experienced. At least it makes your hands so cold you cannot feel string of the bucket cutting into your fingers. What a pity we can’t use the gritty water from the nearer mud flats.   

Although Sveinstindur mountain is hidden in cloud, the weather seems slightly better at lunch time, but by tea time it is desperate again. Apart from the business of cooking and washing up we continue to vegetate inside the hut. 

The huts are maintained by parishes for use by shepherds during the October sheep round-up. The remoteness and distances involved make it necessary to do this on horseback, so the huts are both stables and human quarters. 

At Sveinstindur, the single hut doubles up for both purposes, the human area at the rear being raised by three or four feet to form a sleeping platform. I get a spot on the lower floor. It would be a lot warmer if we had a horse, as the Irving Berlin song makes clear:

The snow is snowing and the wind is blowing
But I can weather the storm
What do I care how much it may storm
I’ve got my horse to keep me warm…

The other well-known Irving Berlin song composed during his secret, anonymous and undocumented holiday with Icelandic sheep herders was:

I’m,
putting on my jumper,
putting on my jumper,
putting on my jumper...

Fred Astaire was scripted to sing this in the film Top Hat but refused on the grounds that traditional Icelandic jumpers are inelegant and wearing three made him too hot for dancing. 

There are warming mugs of cocoa at bedtime. Why do those with the weakest bladders bag the spots furthest from the door so they have to pick their way in pitch blackness over the lumps of snoring sleeping bags strewn across the floor? They risk falls, injuries and very abusive language.  

                                                     *                    *                    *

For the orienteers amongst us, here is a 1:250,000 map of the area in 1977 (four miles to the inch or 2.5 km to the centimeter). The blue arrows indicate the positions of the first four huts, with Sveinstindur centrally towards the top. The first picture above looks east towards where ‘Siujökull’ is written on the map, and the second in the opposite direction along the ridge of ‘Graenifjallgardur’. Our trek will later continue to the south of this ridge (click here for a greatly enlarged version of the map).

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I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Rags and Bones

I heard shouting in the next street, the same few words repeated about once a minute. I couldn’t make out what they were. 

It reminded me of when I was little, when the rag and bone man came round with his horse and cart. I could never make out what his sing-song voice was shouting, either. It sounded like “You owe me half a crown” but it was probably more like “Have you any rags and bones?” His fierce, rough look terrified me. I would hide until he had gone.

You could hear him going up and down the back lanes (or ‘ten-foots’) between the rows of terraced houses where we lived. Eventually he would come along ours where I played. Housewives went to their back gates to give him old pots and pans, buckets with holes in, pram wheels with broken spokes, threadbare kitchen curtains, and, yes, he really did collect bones. Once, his horse deposited a stinking pile of manure just outside our gate. It kept me in for weeks until it bleached pale, crumbled, and was gradually washed away by the rain.

Steptoe and Son

The life of Rag and Bone men was portrayed pretty well in the very popular B.B.C. comedy Steptoe and Son, in which the son’s, Harold’s, pretentious attempts to better himself are constantly thwarted by Albert, his wily father. 

As with all successful comedy series, it quickly moved on from stories based on the situation to stories around the relationships between the characters. I particularly remember one 1972 episode, Men of Letters. It opens with them playing Scrabble. Harold wants it to be “… an erudite game calculated to increase one’s word power” but Albert is well in the lead with words like “pox”, “cock” and “bum”. Harold complains they are nothing but filth. “Yes, but they still count, don’t they,” Albert responds.

https://youtu.be/oanikaqvYcU

The shouting from the next street continued into ours. It was indeed some rag and bone men. I haven’t seen any for years. I don’t suppose they collect either rags or bones any more. Good job I hadn’t left my bike out. They drove slowly past in a small truck. No horse! Although, shouting like that all day must make them a little hoarse.

Walking In Iceland 3: to Sveinstindur

links to: introduction and index - previous day - next day

Another extract from the notebook. Neville and I are on a guided walking tour in the south of Iceland with ten others. After two nights in the youth hostel at Reykjavik, today is the first day of the tour proper.

South-West Iceland showing yesterday’s drive to Thingvellir, Geysir
and Gullfoss, and the walking route (east to west) in blue

Friday 26th August 1977

The route consists of ten days walking from mountain hut to mountain hut across an isolated and uninhabited part of southern Iceland, a total distance of about 70 miles (112 km). Huts are roughly 12 miles (20 km) apart, although sometimes we stay at the same hut two nights running. We carry our own clothes and sleeping bags, and a share of the equipment and provisions. We are warned we might have to carry loads of up to 44 lbs (20 kg) although it is normally much less. It would be more but for the advance food depots left along the route by the tour organiser. Even so, the food is mainly dehydrated carbohydrate such as porridge and pasta, plus tinned meat, bread until it runs out, then crackers and biscuits. We are also warned we should be able to walk double the distance in case of difficulties with routes or huts. These problems are only likely to arise earlier in the year, before mid-June, when there is more snow on the ground and the rivers are higher. Our walk, in August, is a soft option.

The tour is organised by Dick Phillips’ specialist Icelandic travel service which has been operating since 1960.

Dick Phillips is something of a legend and sounds a bit scary. He possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of Icelandic landscape, culture and folklore. 

He first visited the country several times in the nineteen-fifties, initially on a month-long cycling tour, and then on expeditions to the interior, including the first unassisted coast-to-coast crossing of Iceland by bicycle. He worked on a farm and lived in an upland community before converting an old farm house into a hostel. 

The tour brochure shows him with a fearsome beard, wearing one of his distinctive Icelandic jumpers, checking out a glacial river crossing. He looks formidable, not to be messed with. He is also very smart. He appears to have sent the photographer across first.

Despite being a walking tour, this first day does not involve much walking. It begins with a long cross-country ride of around 150 miles (240km) in a chunky, radio-equipped, four-wheel drive, low gear-ratio, Icelandic mountain bus. It needs all this kit. Soon after Selfoss, the bus turns left off the deteriorating road on to cindery, bull-dozed tracks, and then winds off-road across open country. It picks its way through volcanic wastes, swerving to avoid boulders, rising and falling to cross undulations and splashing through rivers. At one point it crawls diagonally down a steep, unstable hillside, hoping not to start a landslide. Few other vehicles would have been able to pass this point.

The view inside the bus, and out towards the Hekla volcano

We stop to pick up Paul, our tour leader, who is waiting in a Land Rover. We are a little wary, unsure what to expect. Is he going to be another tough mountain guy like Dick Phillips, a commando boot camp bully or a snarling Eiger Sanction assassin? Surprisingly he is a pleasant, young, bespectacled, quietly spoken human being with shorts and suntanned legs.

He asks for help to unload provisions from the Land Rover, and Neville, ever the volunteer, rushes forwards. It doesn’t need all of us, only two or three. Neville returns arms filled with loaves of bread, highly appropriate for someone who works for a Hull bread manufacturer. The provisions are piled on to the overhead racks and vacant seats so as not to be squashed by the rucksacks in the luggage compartment. As the bus bounces over the rough terrain, my views to the south of the dormant Hekla volcano [it would next erupt in 1980], snow-capped and shining in the sunlight, are frequently disturbed by loaves of bread raining down on me.

At the front people are asking Paul about the tour, other tours, the elusive Dick Phillips and “what happens if …?” sort of things. Paul speaks slowly, emphasising each word as if painstakingly chosen, with long pauses at full stops and commas. He has a nice line in irony and understatement. He would like to be able to promise us a fortnight’s weather like today but he can’t of course. “Has it ever rained for two whole weeks?” “Yes,” replies Paul, “but I can’t guarantee it.” Someone else asks about crossing glacial rivers. “Sometimes, you can even get the bottom of your shorts wet,” says Paul, as if it is a pleasure. 

Eventually the bus drops us in the middle of nowhere, at the side of a small lake in a cindery, rock-strewn desert. We could be up a Knottingley slag heap: the Black Hills of West Yorkshire. Despite the evening sun, it is surprising how cold it is. There is a bitter wind. The provisions are divided up for us to carry, although Paul took the most. After about an hour’s walk across a stream (wet foot but not wet shorts) and a gap between gravel hills, we arrive at the Sveinstindur hut where we are to stay for two nights.

I can now put names to half the faces, but conversation remains guarded, formal and polite. It won’t last. We are about to be holed up together for a week and a half like Icelandic sheep herders. 

Arriving at the Sveinstindur hut. Paul the leader, with his massive carrying frame, is on the left.

 

(next part)
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.

Walking In Iceland 2: Road Trip

back to: introduction and index - previous day - next day 

Thursday 25th August 1977

Neville and I arrived in Iceland yesterday for a walking tour which does not begin properly until tomorrow. We have therefore hired a car for a trip to Thingvellir, Geysir and Gullfoss.

Two others from the party have joined us: Gavin from Aberdeen who is a factory inspector, and Steve, a nuclear chemist from London. Steve is the one we spotted with his rucksack at the airport, who looks remarkably like our friend Gavin. But this other chap is also called Gavin. This is very confusing. I keep calling Steve, Gavin, and Gavin, Steve.

At Thingvellir, you see a cliff face. As you begin to ascend you suddenly come to a gorge running parallel with the face. A river runs along the bottom of the gorge from a waterfall on the upper cliff. It runs for some way before breaking through the lower cliff into the lowland. The strange topography marks the boundary between the North American and Eurasion tectonic plates. It was also the site of the Althing, the ancient Icelandic parliament, which met there for nearly nine hundred years until 1798.

Even in the sun it is cold, and there are intermittent showers.

Geysir, of course, has the geothermal hot water geysers. Out of holes in the ground that resemble the craquelure an avant-garde oil painting, they eject pillars of hot water and steam high into the air with a terrifying roar, subsiding into witches’ cauldrons of angry boiling water which gurgle ominously. It demands nerves of steel to stand close as they threaten to erupt and dissolve you.

Photographing them requires split-second reflexes which Steve, apparently, does not have. He uses half a film and still misses it. If the famous but almost inactive, eighty-foot Great Geysir erupted, he would probably click the shutter just too late have to wait with his camera for the next thirty-five years until it went off again. He would then, almost certainly, still miss it.  

The sulphurous fumes, the noise, the hell on earth – I decided there and then it was best to be good and go to heaven. Film does not really do it justice. 

The same is true of Gullfoss. All that rushing water takes me back to the canning factory where I have been working, cleaning the machinery with a hose pipe. Channel that lot through and it would be spotlessly clean in an instant, assuming there was any machinery left, or indeed any building. I wonder what it would be like to jump in.

We end the trip with a short ride north towards the Langjökull ice cap, the second largest in Iceland and source of the Gullfoss waters, but we turn back at the first river crossing. We are in a Volkswagen, not a Land Rover.

Formal, polite conversation most of the day. It will be more spontaneous when everyone gets to know each other. Tomorrow is the first day of the walking tour, proper. 

 

(next part)
Some names and personal details have been changed. I would be delighted to hear from anyone who was there.