The previous night I had to make a choice with what I was going to do today.  I wasn't going to stay in Reykjavík, since, fair city though it is, it seemed like a waste of precious time in Iceland.  So I was either going to go to the Snæfellsnes penninsula or Vestmannaeyjar.  A bit of online research made that decision easy.  All flights to Vestmannaeyjar, a small archipelago off the south coast of Iceland, were full.  So another rental car and Snæfellsnes it was.

As far as the rental went, I sure as hell wasn't going with Avis again.  Not that there was anything wrong with the car, but renting a small car for a single day cost 9100kr, over $100.  There had to be a cheaper way.

The cheaper way was found in the form of Átak Car Rental, in the Reykjavík suburb of Kopavogur.  A single day's rental there would only cost me 5900kr, a far better deal.

I left the flat without breakfast, stopping at the Sandholt Bakariið on Laugavegur for breakfast.  Though I'm not a pastry person, here they just looked to good to resist, so I got something with an excellent cream filling and a cup of coffee.

After breakfast I walked to the bus station, where I got on the number 3 bus.  Unfortunately, I wasn't really paying a lot of attention when I got on the bus, and I soon realized I was going the wrong direction.  Unsure what to do, I just got off outside the hospital, consulted a map, and realized that even though I had been going the wrong way, I wasn't so far off that I couldn't just walk the rest of the way.

45 minutes later and a little sweaty, I arrived at the Átak office.  It is worth noting that the Átak folks will pick you up; I just went there because I wanted to get breakfast first and wasn't sure what time I'd be where.  My car was a white Nissan Almera, bringing back memories of the trip with Paul, John, Kevin, and Tyrrell two years earlier, when we'd rented the same model.

From the car rental, it was a quick drive to highway 1, the ring road that encircles Iceland, and I was soon on my way out of town.  While in Reykjavík, the ring road looks like any American expressway, but it's not long before it becomes a two-lane road sandwiched between the mountains and the sea.

About 45 minutes or so outside Reykjavík, I came to the Hvalfjörður tunnel.  Built across the mouth of Hvalfjörður (Whale Fjord), it replaced the ring roads former route around the fjord, cutting nearly an hour off the northward journey.  Clearly the fjord is deep: the 5km long tunnel plunges downward steeply, only to immediately begin its ascent to the surface and the 1000kr toll (roughly 12 bucks) on the other side.

From here it was not far to Borgarnes, where I made my first stop, the farm Borg.  Named after a large rock on the premises, Borg was home to two of the great figures from the sagas: Egil Skallagrimsson, a poet, mercenary, and murderer, who was among Iceland's earliest settlers, and Snorri Sturluson, to whom Egil's Saga is attributed, among other works, and who was
assassinated in 1241 for reasons I don't completely comprehend.  It appears as though it may still be farmed today; horses were grazing on the hilltop above where I parked my car, and the modern house next to the church at the site appeared to be occupied.  In front of the church is a stylized sculpture of Egil mourning the death his two sons.

I continued on, heading west now.  My second stop was completely unplanned. Rising from the brown plain to my left was a low, angry crater.  I pulled over and looked it up in my guidebook.  It was called Eldborg, and it was a volcano that last erupted during the Viking age.  There was a 4km trail to it beginning at a nearby farm.  Soon enough, the farm appeared.  I parked the car and began the trail along the fence enclosing the sheep pasture.

Funny thing about sheep.  They run away from me.  I always figured they'd be docile and cuddly, like they are in sentimental portraits of Jesus that have "I am the good shepherd" written below them in gentle italic script.  I do not know if sheep run away from everyone except God incarnate, though Kay suggests that considering that it was lamb that caused me to cease being vegetarian some four years ago (after seven years of vegetarianism), the sheep have good reason to avoid me.  Fair point.
 

Eldborg

Once past the pasture, the trail crosses the rocky plain for a while, after which there's a stepladder over a barbed-wire fence.  From here the trail winds through a thicket, until finally I arrived at the rocks below the crater.  Here the trail got a bit tricky, because it's tough to mark a trail that's crossing unvegetated terrain littered with boulders, but while I made a couple of wrong turns, I mostly did all right.  When I reached the final climb to the rim of the crater, I just sprinted up the steep trail (slowing
down for the one or two brief points where there was just rock I had to find footholds on).

I now stood 300 feet above the plain.  The bowl of the crater itself was perhaps 100 feet deep; I'm not sure.  Back toward the farm, there was another group of 4 hikers approaching.  I sat and surveyed the landscape for a while.

It had turned out to be a warm day.  Overcast, but there was little sign of rain.  I was wearing just a t-shirt in the light breeze.

The four hikers were all young men.  When they arrived at the rim they promptly began a circumnavigation, and I headed back to the car.

The Snæfellsnes Peninsula, jutting out into the Atlantic, is known for its terrible weather, since it often bears the brunt of the storms coming in from the West.  Today was an exception, however.  As I ventured further west, the sky kept getting clearer, and the weather steadily warmer.  I drove with the window open.  The Beach Boys were on the radio.

By the time I arrived at Buðir, a large field of lava caves and furrows surrounding a low crater, there was no way the weather could have been improved short of throwing in a rainbow and a pot of gold.

Known by those who believe in such things as a home of elves, Buðir sits on the sea on the south coast of the penninsula.  Directly to the north, the snowcapped mountains that form the spine of the penninsula rise steeply.  I parked my car in front of a walled cemetery next to a tiny, pitch-black church with white-framed windows.  I started walking, following a path through the lichen, moss, and grass covered rocks toward the crater.  The rocks were littered with driftwood blown in on storms.
 

the church at Buðir

It takes little enough imagination to see why people might think elves live around here.  The landscape is riddled with tiny caves, and the land is heaved up like waves on the ocean.

The trail is neither well-trodden nor well-marked, and after a while it grew fainter and fainter until I lost it completely.  I followed a set of footprints through the rocks till I lost them, too.  I tried to go back, but I couldn't even see the path that I'd been following.  I climbed on top of a rock to see if I could spot the path from there.  No luck.  In the distance the crater taunted me; I couldn't even see the church.

I continued searching for the trail, heading vaguely in the direction of the crater, but the terrain was conspiring against me, sending me in circuitous routes that brought me no closer.

Finally, I gave up.  I didn't know where the trail was, but I did know where the ocean was.  I went south.  Refusing to bend to the landscape, I climbed over or jumped across whatever got in my way.  Once I reached the shore, I headed back east.  After a while, I climbed up a nearby rock.  I spotted both the church and the trail, and my white Almera.  It was no longer alone in the parking lot, though by the time I got back to the car, the other car and the two figures who had been looking at the peculiar church were nowhere to be seen.
 

the smaller pillar at Lóndrangar, Snæfellsjökull behind

I continued on to Lóndrangar, and what happened there never happens to people in real life.  After coming around a curve in the road, Snæfellsjökull, the glacier-topped volcano that inspired Jules Verne to write Journey to the Centre of the Earth finally came into view, its top obscured by puffy white clouds.  I parked the car and turned around to look at the mountain, and in what seemed like an instant, the clouds lifted and the glacier, heavy, blank, and indistinct, came into view.

Even aside from the glacier, Lóndrangar is impossibly beautiful.  I climbed a rise from the parking lot and soon arrived at the edge of a cliff.  Below, the blue surf pounded against the rocks, while birds launched from their perches in the walls and circled above the restless water.  To the west rose Lóndrangar's main attractions: two massive rock pillars, the taller of which is over 200 feet high.  They're the remains of two ancient volcanoes that gradually eroded to nothing but their basalt cores.
 

the larger pillar at Lóndrangar

Now the homes for thousands of birds, the taller pillar gazes to sea like an Easter Island statue, while the smaller one stands motionless and inert.  I stayed here for an hour or so, standing for a while on the flat rocks that jut out into the ocean and watching the ocean roll in.  The sun was starting to get lower in the sky, and the air was getting cooler, so I headed back to the car reluctantly.

It's sort of funny: in May, at least, you don't have to share much in Iceland.  Here and in the Wesfjords, I had some of the most dramatic and unusual landscapes in the world entirely to myself.  It's the sort of thing that makes a guy feel really damn lucky.

Speaking of lucky, as I started back toward Reykjavík, I passed what may be the most idyllically situated farm on the planet (provided you're willing to discount the odd north Atlantic storm).  It sits at the base of a mountain at whose top is a vertical rock face.  A waterfall spills down into a stream that wends its way down the mountain and out to sea.  Altogether unmentioned in both of my guidebooks, the farm is on the road between Arnarstapi and Buðir and is worth a look.
 

farm

At a gas station at the interesection between the road I was on and the road to Stykkisholmur, the principal town of the penninsula, I stopped and called Kay.  It was now 7:00.  I expected it would be another two hours before I got back to Reykjavík.

It ended up being longer than that.  After passing through Borgarnes, instead of continuing on the Ring Road through the Hvalfjörður tunnel, I took the long way, driving around Hvalfjörður.

Future travellers to Iceland, take note: if you ever find yourself presented with the opportunity to drive around Hvalfjörður, take it.  The sun was low in the sky and the walls of the fjord and the sea were blazing red.  Celine Dion was on the radio: under the circumstances, even she sounded good.  The road rose and fell, passing farms, and, here and there, steaming hot streams pouring down the mountains.

Eventually the road descended to Hvalfjörður's most notorious tenant, the whaling station.  Idle now except when the odd whale is beached or caught in fishing nets, it's a poignant sight.  The empty pier extends into the fjord, standing high above the water.  I will admit that it is for the most part impossible for me to look objectively at the question of whaling, a testament to the effectiveness of the PR campaigns waged by spokespersons as disparate as Greenpeace and Star Trek.  But it's an important question to Iceland, which counts whales among its few natural resources, but dares not resume whaling for fear of triggering a trade boycott.
 

evening at Lóndrangar

All good things come to an end, and soon enough I was on the south end of the tunnel, driving back into Reykjavík.  I got back to Kay's place at 9:30.  She and Craig were going to visit her mother in Hafnarfjörður, so she gave me a set of keys and set me loose for the evening.

It suddenly occurred to me that I was starving.  At the Samkaup in Ísafjörður, I'd bought four bags of licorice as a birthday present for my mother.  When I mentioned that to Kay the previous night she warned me to be careful about the licorice, because the Scandinavian stuff is generally heavily salted, unlike English licorice.  I tore open a bag to check it; while faintly salty, it was fine, so I took it in the car and had been eating that all day.

I headed down to Laugavegur to find food.  The trouble with it staying light so late is it seems like everything should be open all the time, but it isn't.  Kebab Husið, one of my favorite haunts from the last trip was already closed.  But finally, near the end of Laugavegur not far from the Alþing, a light shone down from heaven on a sign: Shalimar Indian Take-Away.

I went in.  A man looked up from cleaning and empty steam table.

"Oh," I said, disappointed.  "You're not still open, are you?"

"No, but listen.  I only just took the food off the table, so it's still hot.  You can still get that, if it's ok with you."

"Sure," I said.  A chalkboard indicated my choices; I got lamb saag and a vegetable korma.  The man packed it up in a styrafoam box, and I walked back to Kay's.  It started raining.

The lamb saag was pretty faithful to its origins, considering that the spices had been toned down subtantially.  The vegetables didn't taste remotely Indian, but were good taken on their own terms.  The portions were generous, and I was happy.

I sent my mother an e-mail wishing her a happy birthday.  Kay and Craig hadn't come back yet, so I went back out in search of a beer.  I walked back down to Spotlight, skipped the Guiness and ordered a Grolsch instead.  I talked to a guy named Ari for a while.  An Icelander, he lives in Florida now, a skydiver by hobby and parachute packer by trade.  He was back in Iceland for a visit before heading on to Norway for six weeks packing parachutes there.

Around midnight, I went back to the house.  There was light coming from under the bedroom door.  Not wanting to disturb them, I went to bed without a word.
 

 May 24: Reykjavík & Akureyri
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