It was a long walk, and even though I had a 10-minute head start on Katja, she caught up with me about a block before I got to the bus station. It turns out the banks didn't open till 9:30, the same time my bus was leaving, so I put my ticket on a Visa. Katja's bus left at 9:00, so I sat outside and waited with her for her bus to arrive. It was a beautiful morning. Katja had been great fun, and I was sorry to see her go–but rather than have her come with me, I wanted to go with her. I had only been in Iceland 4 days, but I could already sense a desire to be there for longer than the 6 days I had left, and traveling east, even for a repeat visit to Mývatn, sounded great to me.
Unfortunately, a job and three cats–not to mention car payments–called me home, and reservations called me to Ósar. I had no idea what I was in for here. My guidebook only had a couple paragraphs on it, and all the hostel in Reykjavík had been able to give me was a post-it note saying to get off the bus at the petrol station in Viðigerði. This town didn't make it into my guidebook period, and moreover, my guidebook said to get off the bus to get to Ósar at Viðihlið, which unlike Viðigerði, I had also been able to locate on a map. But the guy I bought the ticket from seemed to know where Viðigerði was, and the bus driver did as well, so I decided to trust my post-it note and see what happened. If it came down to it, I figured I could hitch a ride back to Reykjavík and forget about the whole thing.
The petrol station in Viðigerði, which is basically the same place as Viðihlíð (as I discovered in a later study of a very detailed map), reminds me of the truck stop in Nebraska I visited when my friend John and I took a road trip to South Dakota to see Mt. Rushmore my sophomore year in college. We had already seen Mt. Rushmore, and had had enough of what we had found to be the less than friendly people of South Dakota, and we were fleeing to (of all places!) Nebraska, where, surprisingly enough, the people were substantially friendlier. The particular truck stop I'm thinking of is in Valentine, Nebraska, which you encounter just after leaving South Dakota, passing through the Rosebud Indian Reservation, which is dotted with large warehouse-like structures advertising themselves as glamorous casinos. It's pretty basic–two gas pumps, a small convenience store, a small café, and a garage.
And that's what I found in Viðigerði. I went up and stood by the door of the café and waited for my ride to Ósar to show up. Turns out he was already there. I had only been standing there a minute when a red-haired man got out of a blue SUV and looked up at me. I walked down and asked if he was from Ósar. He said yes, and I introduced myself. He helped me get my things in the car. There was another man in the front seat, a goateed blond about my age. His name was Abe, and he was from Sweden. It seemed a peculiar name for a Swede. Knutur, the owner of the hostel, got in the car, and warned us that there was no food to be had at Ósar, so if we needed any food, we should go into the convenience store and see what we could find. Abe looked to be in a panic. My guide had mentioned Ósar was rural, so I had brought spaghetti left over from Akureyri, but I went in anyway, in case anything looked appealing.
This was not a very convenient convenience store. There was next to nothing there. We saw two cans of split pea soup, two cans of cream of chicken soup, some flour, and some powdered Bearnaise sauce. Abe grabbed both cans of split pea soup, and one of the cream of chicken–I got the other. We both passed on the Bearnaise. We checked out and went out to the car.
Knutur was worried. "You," he said to me, "I know I'm supposed to pick up. I have you as a reservation from Reykjavík. But, I don't know about you. How long are you staying?"
"Nine months," Abe said.
"And what are you doing in Iceland?"
"Working on a farm."
Knutur laughed. "I think this is the wrong car. I haven't hired anyone to work on my farm. Where are you supposed to be working?"
Abe's travel plans were a mess, but much more charmingly so than the man I'd met at the Reykjavík hostel. "I don't know," he said.
"Do you know the address?"
Abe shuffled through some papers. "I can't find it," he said.
"Do you know the name of the farm? Or the name of the farmer?"
"Wait," Abe said, "I think I've got it in my mobile." He began punching buttons on his cell phone, to no avail.
"Well, how did you get here?"
"The farmer's brother–the one I'm supposed to be working for–put me on a bus in Reykjavík, and told the drive to let me off here."
"Well," Knutur said, "perhaps I should let you off, and the person you're
working for will be here soon."
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| Ósar |
At that moment a station wagon drove up, and a young man got out. "I know this guy," Knutur said, and got out. It turned out that this was the man Abe was to be working for. After exchanging pleasantries, Knutur got back in the car and told me, "I've known him for a long time. The two of them will be a perfect match."
We got going. We drove for a kilometer or two on the highway, then pulled off onto a gravel road heading north. The hostel, I found out, was on a farm. Knutur owned it, and raised cattle and horses, but his main business was harvesting the hay each year to build nests for migratory ducks. They stay the summer and breed. Then after they're gone, he harvests the down and sells it. It's an extraordinarily high-quality down, and he sold last year's harvest to NASA.
"The farm is like it's at the end of the world--or the beginning," Knutur said, and when we arrived, I immediately saw what he meant.
You approach Ósar by a long gravel road that travels up the length of a fjord toward the Arctic Ocean. I never saw the Arctic Ocean proper while I was in Iceland, but here the salt water was still, disturbed only by the occasional gusts of wind.
The hostel is on a hill on the far side of the road from the water. He was doing substantial renovations to expand the hostel and add a living area, which it currently lacks. The hostel can sleep about 20 people, and Knutur told me that from late May to August, the hostel is full nearly every night. This night, I was the only guest, so I had my choice of rooms. I selected one upstairs with a double bed and a heavy blanket.
Before venturing out, I made a cup of Thai curry soup that I'd bought
in Akureyri. Future travelers to Iceland should take note that the Knorr
powdered soups are an excellent value. Be warned that all Knorr products
in Iceland have instructions in Swedish.
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| Sea stack in the water near Ósar. It's about 10m tall. |
I decided to walk down to the water to see what there was to see. Although the water looks very close to the hostel, the field that separates the two is perhaps a kilometer wide. The path was made up of ruts in the road carved out by a truck, and stream ran through a ditch nearby. I hadn't gone far before I found myself being pursued by a two-month old black lab puppy. His game of choice was leaping up and latching on to my forearm with his mouth. Knutur saw and came down the get the dog off me. He was a friendly puppy--not biting hard at all--but he wanted to keep him out of the fields and particularly away from the duck nests.
I continued canine-free toward the water. As it came close, the stream branched into a mini-delta over the black sand. The sand in Iceland is a little disconcerting. The Riviera this is not. There are no white beaches, just sand the color of coal. Had it been warmer I might have tested its consistency, to see if it held up like white sand for building sand castles, but it was cold and my inner child was hibernating.
Part way across the fjord from the beach where I stood was a spit of sand where, Knutur told me, during low tide harbor seals would come up to rest. For the moment there were none there, but quite a number were in the shallow water. I had interrupted them. Instead of chasing fish, they just stared at me, darting beneath the water any time they realized I noticed them. I'd never been this close to wild seals before.
I watched them for a while, then made my way up the coast. Not far from
where the seals were hunting the sand ended, giving way to large round
volcanic rocks, which made walking difficult. Although rippled by the wind,
the water in the fjord was remarkably clear, and I could see the rocks
under the water as clearly as the ones I stood on.
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| Self portrait resting on a cliff near Osar. If it looks like I'm unshaven and short on sleep, it's because I am. |
Like Mývatn, Ósar has a variety of birds, but as I know nothing about birds, I can't say much besides that some of them were seagulls (which I recognized, of course), some of them were Arctic terns (which I knew because Knutur told me they had just arrived, though I recognized them as well), and there were some very loud black birds with long bright orange bills that would shriek like fire alarms whenever they saw me. Memory now makes Ósar quieter than it was; in reality it's a very squawky place.
The squawkiness doesn't diminish the impressiveness of the landscape, though. Hundreds of birds appear to have nests on the strange-looking rock just off the coast, and hundreds more on the cliffs above the beach. I'm impressed that a place like this can harbor such a variety of very loud life.
Eventually I came to a point where I could go no further; two large walls of rock, one of which looked like a troll, the other like an elephant, blocked my way, so I walked on back. It wasn't low tide yet, so after a nap at the hostel, I came back down later to watch the seals. A group of about 20 lay on the spit, while more still hunted for fish in the water. Birds hovered above, darting after fish the seals didn't catch. After watching for a while, I went back up to the hostel to make dinner.
I discovered Sade in the hostel's peculiar record collection, and excited, put it on, only to remember that I really never cared for Sade. "Smooth Operator" makes me ill. So I took it off and tried my luck with the radio, where I found, to my great surprise, a dance music station. It seemed to alternate between songs that were really popular in the U.S. and obscene hip-hop. Go figure. Dinner was spaghetti with powdered sauce with (at last!) the correct proportion of water.
Before going to bed early, I went outside and wandered over to the stable next door. The cows were happy for the attention. As soon as I walked in, cows began licking my jacket. This behavior struck me as odd, but not too odd since whenever I'm on my computer at home, one of my cats sits on the desk next to the mousepad and licks my hand. The calves had been born recently, so I went to the stall where they were and hung out with them for a bit. They also licked my jacket.
Knutur had encouraged me to stay another day, but this place, despite being beautiful, was very lonely, so I decided to go on back to Reykjavík. I packed everything up, and went to bed.