The Land That Roars
The Age
Saturday December 16, 1995
Nicci Gerrard ventures into Iceland, where water explodes, mud boils and land erupts out of the sea.
THE SMELL of sulphur hangs in the breeze, a rainbow stands like a chimney on the horizon, steam drifts upwards from blasted craters, thick grey mud bubbles in a pothole - glob, glob under grassless hills. Women with silver hair watch while their men pour clear, tasteless liquid down their throats and fall over in the snow. Iceland, home of fishermen and puffins and poets; little land on the edge of the world.
The world is hundreds of millions of years old, but not Iceland. Until 16 million years ago, it lay under the ocean, just a part of the mid-Atlantic ridge that runs from the Arctic to the Antarctic. The huge tectonic plates forming the Earth's crust, with Europe and America on their back, drift apart at a rate of about three centimetres a year, and magma leaks out through the fault. Iceland is just a pile of lava that rose out of the sea in a series of violent volcanic eruptions, and it's still growing and changing shape.
Some of Iceland is as young as 31 years old. In 1963, as autumn turned to winter off the south of the country, flames appeared over the water and the temperature of the sea increased by a few degrees. Then one morning, the water exploded and a pillar of lava, ashes and steam rose into the air, 7000 metres high. Under the steam, a new land was visible; each day it increased in size with flashes of lightning and the great roar of the volcano. In a few months, earth created land: the virgin, barren island of Surtsey.
Because it is so young, Iceland feels utterly primitive - as if we were back at the beginning of the world. The first thing you notice as you fly towards its capital, Reykjavik, is that Iceland is unimaginably empty. It is larger than England, yet it has a population of only 267,000; 100,000 live in Reykjavik and 50,000 more in suburbs around the city.
The rest are strung out, in tiny clusters, around the coast.
The interior of Iceland - rust-colored mountains, black ash, shining glaciers - is uninhabitable. During winter, only jeeps can nose through the blizzards to cross the island.
ICELAND has no prehistory. The first settlers arrived in AD 878 and worshipped Thor and Odin and other baleful gods before being converted to Christianity. It was ruled by Norway, then Denmark. It gained independence in 1944.
Sometimes you can tell that it has no history: its language is primitive and unchanged; Icelanders can still read their sagas with no difficulty. Before the war, almost everyone lived in turf houses, which, of course, have now been knocked down or disintegrated.
Reykjavik is a capital city like no other. It is heated (like the rest of the country) by geothermal springs, and in winter the snow melts on heated pavements. It is built of grey concrete and grey corrugated iron, and large stretches look like wastelands. There are some streets where the iron is painted red and blue and pink and then, from a distance, you have the illusion that the houses are picturesque wooden cabins. There are some buildings, like the elegant City Hall, which are built on water and walled with glass; ripples of light dance on the ceiling. Others - like the famous Pearl Restaurant, whose revolving glass dome rests on six water towers - are glorious architectural audacities. Mostly, though, Reykjavik is grey, low-rise, hiccupping down towards a coastline of rusting fishing boats, halibut heads and fish factories.
Most of the dwellings look as if they've been put up in a hurry and would not be missed if they were covered by lava.
Perhaps this is the guiding principle behind a city whose seduction is precisely that it rests its rickety modernity on a great scoop of black earth and turbulent sky - that stone and iron could be swept away at any minute. Every day there are small earthquakes in Iceland; every year a volcano erupts; once a decade it erupts massively, re-landscaping great slices of the country. If you are Icelandic, you live in the shadow of your own temporality: big sky, boiling earth and little you. The joy of the city is its smallness, its friendliness, the way it crumbles away at the edges and quickly becomes scorched territory.
Reykjavik is full of wonderful and not-so-exorbitantly-expensive- as-I'd-expected restaurants. Avoid the blue cheese dressing they seem to like - the fish is too fresh for that. And Reykjavik is even fuller of cafes. There's a ``downtown" where poets and artists and trendy youth hang out, talking about creativity while slabs of ice the size of houses crash off glaciers a few kilometres inland.
I had been told - and kept reading about - the vibrant club- cafe society. Feeling unhip in my red cagoule, I searched for it, pursuing small groups of men and women down alleys in search of the scene. Later, I discovered that the action really started after midnight - at places like Astro, the Cafe Solon Islandus, Cafe 22, Cafe List, Kaffibarinn - and continued through to breakfast. But I was in bed by 10pm, where I stared, wind-struck, at Icelandic television, beguiled by the fact that until five years ago, television closed down in the summer and also every Thursday.
It is from Reykjavik that you explore the country. On one day, I flew to the Westman Islands (which only cost about $65 return), a group of 15 rocky outcrops blasted by the strongest winds in Europe; winds of up to 220kmh have been recorded.
Only one of the islands, Heimaey, is inhabited and it is made up of several volcanic craters welded together 5000 years ago by a great flood of lava.
IN 1973, another great eruption added a further two kilometres to the island, reshaped the harbor and (amazingly) killed nobody. Today the island is stunningly apocalyptic. The southern end is green and high; the rest is lava fields, ash mountains, red hills. The town disappears into a cliff of lava: there are a few fragments of houses still embedded in the rock.
The latest ash from the most recent volcano is still hot to touch, and steam seeps out of fissures. On rainy days, the entire lava field steams. Our guide told us that a few months ago, he had taken a busload of Scandinavian priests around the island; they had sat in horrified silence until one, a Dane, stood up and said: ``This looks just like Hell.
" A Finnish priest responded: ``You Danes, you've been everywhere.
" For about $32, I went on an hour-long boat trip around the island. As we slapped down the waves on a small fishing boat, I saw seals, many seabirds (Iceland's coast is a birdwatcher's paradise), needle-shaped rocks, deep caves with pink and purple sea urchins clinging to the wet walls, and thousands upon thousands of puffins. There are about 10 million puffins on Heimaey during the summer plump and plucky birds which flap their wings tremendously fast. You can watch them flapping vigorously around the island and you can eat them in the restaurants pan-fried.
On another day, I went on a coach tour of the Golden Circle, just south of Reykjavik, through the stunning barrenness (tufts of moss on black rock; violent fissures where the tectonic plates are ripping the country down its spine; dark clouds rolling) to the Gullfoss waterfall. Over lusher lowlands (although, even here, all vegetables and fruit are grown in greenhouses and there are no ants, no snakes, no frogs) are the great geysers and Haukadalur, which gave all other geysers their name. In an extraordinary few days, this was the strangest sight of all. A blue pool lay still on red rock; suddenly it started to swell and ripple, then its waters were sucked down, as if under enormous pressure, and it bubbled violently.
And then, with a force that made me jump back, a great spout of boiling water cascaded into the sky.
All around the great spouter were little pools. Here a puddle of grey mud bubbled; here clear water steamed; here a red pool gurgled. Mini geysers gushed. Underfoot I could hear frothing water. The effect was epic and yet strangely intimate - snuffling and farting and gurgling like subterranean bodily functions.
Iceland used to be the country astronauts would go to before taking a rocket to the moon, or where diplomats would meet because it is halfway between Europe and America. But today it is attracting tourists. You can have nightlife; you can visit Europe's largest glaciers; you can walk for miles and miles in hellish beauty and never see a soul. You can travel north to the midnight sun; or south and see an island that was only born 30 years ago. There are whales in the sea, rainbows in the sky, geysers down the road, earthquakes underfoot, sulphur in the air, wildness in the mind.
GETTING THERE.
THERE are no direct flights from Australia to Iceland. You have to fly to Europe or America and take an Icelandair flight to Reykjavik. Icelandair operates daily flights out of London.
The three-hour flight costs from $595 return. There are also regular flights from Paris, Frankfurt, Copenhagen and several other European cities, as well as New York.
Hotels in Iceland cost from about $174 a double, youth hostels from $22 a night and guest houses (from $65 per person).
Snow falls between November and March but normal life, including tours, continues. Officially, the midnight sun is seen in late June but the days remain long between May and early August.
Nordic Travel operates several tours of Iceland including the six-day Mountains and Fjords tour, which costs $1560 (twin share) from Reykjavik. Contact Orbit Travel (9670 7071) or your local travel agent. Reading: Lonely Planet combines Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands in its Travel Survivors Kit (rrp $22.95).
© 1995 The Age