Two Days Hitchhiking Iceland

Morty the Spanish-Icelandic kitten pawed me awake to the muted daylight of a cloudy Icelandic late afternoon. I packed everything up into my backpack and banjo case and took them with me, just in case I didn’t come back to Reykjavik that night. It’s nice to have choices. I followed Hitchwiki‘s advice and took bus 5 to a gas station at the outermost reaches of the city, where I crossed a traffic circle sending cars southeast on Route 1, the Ring Road that circles the perimeter of the island.

Had I more time in the country, I would have hitched all the way around the Ring Road circuit – other than little Akureyri in the north, the country is very sparsely settled, and natural beauty abounds. But I only had two days left to see the wilds, so I’d have to make do. Everybody recommends some part of the island, but Bylgja and Tóta generally had a lot more to say about the north than the south. Realistically, one day of hitchhiking with the intent to return by nightfall wouldn’t get me too far in either direction, but I elected to save the northerly jaunt for a day when I didn’t start after lunch.

As long as the road has a good, wide shoulder, hitchhiking off of a traffic circle is extremely easy, as everyone’s moving slow and has had a good chance to see you up ahead. I didn’t get a ride immediately, but in the world of hitchhiking, 15 minutes might as well be nothing. And so it came to be that my first hitched ride of this journey was a pair of Icelandic teenage sisters (the older one driving couldn’t have been older than 16) heading back home after going in town to go shoe shopping for the younger one (they didn’t get anything). I don’t know if Icelandic teenagers are told not to pick up hitchhikers; everyone says it’s really common there, and they didn’t seem uncomfortable about it at all.

Icelandic-language pop music pulsed softly on the radio as we crested the mountain range that surveys Reykjavik from the southeast, popping my ears and opening up into a wide sprawl of rough scrub grass and red-roofed farmhouses. The landscape reminded me of the area around Laramie in particular – rolling, rough plains, sparsely populated, neatly hemmed in by a horizon of snowcapped mountain peaks. Only the colors were swapped – rich, deep greens over beds of rich volcanic soil made even blacker by the white mountaintops above, themselves far brighter than the mist-gray sky.

The girls live in Hveragerði, the first substantial settlement after the mountains. There’s not a lot there, but there are natural hot springs and mountain views, enough that the map at the foot of the town has directions for dozens of tourism sights, mostly geothermal in nature. I walked around for a few minutes, stretching my legs and enjoying the sight of someplace other than Reykjavik, before heading back to the Route 1 roundabout and seeking another ride out.

Across the street a busful of high school athletes of indeterminate sport were putzing around in a parking lot, presumably commuting to a game. The boys cheered when, after only a few minutes of waiting, a car pulled over for me. Driving was a 20-something local girl with dyed-white hair who was driving out of Reykjavik to meet a friend in Selfoss for coffee. Although Selfoss is a more substantial settlement than Hveragerði, I wasn’t interested in towns, so I walked the mile or so to the edge of town, where a grocery store gives way to a barren plain and more highway, and kept hitching.

There was considerably less traffic going on from Selfoss, but a ride eventually came. This time it was an American expat with three kids in the backseat. She had moved to Iceland with the father of one of the kids, but now she was with the father of the other ones in Hella, which is not pronounced the way you might think, although I can’t quite get it right either. This woman was very nice and had a lot to say about her life, most of which I won’t recount here. She offered me a quick tour of Hella, which I accepted because she seemed so enthusiastic about it. I maybe shouldn’t have. Her idea of a tour seemed to drive painstakingly slowly up every street in town – past her kids’ school, the local gym, her house, the house of someone she knew, the house of someone else she knew who did something once, the stables where they raise the horses, the stable where she thought she might know the owners…

When she finally dropped me off I was mentally exhausted and the afternoon was late. My loose goal for the day had been to get to Vík, known for its black-sand beaches, but getting there and back again wasn’t looking likely, so I thumbed out on the other side of the road – better to get back and be ready for an early start tomorrow.

But the rental car that pulled over for me had much better plans. Owen and Pam were in the front seat, two friendly Americans squeezing as much Iceland as they could into one weekend (sound familiar?). They were coming back from the beaches at Vík and asked if I would mind a couple scenic stops on the way back to Reykjavik, and I didn’t at all. We compared lives on the way to Gullfoss Falls. Pam is a Captain (soon-to-be Major) in the U.S. Army who’s been stationed in Germany; her manner is blunt and a bit wry, but warm, too. I hope our military has lots of Pams in it. Owen lives in Vermont, and when I told him that basically all I know about Vermont is Ben and Jerry and Bernie, he delighted me by confirming that he’s into both – the state universally adores Bernie Sanders, and Owen actually works for Ben and Jerry’s, doing quality assurance, which includes, yes, regular ice cream tastings.

I’ve seen a lot of waterfalls, and in typical Icelandic fashion, Gullfoss, while not being the biggest falls I’ve seen, had a strange aura to its grandeur that startled me. From a large, damp stone platform that juts out into the middle of the falls, you can watch the water rushing down in tiers, bursting from fall to landing above and around you, ultimately plowing into an abyss far out of sight. Wherever that deep canyon takes the water, it leaves a gift, a steady flow of thick, cool mist that fills the air, drizzling almost imperceptibly on the whole spectacle.

Between Gullfoss Falls and Reykjavik is the site of Geysir, a big geyser. It’s no Old Faithful, especially now, having been dormant for some time, but a smaller geyser nearby erupted a handful of times while we were there, jetting its plume of steam-water high in the air to come down as a sticky, sulphurous fog over tourists and geothermal basins much like the ones in Yellowstone, clear and still and unnaturally brightly colored. We walked up the nearby hill and took pictures, appreciating the silence between eruptions.

At around 22:00 they returned me to Reykjavik, and I decided that an ice-cream-covered Belgian waffle from a food truck could count as my dinner.

The next day, Monday, my last full day in Iceland, began in much the same way as the day before, only much earlier. I took a bus to where the Ring Road leaves the edge of the city, and after a little lunch at a bakery and stocking up on snacks at a grocery store, I found my roundabout and started thumbing. Traffic was steady, but a ride didn’t come immediately. A few minutes into my wait, a massive backpack came into view, hiking up the roadside towards me on the back of a girl. In a light and fascinating accent, she joined me at my spot and introduced herself as Marina, from Montreal. She’d just arrived in Iceland that morning and was looking to hitchhike north to see the sights. We’d just gotten through our introductions when a car pulled up with room for both of us.

Aileen is from Ohio, but she’s lived in Chicago for a few years. We’re the same age, too, and although we didn’t have mutual friends on Facebook, we do have friends that know each other, so that’s fun. Aileen is no stranger to traveling; she’s been to Iceland a few times before, and this time she’d been staying at a friend’s place in the city for several days before finally renting a car to see some new sights. She was accommodating beyond all expectations, having built plenty of time for spontaneity into her day. My goals were to get into some hot springs and maybe eat something authentically Icelandic other than hot dogs. Aileen wanted to check out an area called Kirkjufell, on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, north of Reykjavik and pretty much 9:00 from Iceland’s center. Marina just wanted to see cool stuff, but she had her eye on a hostel called the Freezer, near the peninsula’s tip. So we went to Snaefellsnes.

The day was warm and buoyantly sunny for the first time since I’d crossed the Atlantic, perfect for zooming down Route 1 between tall mountain peaks and the ocean gently rippling with light. Aileen played spacey DJ mixes through SoundCloud, and we ate Icelandic licorice chocolate and compared our travel experiences, both at home and abroad. I think we’d all been expecting a day of beautiful but lonely travel; instead we made friends. We took a road down the southern flank of the mountainous peninsula, then took a path up and over the snow-capped peaks to the north side, where strangely round Mount Kirkjufell juts steeply over the water. A black-sand beach stretches up to the parking lot, beyond which a 50-foot span of millimeter-deep water shimmers darkly. You can walk out on it and feel like Scandinavian Jesus.

Across the road from Kirkjufell, a river pours down from the mountains, transforming briefly into a mighty waterfall and back again, rushing towards the ocean. We watched a group of locals on horseback tromp through the water, escorted by the happiest frolicking dog. When we felt our cameras had absorbed as much as they could, we drove into town for food. There’s a cafe in Grundarfjörður that serves, among other things, a traditional Icelandic fish pie. There was nothing flashy about it, but it was pretty decent and super filling. Goal achieved. As for the other goal, hot springs, I’d Googled up a travel blog with directions to a natural hot pool. Checking our maps on the cafe’s WiFi, we compared routes and found that Marina’s hostel was to the west, directly opposite of the way toward the hot spring and Reykjavik (and the southern destinations Aileen wanted to hit the next day). After stocking up on some groceries in town, we left Marina to hitchhike the rest of the way to The Freezer, where she’d already made a reservation for the night, confident that a ride would be hitched.

Aileen and I crossed back over the mountains and, following a GPS pin situated off the main road and sort of in the middle of nowhere, made our way to a gravel road, a rocky path, a cold creek crossing, and finally a steamy little puddle in the rocks, occupied by a young European couple who, up until we arrived, had probably been having a nice romantic moment. The hot pool could fit three acquaintances, maybe four close friends. We told them to take their time and kicked pebbles around for a while until they hopped out. Aileen’s got a boyfriend in Chicago and a pretty carefree demeanor, so what might have been awkward or intense with a different spontaneous travel buddy was a pretty relaxed occasion. It was a cozy little natural hot tub, too hot to stay in for very long, with some natural perches of mossy rock under the water to lean against. On our way out, we passed a large group of visibly disappointed tourists who must have assumed, like I initially had, that the pool would just happen to be the perfect size for a group of any number.

We’d parked the car near a decrepit farmhouse, and I wanted to take a peek at it. It was crumbling and long since abandoned, floor covered in debris, windows empty. By the front door was a sheep carcass, mostly skeleton and hair, preserved by Iceland’s chilly climate. Aileen already had the sheep teeth she needed to make a necklace, but she still found it incredibly fascinating. She’s got some niche interests. On an inside wall, someone had written something in very shaky Latin (“Latin they probably got from ‘Warhammer 40K‘ -David Westfall) about “all spirits of the world,” with the word “exorcism” scrawled in English over the top. I wonder if one’s Latin needs to be grammatically correct in order for witchcraft to work properly.

It was late but not too late when Aileen dropped me off near where she’d found me on the outskirts of Reykjavik – when the sun doesn’t set until midnight and it never really gets dark, “evening” has a very loose definition. When the sun finally went down, I was back at Mariam’s place, doing a quick load of laundry and getting ready to wake up and catch a flight to Glasgow.