We left Diamond Beach and outside the ridiculously stunning scenery continued to roll past as we drove East. We were on the lookout for Brunnholl; a dairy farm offering guest rooms with a small restaurant and home made ice cream. We were excited. Sampling the local ice cream is a favorite past time of ours when traveling. We have stopped plugging our destination into the GPS and are using the map as there are only so many roads so as we spy a billboard in the distance we eagerly await until one of us can read it and says “Turn here!” So far it’s been “Not it” one after the other. Look there’s another glacier! The escarpment holding the ice cap has retreated inward and we are driving through lush grassy plains bisected by large streams of run-off from the ice cap. We are seeing more accommodations and farms each with a large sign on the Ring Road pointing the way to them. We still haven’t seen any cows.
Finally the “Turn Here” billboard is sighted and announced and we turn South off the Ring Road onto a long drive up to a low long building with a small empty car park. There is a large industrial looking barn beyond the car park and other out buildings and farm equipment scattered about. I wonder where the guest rooms are, probably in the building we park in front of which contains the restaurant. There is a smaller version of the Ring Road Billboard on one end of the building. A smiling child holding an ice cream cone under the name Brunnholl. That’s why were here!
Inside the small restaurant which looks North across the fields to the road and the glacier beyond is empty. There is a mousy girl with glasses polishing silverware and a large young man, also in glasses and a short thin beard on his round face. Hi, we are excited to try your ice cream we exclaim to the mousy girl who does not return our enthusiasm but sets down the spoon she has been polishing and moves towards the glass case in front of which we with panting faces eagerly stand. She uncovers eight flavors of ice cream. There is Chocolate, Dandelion, Licorice, Cherry, Vanilla, Strawberry, Coffee, and Butterscotch. Ambiana asks excitedly if she can have a taste of the Coffee. “Only two tastes” the mousy girl explains sternly. Do people come in and sample all the flavors repeatedly and then leave I wonder.
Colleen asks if they make the ice cream from their own milk. The waiter who is passing by on his way into the kitchen stops and says “But of course.” “We haven’t seen any cows our whole trip, she explains. “The cows are inside” the waiter patiently explains. “It is Winter, they get cold” Wasn’t the first day of Summer 5 days ago I ask, that’s what they told us in Reykjavik on Thursday, they were celebrating it. “Outside now it is cold, the cows stay inside.” That settled I sampled Dandelion and Caramel then chose Chocolate, Jakobi lingered over her two samples and finally chose Coffee, Colleen sampled Chocolate and Dandelion and went with the Chocolate. Ambiana sampled the Strawberry and the Dandelion and picked Dandelion.
The ice cream was served in a small glass dish, the scoop was the size of a ping pong ball and a small was a single scoop for 700 Icelandic Kroner. I noticed they had Skyr on their breakfast menu and asked if they made their own. They did not and when I told them I was excited to be in Iceland to eat Skyr from the source the mousy girl told me that the Queen of Denmark took all the yogurt from Iceland and that Skyr was the dregs of the yogurt scrapped from the barrels it was transported in.
Do they hate tourists? It’s not even the high season. There is only us in here. Tourism has exploded in the past 10 years going from 300,000 tourists a year to 1,300,000. Tourism makes up 31% of Iceland’s goods and services, employs 14% of the country’s workforce and accounts for 5% of the GDP. It can get taxing playing host to a bunch of entitled people traipsing through your country on a site seeing tour. Is that any basis for a local economy? I’ve worked in Alaska and spent a lot of time in Hawai’i and the locals definitely view the tourist with disdain but do not hesitate to take their money and construct attractions and tours to accommodate them. Tourism turns Nature into a Theme Park Experience and the place you live into a Theme Park.
We step outside when done with our ice cream, returning the glass bowls and thanking the mousy girl and the round faced waiter. The ice cream wasn’t anything special but the view outside was with the Glacier spilling down it’s valley across the road and fields to the North. I asked if anyone wanted to do a dance and Colleen twerked for the video. A car pulled off the Ring Road and headed up the long drive passing us as we drove out. More ice cream lovers or maybe seeking dinner and a room. That is where we were headed to in HOFN. We were close. We approached a long ridge pushing us back to the sea and the peninsula on which HOFN is situated. HOFN was founded in 1897 by a merchant who moved his trading post from a nearby area to the current location of the town. HOFN means “harbor” in Icelandic, and it is one of the few natural harbors on the South Coast of Iceland, which is mostly flat and sandy. We found the campground on the outskirts of the town which was unattended; a sign said the Office would be open between 1930 and 2200 so we headed into HOFN to get some seafood.
HOFN is a small town; population of about 2,000 people and as we drove through it we passed the outdoor thermal swimming pool which is at the heart of all Icelandic towns. HOFN is a fishing port and we made our way to the waterfront seeking a place to eat. The harbor was lined by long warehouses with a few restaurants tucked in among them. We checked out two places in the guidebook but they were both super pricey so we opted for the diner looking shack on the far end of the harbor where I still paid $20 for a beef patty (frozen not fresh) and fries. I would have gotten fish and chips like the rest but I suspected that was frozen not fresh as well. The fresh stuff was out of our price range which is weird cause there is the sea, we can see it out the window. Maybe the Queen of Denmark is taking all the fish. More likely it’s the export market. Everyone works for the fishing conglomerate which sells to the diner the same frozen stuff it sells to the rest of the world. The fresh fish they catch for themselves or sell for lots of $$$ to the tourist restaurants.
It was still too early to check into the campground so we headed to the town pool. This time they gave us a key on a wrist band to open our lockers. This pool also had a steam room and I headed there first. It was a large rectangle of a room maybe 12” x 16′ with the glass door in the corner, long wooden benches facing each other against the 16′ walls which were tiled white. The floor was also tile but larger and red. The room was hot and moist and I took a seat on one of the benches. There were two other young men on the bench opposite. I nodded a hello as I sat but did not speak not wanting to break the sanctity of the sweat if only my own. After the cold night at the SKATAFELL Campground it was blessed to be enveloped in such warmth.
The silence was broken by the hiss of steam as it entered the room via its vent upping the heat and humidity in the room. I thought back to the unsuccessful attempt to make our shower back in Vermont into a tiny steam room. It was this lushness of heat and humidity that I envisioned but the steam generator model I acquired was equivalent to the steam generated by a hot shower and was very unsatisfying. To generate more steam would require a more expensive and higher wattage generator. I decided to build a sauna instead and make steam by pouring water over the rocks on top of the stove. The sauna back home is as satisfying as this room which is a nice thought.
Upon leaving the steam room I sit for a moment in the cold plunge with a young lady. She was already in when I got in and was still in after I was long out and in the adjoining hot pot. I look with remarkableness upon the people we have encountered here who sit in the cold pots for long periods of time. Jakobi is one of them, she sat in the cold pot tonight for 5 minutes. I joined Colleen in the hot pot where she was in conversation with a bearded and tattooed red haired mullet Icelandic man. He was telling her how he was bored of the Northern Lights. “Big deal, it’s fucking dark for 8 months of Winter” he said and he’s moving to Amsterdam where there is something to do. His name is Thor Gunderson, “And fuck the gnomes too”, he said, “there are no gnomes in Iceland, that shit was made up by and American Journalist who needed something to write about. No one believes in Gnomes in Iceland, just the tourists. Also there is crime and homelessness and drugs, Reykjavik is a city like cities everywhere except it is the most boring”.
He told us he thinks America is hilarious and so do most people in Iceland. What is so funny I asked him. “Joe Biden” he replied, “Donald Trump”. That’s not funny, it’s fucked up I muttered. “Yeah, that’s why its funny”, he laughed. I didn’t want to hear what he thought of Bjork so I asked him about the coming change to the way Icelanders calculate their age. He told me people don’t ask how old are you, instead they ask what year were you born. Because on June 1st everyone gets a year older regardless of what month they were born.
Back at the campground there were now 8-10 campervans in the lot and a bunch of people in the common room waiting for the office to open so they could check in. We drove around the campground which was on a small hill looking for a spot to set up but most of the sites were unsuitable for a tent, just a gravel strip cut into the hill for a campervan. We found a level place back down behind the office and I set up our tents while Colleen, Ambiana and Jakobi went to the office to check us in and use the bathrooms. When I was done I joined them noting on the short walk over that ours were the only tents in the campground
The common room was crowded and the office was manned by two teenage boys. There were one bathroom each for men and women and they were small with only one toilet, a sink and a single shower. Most of those in the common room were cued up for the showers. I filled my water bottle in the small sink nook tucked between the bathroom and went back outside to brush my teeth. It was past 2100 now and the sun was down behind the mountains in the West. I sat and brushed my teeth and my eyes gazed over mountains from all the way in the distant West to those looming closer in the East. The over them sky was clear; a deep blue with golden and orange clouds streaming high like fiery banners in the darkening sky. The stars were winking into existence and I could feel it was going to be another cold night but hopefully not as cold as up by the glacier last night.
I crawled into my tent and got comfy in my bag and settled into my book: NANDA DAVI: The Tragic Expedition They are high on the Nepalese peak and I am amazed by how dysfunctional and petty the climbing team is. It doesn’t sound like a fun trip at all. People just do what they want regardless of the circumstances, they don’t work together, they don’t listen to the expedition doctor. It’s not surprising that it is going to end in tragedy. I hear Ambiana & Jakobi return from the common building and get into their tent followed soon by Colleen. Soon they will be tucked in comfy and reading themselves. Tomorrow we are turning back to travel West the way we have come.
