View all the Vik photos here
Vik is famous for its coastline, not because it’s a great place to lounge around and sunbake, and probably not for the surfing, although for all I know it’s possible to pull on a dry suit and surf until you get frostbite on your nose. The stunning aspect of the Vik coastline is the jet black fine sand on the beaches. Photos of the beach on a grey day look like they’ve been taken in black and white. For Australians raised on blinding white and blazing hot sand it’s an inverse beach experience more attractive for its novelty than comfort.
The previous day we took a stroll on the fourth biggest glacier in Iceland, Mýrdalsjökull, but really when you walk on the glacier it’s just the spillover flowing down the valley. Even a finger of the fourth biggest glacier is massive in scale. You can see the movement of the glacier in this video. (UPDATE: That video has been removed so you’ll have to make do with this one showing an eruption in the same location.) The glacier is in furious retreat, 75 metres per year, and this November in Iceland was unusually warm. Usually roads are closed because of snow and ice, the waterfalls are frozen and our glacier guide would be ice climbing up them, but this year it was 17 degrees in Reykjavik with no sign of anything being frozen.
For our walk we strapped crampons to our trainers and trekked up this massive ice cube. The ice on the glacier was incredibly hard and glassy. It is advised not to place the ice axe directly on the ice because it could slide off into a crevasse very quickly. The ice is clear blue in places, other times it’s filled with air bubbles. This particular glacier is dotted with black volcanic ash from the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull last year (I dare you to pronounce that). There are also piles of black rock which the glacier has pushed up through itself. Where the black rock covers the ice the melt rate of the ice slower so you get these black towers of ice forming. Crevasses could be anywhere. Most of the water in glaciers flows under the surface which we never see but there are still many caves and crevasses to see on the surface. The guide would hack of a big hunk of ice and throw it down the crevasse so that we could gauge with our ears how deep it was. Suffice to say you wouldn’t want to fall in one.
Sarah has inherited an interest in death and destruction from her mother. It might be genetic. She asked our guide whether they had ever lost anyone on the glacier, thinking that perhaps a hundred years ago some people might have gone missing. “Yes, last week actually,” the guide replied. A Swedish man had climbed 6km up this finger of the glacier without proper crampons or telling anyone where he was going. He got lost as the day was ending and made an emergency call but they lost his signal before being able to get useful information. Our guide among others searched the glacier all night and continued the search for four days before the man’s body was found in a crevasse which he had slipped into. This put a slight dampener on our stroll but the guide managed to get people cheered up at our next stop with a joke that Sarah and I were out of range for, but Sarah managed to drag everyone back to reality by asking about the evacuation procedure should there be an eruption. Apparently the biggest danger with an Icelandic eruption is that there will be a flood from melted glacial ice so the best procedure is to stay where you are when the warning sirens go off then drive like hell in whichever direction you are directed. During the Eyjafjallajökull eruption the guides were still hiking the glacier through all the ash but the glacier was completely covered in the black ash so you couldn’t see any ice at all.
We drove to our hostel in Vik, a cute two storey cottage where we were the only guests. We had our traditional hot pot soak (we were the only people in the outdoor pool), cooked up some pasta then curled up in the cosy front room, I drinking Cuban rum and Sarah reading her Jordan and Israel guide book while the wind threw rain around outside in the freezing temperatures. It was very pleasant.
On our final morning in Vik we went for a walk over the headland and watched the terns (accuracy unconfirmed) wheel about in the sky trying to land on their cliff-side nests. One guy had terrible trouble getting its feet on the ground. Every time it came in to land with feet stretching for the ground a gust of wind pushed it back into the air again. Eventually it just bombed in from the front straight at the cliff and landed to a great chorus of bird calls probably letting him know what a pork chop it was. The walk was scenic but bitterly cold. It was a cloudy day, not much above freezing, but the wind was the real killer. Going up to the top of the headland was ok as we were generally walking into it, but going downhill we had to really push to make any headway. Despite having five layers of clothing on (t-shirt, thermal top, long-sleeve top, coat, rain jacket) it was still freezing and my lips were too numb to form even my usual mumbled sentences. It was sweet relief to make it back to the car and head off for another misty drive, this time back to Reykjavik.
View all the Vik photos here
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