Þjóðhátíð: Part III

Þjóðhátíð: Part III

I didn't find myself at the festival grounds until just before midnight.  Guess I wasn't much interested in the music after all or tired from the Eldfell hike.  But at midnight, I find the crowd huge.  And like me, all anticipating the grand fireworks to begin at midnight.   I walkt over to the beer tent first, and found that it wouldn't be open until midnight!  My watch said it's about 20 minutes before.  The German waiting there was disgusted and that rubbed off.  I wandered off to the main stage and here again, families with kids and infants in prams, and every age above that.  This was still a family-oriented crowd, and to keep things traditional, not a few stumbling about and tripping over themselves truly wasted.  Lots of Icelandic sweaters and lots lots more in fluorescent orange overalls like fishermen or firemen might wear, and I regret not asking why.

It was a long while before I wised up to why so many children were up past bedtime with their parents in tow, waiting for the fireworks to begin.  Hazard a guess yourself?  It doesn't get dark enough for fireworks until after midnight.  Walking over to the festival ground at 11:30, it was still too bright a twilight and it didn't register as too bright for fireworks.

I described the festival grounds as being in a natural amphitheatre, surrounded on three sides by enormously high slopes and higher cliffs above them.  Tonight I noticed a LOT more persons up there above The Wall.  Tiny dots of orange in the growing darkness.  Way high.  Way way high.  I didn't get it.  Hazard another guess?  

Promptly at midnight the first Roman candles were lit and the crowd roared in delight, and then the major fireworks were shot high into the air.  They actually didn't seem to go above the height of the cliffs, so the fireworks were contained in this bowl.  Three or more things notable.  Those person high high high on the slopes had this most excellent view of the fireworks.  They were exploding right in front of them! not above them!  They probably felt as if they were inside the explosions! WOW!  How bloody cool is that!?  

Secondly, the explosions as I said were completely inside the bowl of the festival grounds, so to triple the fun, we had massive echoes.  First the bomb blast of the firework, then immediately, the echo off the cliff behind, then the more MASSIVE echo on the cliffs behind us.  To be honest, it was scary at times, because it outdid any thunderstorm I'd ever been in ten-fold, AND, won't all that vibration cause a boulder to cleave off and roll and bounce down?  (I worry way too much.  Þor, God of Icelandic Thunder, save me or crush me with a tumbling boulder and get it over with.)   

I didn't want it to end, no one did of course, and it was just like fireworks at home, a constant finale and huge cheers from the crowd.  WE ALL LOVED IT!!! and screamed our delight and appreciation and clapped and whistled forever when it ended.  And so, there's an encore!  Wow!  Where does that happen?  Such a teasing!  I always feel I might be exaggerating, so let me just say honestly, that after the encore and a nice finish with excellent Roman candles and then lots of yells and whistling of appreciation again, we had another encore.  Did they know how to keep us enthralled or what?!

When I think about that evening or rather, early morning at Þjóðhátíð, what is the one thing that keeps me excited having experienced it?  The impossibly massive echoing through your bones thunder.  You can't record it, photograph it, describe it.  Through your bones shuddering crashing hide for dear life thunder.  True awe.

Eldfell Diner

Eldfell Diner

The story of the eruption of Eldfell on the island of Heimay and the near destruction of Vestmannaejyar is too well documented and photographt to be repeated here.  Except to note that it began on my twelfth birthday and by that age anything volcanic was an obsession.  To me, it was clearly a war between mankind and nature, where there were no casualties, and yes, not to downplay the destruction and hardship on the people living there, no lasting damage to either party that can be thought of as controversial.  (Do we really need to go into examples where that battle has been indisputably lost by nature and there's never going back, it's simply unrecoverable?  Let's not.)

Hard work and sheer luck actually created a stronger Vestmannaeyjar fishing port and most of the population returned and cleaned up the place and except for a huge red mountain on the east side of the island and massive hraun, blocky basalt lavaflows now covered in thick green moss, is there little evidence to the average tourist of Eldfell's wrath. John McPhee, a favorite non-fiction writer of mine, has an excellent account of this in his book The Control of Nature. The tephra and ash has long been removed and the island is as lush as ever.  Save Eldfell itself.

I hiked up to the summit of Eldfell, some 200 meters, on a properly markt trail and got sidetrackt on a side trail that turned out to be a non-sanctioned shortcut up to the top.   It was climbing straight up and on a steep gravel sand dune, and only halfway up did I realize this wasn't the main trail.  I was winded but there was no going back.

At the top.  The sky was so blue and cloudless and the sun warm.  What a view!  I could see the mainland clearly, the cliffs of the plateau of the Eyjafjallajökull icecap on the right, the sandur and floodplain of the Markarfljót on the left and for the first time and very clearly and not crowned with a cloud, the lonely mountain Hekla, the most dangerous and disastrous volcano on the island.  Popular hiking there, an overdue eruption, a 30 minute warning tops.  (I kept the photo here "original size" so you could actually see the mountain.)

Lonely mountain in distance is Mt Hekla, finally a view of it not shrouded in clouds! 

Eldfell is a huge gravelly sand dune of red tephra and is quickly eroding, red with rust, and at the top, only a bit of hard lava stone capped the mountain.  I found it friable, parts easily broken off.  This will quickly erode into the red gravel too.  All in just 40 years. At the bottom of the mountain, both to the north toward the town and to the east to the sea, the black and gray and blocky and moss green hraun spread out evenly, not yet covered by the tephra gravel.  A clear demarcation if only by the color of the rock.

Of course, I was going to get a handful of the gravel, and dug in and scooped up one, and shook the sand out between my fingers.  Wow, this gravel is hot.  But it was dug up on the north side of a boulder.  But it never gets this hot in Iceland ever enough to warm this up.  But this gravel was hot enough to hardly hold in my hands very long.  But this was gravel just inches under the surface.  I was somewhat frightened to be honest.  This kind of under the surface heat I'd only come across while soaking in hot water streams, where you could scald your fingers if you dug down even half your hand.

Was I was really uninformed about Eldfell today and volcanoes and lava in general.  As it happens,  Vestmannaejyar gets all of its hot water, extracted from steam, from water that's percolated down from surface rain, heated from the still very very hot insides of the mountain.  It will be decades and decades before the core of Eldfell will be completely, if ever, cooled.  Lots of stories I found online: cooking brats in the gravel was the funniest.  Holding a 40°C stone found at the top was another, and countless other stories about how hot it is inside this now dormant? but it's not dormant but still very much active: an active volcano is one that has erupted in the last 10.000 years. This is a volcano 40 years after the eruption.  It could go off again at anytime.

On the way down from Eldfell, I came across a picture of the village before the eruption.  It wasn't taken at the same spot where the posted board was, so my picture doesn't quite match, but you should get an idea.  Everything of that part of the village you see is under 16 meters of hraun lava flow you see in the other picture, hraun now lush with moss and grass and purple lupine.  As the trail meanders through the hraun, every so often you come across a marker, to indicate that some meters or so below this spot is a house, giving its name, the names of all the inhabitants, their birthdates and deathdates, and those of their children born there and spouses and their children's children also born there, and their spouses as well, some of course were still living today.  Some markers had old photographs of the original inhabitants.  They hadn't died there, mind you, as no one died during this catastrophe; it was only a memorial of the place and the persons having lived there.  It felt awkward.   

All those funny after-the-fact wish-I'd-thought-of-that that one has.  I had the time to sit up on the top of Eldfell for an hour and just enjoy being in the warm sun and fantastic view, and wait for an egg I'd buried deep in the gravel to hard boil.

View from Eldfell, facing east.  Iron-rust Eldfell, green mossy hraun and the blue Gulf Stream.
The Gulf Stream hits Iceland dead on.  Heimaey Island never gets snow.

Þjóðhátíð: Part II

Þjóðhátíð Part II

The scandalous description of the Þjóðhátíð festival needs to be tempered.  As I walk to the festival grounds, I'm walking alongside a lot of people in their 20s, but alongside just as many prams, families and kids, retired folk, the lot.  And I definitely don't see a lot of teenagers on their own.  

What I do see and was surprised and shouldn't have been, was the number of the traditional Icelandic sweaters I saw, on perhaps a third of the crowd. This festival is in Iceland and for Icelanders.  Not a posted sign in any other language but Icelandic.   It's an interesting feeling, not having a clue.

  

Main stage.  

Behind it is the children's playground and putt putt. 

Tent city with streets and addresses.  

Locals rent them and invite you in to enjoy 

their company and food and drink and general good time. 

High above the festival grounds.

In the foreground, the tent city, stage and crowd to the right; 

in the back, with the tower, is the children's area 

and far above it on the hill behind is where we'll have a bonfire.

The festival grounds are in a natural amphitheater, a rounded out bowl of an ancient volcano that is impossibly high and no matter how noisy the music might get, the town on the other side won't hear any of it.  The grassy grounds rise steeply to rock cliffs way way up but still cliffs.  The kind of cliffs that now and again drop rocks which roll down the side.  And there's a boulder here and boulder there.  

The Wall in the background protecting the crowd from the boulders in the background. 

So there's The Wall.  A wall of stones, boulders all bound in wire, about a meter high. It blocks off the seating area from the mountainside, and behind it the slope rises very steeply.  A kind of break wall should any stone find itself falling off and rolling down the slope to join the party.  It's also the men's toilet. 

I leave at about 10:30 because I'm way underdresst and I'm freezing.  About this time of the evening it's a sing along which is kinda fun to watch and listen to, but I'm going back to put on a lot more clothes.

I return at midnight, just before the bonfire is lit.  On stage is a famous pop star in Iceland and everyone is nuts for it and singing along properly to every song as one does at any pop concert.  Then a red ball of fire comes flying in the air to the largest bonfire pile of wood possible.  It's a huge cube matrix of wood and the size of any house on your block.  I didn't bring a camera this time, and wouldn't have filmed any of it anyway.  It was way too cool watching this massive fire take over.  I thought I'd at least wait until the fire burnt out before I headed back, but at 3am it's still burning.  Fun to watch, it's on a hill, and now and again a large ember would tumble down the slope and light a fire.  This is all quite aways from the concert area, so there's not any fuss about putting these out.

Before, I was too cold to get a beer or anything else, but warmed up by the bonfire, I go get a Tuborg, and it's in a half-liter can.   I made sure I went on a completely empty stomach.  Along with my second beer, I order a hamborgari and franskar but forget to ask for kokkteilsósa to dip your fries into.  (It's not ketchup or mayonnaise, but a kind of bearnaise.)   No matter.  I go to the shelf around the tent where there are many abandoned hamborgari baskets, half-eaten hamborgari and lots more masht franskar on the floor.  Oh look!  More than one basket had a left-over cup of kokkteilsósa.  That I could dip my own fries into.  

I said that I could dip my own fries into.  I didn't say I did.  And wouldn't I admit it if I did?  I admit that after two half-liter cans of Tuborg it did cross my mind.  But because it was a funny notion.  The lot of you reading this won't believe me either way (did he or didn't he?), but I did so only because it was funny.  Did what, Benjamin?

I'm not writing anything about the music!  There was that sing-along earlier, and then the big pop star Páll Óskar who ended with the lighting of the bonfire, then Skálmöld, a Viking heavy metal band (translates into "Lawlessness") and who´d´ve thought an intensely angry Icelandic ice pick drilled into your ears would get your head nodding to the beat?  That was the only set I stayed for the entire time.  

Did I find people dropping over drunk?  Tumbling down the slopes?  Trouble getting to the Wall (to pee)?  Yeah, of course, and then medics/security would get called over to the fallen and passt out, and they pickt him up and walkt him to the recovery tents.  It was more "poor idiot let's get him to the tent" than "stupid drunk we're off to the cells".   Making out.  Of course.  Sex.  None.  Not on or near the grounds at least.  There was another team of security, G something something something Eyja written on their uniforms (which does not translate into The Night's Watch) with torches, that I noticed monitoring the Wall and what might lie behind the Wall.

I did not wait for the bonfire to go out.  I'm sure it's still smoking this morning as I write this.  

(Where's Part I?  I'm having a serious debate with myself about that one getting posted.  You may have to ask for a e-postcard for that story.)
(Having been advised, Part I will only be available upon request.)
(Having been re-advised, Part I has been posted.)

Þjóðhátíð: Part I, cont'd

Þjóðhátíð: Part I, cont'd

[Next day, the story cont'd...]

Last night, while we were introducing ourselves, Magnus, the Kicker wrappt in a sheet, his take-away wrappt in a sheet, and me, all thumbs up that between us, everything was cool, we're all friends, really, they needed me saying I was friends, needed my no-problem attitude. I think they all thought I'd rat on them, they're having a party! and it's no guests! strictly forbidden! 

Meanwhile, the man disappeared, to everyone's amazement. I actually went out to the street to find the naked man... 

(I'd told the guesthouse owner, I understand the no-guest rule, but I will not contact you if there are any or if there is any partying; these teenagers wouldn't've known that, and I'm their parents' age.) 

As it turns out, the guy actually had a room here, and had just walkt out of his room, lay naked on the front door mat spread eagle, arm over his eyes, the other messing with his cock. All this in the time it took me to go from my room to the kitchen and back. 

The guy that kickt him in the chest to wake him up, well, both are Icelandic, but the naked man was incoherent. We never got anything useful out of him, and we'd considered throwing him out of the house. 

What he'd done was get up and walk back into his room and hide under his blanket. Even with the door open, we didn't see him.

Next morning, did we ever give him a run down again and again and again, just to be sure he was red and embarrasst. Not sure his behavior will change. But that's for the better. A better story. 

I'm really glad we didn't think to photograph any of this. No 20 year old needs that on the internet. It's kinda creepy to post that kinda stuff anyway, in my opinion. It's not funny anymore.

Þjóðhátíð: Part I

Þjóðhátíð: Part I

Just a very quick post before I turn in at 03:45. I pad down the hall to the kitchen to put my beer in the fridge, and when I walk back to my room, there's a completely naked man lying on the floor in the hall, arm over his eyes, hand over his cock, unsuccessfully trying to hide it. I hear voices in another room and I knock. I'm hoping they know who this is. They don't have any idea who he is, so one kicks the naked man in the chest to wake him up. Which works. And he leaves. Or rather, he disappeared. 

Magnus was outside on the lawn, smoking or rather, waiting until his roommate's take-away left. He saw me come into the house, but he didn't see the naked man come in. And no one saw the naked man leave. 

Þjóðhátíð: Eagle Air

Eagle Air to Vestmannaeyjar

I've come to the conclusion that a good number of small posts about my trip and weekend to Vestmannaeyjar is the best option for me.  And you.

Starting with the prop plane ride not 20 minutes long, from Reykjavík's domestic airport, I'm flying there, which is slightly more expensive than the three hour bus ride to the ferry landing and hour's ferry crossing.  Taking into consideration that time is money...

At check-in, I have my paper receipt, but she hardly looks at it and finds my name in the computer and prints off a small "electronic ticket", which is like a paper receipt from the grocery register, with my name misspelt, with seat assignment 4A.  I put my luggage on a scale and it's thrown on the dolly and I'm free to sit down in the small lobby with regular wooden chairs and wait for 15:45.  I'm there at the appointed 30 minutes before, but people are still walking in to get their boarding pass at 15:45.  Note, I made no mention of baggage inspection.  No confirmation that I indeed was Benjavin Doyle.  No looking into my carry-ons, or stopping to tell me two is too many. 

The couple on the other side of the room, they're opening a tall can of Viking beer to share.   

Finally a boarding call, just the word "Vestmannaeyjar" and we file out the door on the tarmac to our prop plane.  There is no under the seat storage, but there are seatbelts.  There's no stewardess in a fashionable scarf.  No one to explain how to use a seatbelt (don't you get tired of that explanation?), no one to explain how to use the oxygen mask should there be a loss of cabin pressure. 

The captain and his co-pilot are in the cockpit, only separated from us by a curtain, which remains open.  Fun to watch how to fly a plane.  LOTS of buttons, which I really believe they just press randomly and hope for the best.  The captain makes an announcement, only in íslensku.  Then a few minutes later, another announcement.  THIS time in íslensku.  Then we taxi to the runway.

There's no cabin-pressure explanation because we won't get cabin pressure.  We're simply not going to fly high enough except to make your ears pop a few times.  There's a couple in front drinking that same beer.  I had a left side window, so I could see the main island, but nothing lookt familiar, which was sad ("oh look, it's Ingólfshöfði!"), and suddenly the captain makes another announcement, again only in íslensku.  Which was refreshing for some reason.  And then begins the descent.  We can tell that already, because he's changing that lever back.  We've landed and we taxi to the terminal, a man rolls a trolley into, we grab whatever bag is in the pile....

If you're thinking, wow, the security is lax in Iceland or they're certainly naïve, take another point of view: Icelanders have near zero crime and it's one of the safest places on the planet, if not the most.  One reason for the zero crime is that everyone is related to someone who knows someone related to someone who's related to.... There's not much you can get away with here.

I got a hitch into town without even asking.  My stay at Gistiheimilið Hlíðarás on Faxastígur is going to be great.  I'm kindly greeted by Hrefna Ósk.  I ask about the pronunciation of everything, and they're impresst, so I am too.  (I really have been trying.)  I'm One of Seven here, and the only one not from Iceland. She makes it very clear: no guests and no partying. 

I need to be off now to the state-controlled alcohol store where prices are reasonable.  Otherwise, this trip will bankrupt me.  A pub beer is easily $10.  And the only point of this festival is to get wasted.

Þjóðhátíð 2014

Þjóðhátíð 2014

All the exciting and sordid details in small posts about Þjóðhátíð 2014 will follow.  Lonely Planet guide describes it, quote, It involves music, dancing, fireworks, a big bonfire, gallons of alcohol, and, as the night progresses, lots of drunken sex (it's something of a teen rite of passage), with upwards of 15,000 people attending...

This year, 20,000 people are expected, on a town with not even 4000.  Many locals flee.  I don't recognize the line-up, and not much fusst about it.

I'm extra excited about the bonfire.  Supposedly the largest in Scandinavia.  Do they ever love their bonfire.  And the next evening the fireworks.  And always lots of drunken sex.

I think I owe it to you, some kind of pronunciation.  THEO thou teeth is close enough.  Pronounce it slowly, it needn't be some quickly said word.  A lot of Icelanders can't say it either (so I'm told).