At the very beginning of the school year, our program director told us that one of the highlights of the program would be a class trip to the Westfjords in the spring. The Westfjords are to Iceland what the Aran Islands are to Ireland, or maybe what the Pacific Northwest is to the US—rugged, stunning landscapes where the old ways of life have not yet entirely died out. Well, at last the long-awaited trip arrived, and now I can say that not only was it one of the highlights of the program, but it was one of the best trips I´ve ever taken!
I am entirely at a loss to describe the Westfjords. Even my pictures don´t capture how amazing the land is. The road skirts the coast, weaving around every fjord (and there are many!) so that you can see the place you´re trying to reach but you know it will take you two hours to get there because you have to drive around this massive body of water in order to reach it. The villages are few and far between—in fact, even Ísafjörður, the biggest town in the Westfjords, has only 2500 people, and the village where we stayed for two nights, Flateyri, was so small the owner of the local swimming pool was able to track us down an hour after we left in order to return a pair of gloves someone had forgotten!
We spent four days driving in this bleak, stunning, practically untouched subarctic fantasy land, visiting saga sites and archeological digs, as well as touring a museum of magic (the picture is a magic staff for changing the weather), a maritime museum, and a fish factory owned by our program director´s cousin. In fact, everything in Flateyri seemed to be owned by a cousin of our director—it´s that sort of town.
It is still winter in the Westfjords—in fact, it was hit or miss whether we would be able to complete the trip as planned because there is a high mountain pass that is closed in bad weather, and there was a real possibility of snow. Actually, there was a snowfall the day before we drove through that pass, but it wasn´t bad enough to cause the road to close. For the most part, though, we had very good weather, and we were very conscious of how fortunate we were in that department!
On the one hand, it´s unreal to stand at the top of a mountain pass and say, “Here, on this very spot, on this same road, a saga hero decided to ride to his doom.” It was especially unreal to hike down to the site of another saga hero´s famous last stand, and find it to be a peaceful and deserted mountain slope now, with no evidence of the violence that occurred there a millennium ago. (This hike, by the way, was not for sissies—it was very steep with loose rocks most of the way, and a patch of dwarf birch forming such a thick undergrowth that we were quite scratched and bruised by the time we wrestled our way out of it.)
On the other hand, it was really wonderful to get a sense of daily life in the Westfjords now, something we couldn´t have done without the knowing aid of our program director. Towns get wiped out by landslides, farms will be isolated for months on end when the roads close, there is only one real grocery store in the whole of the Westfjords, it is winter until June. It is a hard life, especially for the farmers and the fishermen, and it is fast disappearing as people leave the old farms for an easier and more profitable life in the city. Most of the towns in the Westfjords are made up primarily of summer homes, populated only a month or two each year. The depths of winter must be incredibly bleak—but while we were there, we experienced as close to the “midnight sun” as most of us will ever get!
Driving back on Saturday night, seeing Reykjavík rise out of the ocean as we came south, we realized what a big city the capital is. Some 100,000 people may not seem like much in terms that the rest of the world uses, but when you´ve gone for three days without seeing another car on the road, and when you run into the same tourist twice because there are so few places for tourists to stay…Reykjavík suddenly looks much, much bigger.
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