An eager Hannah heads to one of her dream destinations, only to discover it’s not like she imagined at all.
Words Hannah Photography Hannah and Snorri Thor Tryggvason
Iceland Air’s safety announcement features very little of the usual plane stuff. Instead, there is an improbably healthy and relaxed looking woman hiking her way across the mountainous landscapes of Iceland. Instead of heading for the exits, she walks serenely towards a pass between two hills. She dons a life jacket as well as a wetsuit, and prepares to canoe down a river, clear waters revealing a black river bed which cuts through lush green terrain. She leaps not down the emergency water slide, but instead off a waterfall. She’s not assuming the brace position, she’s doing yoga. Her child (I told you she looked improbably healthy and relaxed) sits happily beside her in the plane as they both relax under a blanket and take a nap. It’s an effective video: I ignore all the safety stuff and look forward to seeing this outdoor paradise for myself.
As we come in to land and I lay my eyes on the landscape for the first time, it is nothing like I expect. There are no roiling waterfalls, bubbling springs, dramatic cliffs, or smoking volcanoes. There is just… flatness. The sea meets the land in fractal fingers that look like they could be washed away in just one extra-large wave. Resisting the sea’s advances are acres of black gravel, akin to the reclaimed spoil heaps of former mining towns. Late snow covers much of the ground, though not enough to give a winter wonderland scene. The light is flat, grey and murky, and so it will stay for most of my trip.
Listen to this story, here:
Pedalling purgatory
There is often a space in-between. It’s the gap between expectation and reality, in the wait between now and the next thing. It’s in the unpredictable weather at the change of the seasons, or the purgatory between heaven and hell. The space in-between may be vague, amorphous, difficult to pin down, with edges that bleed into the certainties on either side. Or it may be clear cut, with defined boundaries – the sea between the land, the gorge between the cliffs.
Is in-between a place, or a state? Is in-between somewhere in and of itself, or by its nature neither here nor there? What is in the in-between? Can you exist in it in perpetuity, or will you eventually be forced to one side or the other?
These are the thoughts that fill my mind, between the islands of ‘where did I go wrong?’ and ‘why am I doing this?’. I am between the in-betweens, a crackle glaze of ‘this is not what I ordered’ on a plate of what I thought I was getting.
I pedal on in the in-between. The ground is somewhere between thawed and frozen, and it sucks at my wheels like a sand trap in a cyclocross race. The black gravel and muddy melt water sit in tyre-pressed lines. I ride the wet bits, the raised bits, the drifts of larger gravel and the furrows of finer grains. There is no method to the terrain – external appearance gives no clue as to how it will behave as my tyres roll over it, or into it. Momentary stretches of hard ground release my tyres with no warning, and the going becomes suddenly easier, then with no visual clue nor apparent reason, the softness returns. The softness is physically draining; the hard sections offering some respite to the legs, but little to the mind. The anticipation of the return of the drag drags my mind down, and my spirit sits low, like the murky water that lies just below the surface of the gravel before me.
The boundaries of what I thought I would get are clear: huge geological wonders of scenery, fire and ice, freezing river crossings in valleys and sweaty hikeabikes up endless hills. There would be black, and green, and white and blue. These are the colours of the Icelandic tourist brochures, and the scenes I have seen and heard of in tales of adventure cycling here.
Soul sucking, wheel sucking
The one feature that crosses from the expectation to the reality is the wind – though even here it manages to find an in-between state. It blows. As promised, it blows. It blows straight into me, so I crouch on the drops into as aero a position as controlling my steering will allow. It blows sideways, and I lean into it to stay upright, causing one half of my bum to be misaligned on the saddle, creating an ache I fear might eventually concentrate into an eruption of a saddle sore. It blows in constantly shifting directions, which for a time offers a form of entertainment, or at least occupation for the brain. Finding the sweet spot to draft behind or beside another rider, feeling it shift, finding it again… it provides some diversion, until either the elastic snaps, and I can’t keep pace with my windbreak, or the ground below makes an extra grab for my tyres and we’re forced into single file.
The wind splinters us and snatches our conversation from us. A moment of adjustment in the saddle or on the bars and the wheel you were following escapes. We pedal along like the melting ice floes swirling in the thawing rivers – coming together briefly before being swept away by the wind, or sucked down by the earth. It’s not a solo ride of epic proportions, nor a group ride of warm camaraderie. In the neither/neither either/either we give chase, we give up, we catch and are caught.
In this windswept landscape there is little shelter, and we regroup behind scattered shells of forgotten buildings, or clusters of rotting farm machinery. We seek shelter behind oddly land-bound boats, or gatherings of sticks that pass for trees. Food is eaten in these sheltered places, tyre pressures adjusted. We pace and circle, swirling into our support vehicle for sandwiches, coffee, chocolate, before shifting positions, ever seeking shelter from the wind. Behind a jeep, on the other side of a jeep, is the wind coming from here, or there, or both?
No distractions
And yet, while the wind and the soft ground shape our ride, neither is so extreme as to be distracting, or interesting. Our bikes are not flying sideways from us like kites in the wind; it doesn’t hammer rain or snow into our faces. The ground is soft, but it is also flat. There is never any need to stand to pedal, there are no hills to crest. Leaving the shelter of the stunted trees or decaying vehicles we splinter again, pushing on not to see what is there, but just to get to the end.
Brief glimpses of the end, the edge, the outside of the in-between loom as skies clear. Great craggy hulks of cliffs and mountains show their dark, bare sides between their icing of snow. As the thaw continues, hints of the green that will eventually contrast sharply with the black gritty soil are revealed. ‘March in Iceland, that’s a risk’, the comment I heard more than once before I came. Neither deep winter nor spring, the interior – where all the photos I’ve seen have been taken – is still locked off to bikes, buried under snow and ice. And so we pedal the flat skirts of Iceland, the swamps on the way to the sea, the scenery always just over there, not here.
This is not the great barren wilderness of the interior, where bike packers lose and find themselves in days of solo isolation and self-sufficiency. There are roads here, and homes. Small white tin churches with red roofs. Sheep farms where sheep are kept indoors through the long winter. There’s no such luxury for the native Icelandic horses, who run alongside us through heavy fields of wet tussocks. Even the horses have an in-between state: an extra gear, if you will, that sits between the usual walk, trot, canter and gallop. It’s called ‘tölt’, and only Icelandic horses do it. It looks like they’re running over hot lava, picking their feet up high, while the rider on top stays smooth and even. The Danny Harts of the horse world, all action down below and smooth up top. There are even competitions where the aim is not to spill your drink as you’re riding as the horse with the smoothest ‘tölt’ wins. The fact that they can do this is down to a genetic difference from other horses, and to keep things that way – and prevent unfamiliar horse diseases wiping them out – there is no in-between for an Icelandic horse. Once it leaves, it can’t return. It’s stay, or go.
Teasing it out
In the capital Reykjavik, the in-betweens are all filled in. Older tin buildings from the 1920s breathe in to make room for more recent concrete creations, then yet more modern glass and colourful buildings where architects have gone to play. They fill in the gaps between the gaps, pushing buildings up against one another so that views out towards the mountains are invariably punctuated by a crane or exposed steelwork of construction in process. Ginnels and alleys lead between the buildings, giving the sense as you walk that you are exploring, not sightseeing. Many are decorated with graffiti or murals, inviting you into these narrow spaces, between the buildings, away from the main streets.
Back out on the gravel plains, there are no such diversions, just roads that extend ahead, onwards ever onwards. No inviting side shoots of trails to make you wonder what’s over there, or around the corner. No bushes or trees to pee behind either. As we stop at the bottom of the only significant incline, I pedal ahead, hopeful of finding a quiet spot over the brow of the hill to wee. As I crest the rise, I find a house, and more miles of flatness. I have simply ridden up to another plateau of gravel and endless vistas of nothing to distract from or hide my squatting behind. Desperately I hide behind a gatepost, get my gloved hands stuck in the sleeves of my jacket, remove gloves, remove jacket and jersey, wriggle out of my thermal onesie in a wetsuit-like wriggle, and am finally free to squat and pee. Despite the impracticality for wild wee-ing, I am relieved at least not to be cold and wet on this seemingly endless ride.
In the flatness and the endless pedalling, distant views of mountains and cliffs tease us, far enough away to never feel like they’re getting closer. Our Icelandic hosts tease us too. It is always ‘only 5km more’, or ‘we’re about halfway’. Unlike the roads, there are no straight answers, and I lose touch with where reality starts and fiction ends. The weather is ‘quite nice’, and I have no idea if this is a joke, or just relative to how bad it could be. Even signs on doors are turned into jests instead of instructions. The cheerfulness seems almost pathological – perhaps it’s a survival instinct essential in a country that seems determined to be as inhospitable as possible. ‘Constant free hot water’ seems less like a perk and more like an estate agent’s cover-up. ‘Small island, free running hot water, beautiful scenery occasionally available, prospective tenants may wish to purchase a second home in the Canaries.’ Indeed, many Icelanders do just that, escaping to the sunshine for the worst of the winter.
One of their jokes is that they are quick to forget the weather. The moment it stops raining, or the sky clears, the Icelanders have forgotten, or forgiven, their cold homeland and are back living in the now. Maybe that is why they are so good at pedalling across the endless gravel – they are in the now. They pedal, because that it what is happening now. They pedal without grumpy thoughts of what is over there, or what might have been, they just pedal, because that is the now that is in hand. They pedal, sheltering me from the wind, telling me there is only 5km left, that there is a forest ahead, that we are halfway into a 75km loop, that there is sag wagon following us if I’ve had enough.
I wish for something, anything, to punctuate the endless pedalling, and am briefly rewarded with a snow-filled track, into which I ride with such delight that I have switched on the wrong parts of my brain and promptly slide out, crashing to the ground. The brief excitement and the slight warmth of a bruised knee lift my mental state for a time, the novelty of the change of state from upright to lying down, of something different happening, keeps me going. Usually I ride to laugh. To see friends, to chat, to whoop down a descent or shriek at some mild peril. I ride gravel bikes to add spice to duller trails, to go further faster and see more scenery. Here, the landscape has stripped all of that away, leaving only my legs and my internal monologue.
Final turns
And yet I don’t quit. My legs still turn. I am not in pain, not cold, not hungry. While one half of my brain tells me this is terrible, and not fun, and wants it to end, the other half tells me that quitting would be a worse and different kind of mental game to the frustration, boredom and mental attrition of pedalling in the soft/hard/soft gravel, with the ever-shifting wind. Eventually, finally, we are done. A loop completed. We have cycled from A to A, with no B in between or at the end.
Perhaps something of the Icelandic forgetfulness – or is it forgiveness – has rubbed off on me. Scoured in by the wind, perhaps. But somewhere between there and here, between finishing the endless pedalling, and pedalling again back on home trails in the UK, I think that maybe I should go back. I want to go back and seek out those geological wonders of the interior, but I also want to see whether, better prepared for the in-between, I can enter it better equipped. As I readied myself for Iceland, I worked on my fitness and ensured I had clothing that would keep me warm and safe. I realise now that legs and clothes are all very well, but to survive – and enjoy – the in-between, it’s all in the mind. Tick off the miles on an odometer, follow your output on a power meter, sing songs, tell stories… divide the endless in-between into bite-size chunks, give it structure, trick your brain into believing that progress is being made. And if all else fails, believe the Icelandic truths: it’s only 5km more, and we’re about a third of the way into our 80km loop.
Disclosure: Hannah’s trip was paid for as part of the launch of the new Lauf Seigla.
See singletrackworld.com/gritcx/2022/04/11/lauf-seigla-reviewed-in-iceland-and-the-uk for details of the bike.
