Reykjavík Grapevine - 06.12.2013, Qupperneq 27

“In what amounts to a continu-
ation of the magical trip, images
of flying reindeer are central to
Christmas tales in North and
South America, Oceania and
parts of Europe even today.”
I took a late afternoon flight from Reykjavík to
Hornafjörður in East Iceland and was picked up
by Magnús Guðjónsson (Maggi), who runs a farm
and guesthouse in nearby Hólmur with his wife
Guðrún Guðmundsdóttir (Gunna). Like much of
Iceland’s expanding tourist economy, they’ve cho-
sen to run a guesthouse and tour service along-
side their sheep farm. In the wintertime, this in-
cludes a tour of Iceland’s wild reindeer, which are
unique to the east of the country and leave their
summer homes in the mountains to the grasslands
and tundra of Hólmur.
Reindeer in Iceland are also a novelty in
and of themselves. They didn’t get here until the
18th century, when the king of Norway brought
them over from Norway’s Hardangervidda Moun-
tains. He thought the Icelanders could raise them
for food, but instead, they let them run free. Today,
nearly all of the estimated 6,000 reindeer in Ice-
land are wild.
Get up and slow down
Before we hopped into a Range Rover to tear up
land chasing down reindeer herds, Maggi and
Gunna welcomed me into their guesthouse with
cookies and tea. Their farm and the others around
them abut glaciers that are tongues of the massive
Vatnajökull glacier and are wrapped in mountains
along the sides. The entrance to the farm faces
the sea and the silence is only ever interrupted by
gusts of wind blowing off the coast or a rare pass-
ing car.
After walking around the place, I was
invited to a dinner replete with trout from a nearby
stream, skyr with mountain blueberries and po-
tatoes covered in fjallagras, a wild moss that the
reindeer and some Icelanders collect and eat in
the late summer. It is rich in calcium and helps the
reindeer grow big, sturdy antlers.
I fell asleep in a food-filled coma and
awoke to a searing red sunrise. The earth out there
is covered in a delicate sheet of ice and the moun-
tains are dusted in snow. If you came to Iceland for
peace of mind, Hólmur is that sweet spot where
you rediscover time moving slowly and space vast
enough to hear yourself think. Around 9:00, Maggi
sauntered out of the house with sleepy eyes and
a soft smile, telling me that he and Gunna take it
very easy in the wintertime and there is no guilt in
sleeping in.
After a breakfast that included Gunna’s
homemade bread and smoked trout, Maggi and
I went through the livestock barn that they’ve
branded as a petting zoo for tourists. They have
several types of rabbits, loads of sheep and goats,
chickens from China, and even two hens and a
goat that will make cameos in the soon-to-be-re-
leased film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” star-
ring Ben Stiller. Various scenes meant to appear as
Nepal were shot around Hornafjörður.
The last stop on the tour of the petting
zoo was the little wooden cabana of Álfur (Elf) the
reindeer, who scrambled up onto his knobby legs
when he saw Maggi. Maggi is, by all of the little
reindeer’s knowledge and experience, his father.
Flying Reindeer
Álfur was a calf (a baby reindeer) when he was
discovered by a reindeer inspector in the moun-
tains east of Hólmur this past June. He was hun-
gry, his mother was nowhere near and the man
brought him to Maggi and Gunna where he was
taken in and nourished with a mixture of milk,
eggs and fish oil.
Prior to Álfur’s arrival, Maggi and Gun-
na had petitioned the Environment Agency of Ice-
land (UST) for a permit to have a domesticated
reindeer. Typically the permits are only given out
to zoos, but Maggi and Gunna had wanted a rein-
deer of their own for foreign tourists to visit, snap
Christmas photos with and get close to. Having
a domesticated reindeer like Álfur is particularly
advantageous to Maggi and Gunna’s tourism busi-
ness given holiday traditions in many parts of the
world that actually developed out of the Arctic.
Historically, in the reindeer-filled re-
gions of Norway, Siberia and Mongolia, people
and reindeer shared a love of the Amanita Mus-
caria ‘berserker’ mushroom. Nordic shamans and
Laplanders often claimed to have seen reindeer
flying across the sky after consuming the fungi.
On the 3,000-year-old mummified limbs of the no-
madic Pazyryk people of Mongolia’s Altai moun-
tains, archaeologists have even identified tattoos
of flying reindeer. In what amounts to a continua-
tion of the magical trip, images of flying reindeer
are central to Christmas tales in North and South
America, Oceania and parts of Europe even today.
In Iceland, there are only three spots
where you can see domesticated reindeer, one of
which is the Reykjavík Zoo, the other is in Jökul-
dalur and the third is at Maggi and Gunna’s place.
In all there are an estimated six to eight domesti-
cated reindeer in Iceland.
Herding reindeer with a Range
Rover
We took Álfur outside to play and then Maggi,
Gunna and I hopped into the SUV to get up close
to a few herds Maggi had spotted on the horizon.
The car rattled most of the encompassing peace
while it dashed across their land, but the reindeer
seemed unthreatened by it. It wasn’t until I qui-
etly crept up to them by foot that they took a keen
awareness of another presence and, when I got
within 100 meters, they all bolted.
We followed them with the car and
snapped some pictures, tried more creeping up
by foot and got closer each time. In all we spent
about an hour going after two different herds
while Maggi and Gunna filled me up with reindeer
knowledge.
In the wintertime, Maggi wears a leath-
er coat made of reindeer hide, which makes sense
given the extreme warmth of the animals' pelt.
Reindeer can handle temperatures of up to -70
C because they’re covered in two layers: a thick,
woolly skin topped with hairs that are hollow and
can trap and heat air. Reindeer are fast, and can
run between 40-60 kilometres per hour and they
are fuelled by mosses and tiny white sprouts called
reindeer grass. They have such a strong sense of
smell that they can sniff out the white grass even
when it’s covered by white snow. In North Ameri-
ca, a wild reindeer is called a caribou. They aren’t
called reindeer until they’ve been taken captive,
so the term ‘reindeer’ in North America actually
refers to a domesticated caribou.
Maggi pulled out his telescope so we
could see the details of the reindeer from afar. One
herd of about 14 had the faces of arctic cows, with
long beards and terrifyingly heavy looking racks of
bone atop their heads. In December, the males will
lose their antlers and Maggi will go look for them
to add to his collection.
We spent another hour or so visiting the
Hólmsá River, getting up close to the glacier and
learning about the history of the land. We heard
ravens and tried to spot foxes that sometimes lay
in front of rocks by the glacier, taking in the sun.
Perhaps it was looking for napping fox-
es that made our eyes heavier and we returned to
the farm to relax, feast more and visit with Álfur
who has the demeanour of a five-year-old and
lives to play and love. The sun was beginning to
set on the drive to the airport and by the time the
plane landed, the streetlights of Reykjavík illumi-
nated the walk home, a reminder that time was
picking up again and moving on.
The novelty of a reindeer tour in the Icelandic countryside is the novelty of
almost all ‘tours’ that take place in the Icelandic countryside: being in those
pockets of remote beauty and getting the fuck out of Reykjavík for awhile.
Words
Alex Baumhardt
Alex Baumhardt
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liters of Christmas beer were sold. In 2012, almost 600,000 liters were sold, almost half of which was sold in the first two weeks of November.
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27 Travel The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 18 — 2013