Reykjavík Grapevine - 11.09.2015, Page 24

While gargantuan and clunky buses
hogged the headlines, a smaller and
leaner brand of vehicles, hitherto unseen
on the streets of Reykjavík, has been
slowly attracting positive interest down-
town. Like a wasp, yellow and black, the
three-wheeled auto rickshaws known as
Tuk Tuks have been zooming elegantly
through those same cramped streets,
emitting but a soft buzzing sound from
their electric motors.
Having just come back from a six-
week holiday in India, where auto rick-
shaws play an important part in public
transport, I was intrigued. I had grown
used to their loud engines (from whence
their nickname “Tuk Tuks” comes), tiny
cabins and terrible suspension, which
coupled with reckless driving frequently
leads to bumpy rides. My experience in
Iceland, on the other hand, would prove to
be quite the opposite, with smooth driv-
ing, six comfortable seats, and plenty of
legroom.
Small operation, big dreams
The General Manager of the new com-
pany behind these novelty rides, Tuk Tuk
Tours, is Ólafur Björn Guðmundsson, who
got the idea on his own trip to India. The
rickshaws he brought to Reykjavík were
heavily modified along the way, most no-
tably through the installation of electric
engines in the Netherlands. This makes
them an environmentally friendly mode of
public transport—a fact that Ólafur and his
staff take every opportunity to bring up,
one of their main selling points.
Ólafur started the company with his
friend, historian and journalist Kolbeinn
Óttarsson Proppé, with the intention of
offering tourists an alternative method to
get around town. Kolbeinn, who is respon-
sible for writing the script that the guides
recite throughout the tours, adds that the
smaller, more manoeuvrable vehicles can
go to different locations, and offer a dif-
ferent view of the city. After the yearlong
legal tangle of registering the vehicles,
both are happy that Tuk Tuk Tours is finally
open for business.
At present they’re running six vehicles
with eleven drivers, offering a choice of ei-
ther 30- or 75-minute tours. The two busi-
nessmen already have different trips in the
pipeline, however, such as a pub crawl
where visitors are ferried from one bar to
the next, and an “Icelander for a day” tour,
where foreigners are taken to local pools
and get to experience other staples of Ice-
landic life.
Hopping on
Photographer Art Bicnick and I meet
at Harpa for our tour, and after a short
chat with the organisers, off we go. Our
41-year-old driver is Gugga Emilsdóttir,
who tells us proudly that she’s just moved
back to Iceland, and is “a 24-hour mom
and multitask queen.” She had worked at
a hair salon, but after an accident where
she cut her finger badly, she had to look
elsewhere for employment while her hand
healed. She applied to Tuk Tuk Tours
through an ad in the newspaper, and got a
phone call the following day asking when
she could start.
Gugga relays numerous stories and
tidbits about the locations we visit (in-
cluding revealing where Jónsi of Sigur
Rós lives), as well as her own meander-
ing thoughts on Icelandic drivers who “are
always impatient, hurrying from place to
place.” She says drivers had at first been
happy to see the colourful auto rickshaws,
but have now learned to try to get ahead
of the slow-moving vehicles, which have a
top speed of 45 kilometres per hour.
Our 75-minute tour includes a trip
through the harbour, the old Grjótaþorpið
neighbourhood, the west end, around the
pond, through the Þingholt area, and up to
Hallgrímskirkja church. These are all sites
that are accessible on foot, but even a
jaded city rat like myself can see the ben-
efits of seeing it all in one go, particularly
for groups or people with mobility issues.
It wasn’t a groundbreaking adventure, but
it was nice regardless, even with the fre-
quent stops when interested passing tour-
ists asked our driver for brochures.
It’s nice to see new and innovative
tour operators shake up what might be
becoming a stale sector. I can’t wait to
see the pub crawl iteration in action, with
drunken locals and foreigners stumbling
in and out of tuk tuks at bars, adding a
shade of green to their yellow and black
colour scheme.
Earlier this summer, during an otherwise ordinary Sunday evening, blues musician Halldór
Bragason was surprised to find a tour bus poised to drive through his living room. Springing
to action, he grabbed his phone and recorded how it narrowly missed his windows, later
sharing the footage on Facebook. A minor media frenzy followed, inciting a maelstrom of ar-
ticles and opinion pieces. Meanwhile, concerned locals raised their concerns on social me-
dia, voicing fears that their precious 101 streets were turning into a giant hotel thoroughfare.
Photos
Art Bicnick
Words
Gabríel Benjamin
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24 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 14 — 2015TRAVEL
Humming
Like
A Wasp
We Tuk Tuk
off in 101 Reykjavík!