Atlantica - 01.06.2006, Qupperneq 79

ICELANDa
78 AT L A N T I CA
mountain biking club has assembled a small
group of elite riders. The sky is gray and it’s cold
as we approach Freyr Franksson’s 1957 Mercedes
troop carrier.
His vehicle is a simple army-green box, stacked
with bikes, not weapons, but nonetheless it feels
like we are going on a military operation.
Freyr assumes his position in the driver’s seat.
Nobody sits in the empty space next to him. His
face is weathered and it is clear that he has seen
some bad paths in his day. He doesn’t say much,
just watches the gray sky and road ahead.
As we lumber up the road out of Reykjavík
towards Hveragerdi it starts to drizzle. “First
rule is never to trust the weather,” says Fjölnir
Björgvinsson, a newer member of the club. “Only
believe it when it says that the weather is going
to be bad, because then you know that it will be
either bad weather, or terribly bad weather.”
Later, an hour into the ride that started by
cutting through a lava field, Fjölnir and I escape
the cold. We are standing near a geothermal vent,
a fat twenty-foot high pipe that is issuing heavy,
sulfuric steam that blows over us. All I can see is
Fjölnir’s thin face. “It’s the tropics,” he says. The
sound of the steam rocketing out of the one-
kilometer deep shaft is like thunder. “You feel the
sound in your stomach,” Fjölnir says.
After passing the hill where I fell, I’m feeling
good about being ahead in our group of seven,
riding with Freyr and Darren Mikaelsson, an
English transplant living in Iceland. The two
of them rode Tibet and Nepal together. “We
dropped 3,600 meters in one day,” Freyr says of
the descent after having reached Mt. Everest’s
base camp. “When we started it was winter, and
then when we dropped it became summer,” he
says from under his helmet and his red beard.
“Jæja!” Darren yells in Icelandic, and we drop
further down the steaming river valley. The trail
is narrow and rocky. White Súla birds warble
in their redoubts among the black rocks on the
opposite ridge, and large swathes of yellow green
moss bring some color under an ominous shield
of clouds.
We come to a dirt road, where I can see a
Range Rover fording the river we’re due to cross.
“If you ride fast enough you’ll float right over
the water,” Darren jokes. Gudbjörn, in his bright
yellow windbreaker, whizzes past, straight for the
river. In an explosion of water and grunts he’s
across. Then he turns and crosses back in a grin-
filled exhibition of bravado.
Darren looks at me. ‘Aw, this is stupid,’ I think,
‘Now I’ve gotta cross this river just so these guys
give me some respect.’ Earlier one of the mem-
bers had been slow to come down a steep section
of the trail. “Oh, don’t be such a big girl’s blouse,”
Darren had muttered.
“How do you spell that?” I asked.
Darren told me it was English and that it
meant wimp.
Darren forges the water. Intent on not being
a big girl’s blouse myself, I bike forward. I hit the
water fast, my tires grab at the slippery stones
underneath. The water is so high that my feet are
submerged when they come into the lower semi-
circle of my rotations. I grunt. The mountain bik-
ing boys yell, and my front wheel makes it to dry
land on the other side.
Freyr says nothing, and rides right through.
Two days later, Gudbjörn leads a group of eight on
the mountain biking club’s weekly Tuesday night
ride on Reykjavík’s well-manicured bike paths.
I’m confident; out of the eight, only Gudbjörn,
Fjölnir and I have crossed the lava and the river.
I’m almost a veteran.
We leave from the bus station in the suburb
Breidholt. I stick with Gudbjörn in front as we
climb the thin asphalt path that is such a hot topic
in Reykjavík.
“The city is planning to continue expanding
the system,” says Pálmi Freyr Randversson, a
transportation engineer in the city’s environmen-
tal division. “The hope is to get up to six percent
of people using bikes to go to work.” Right now
that number stands at 2-3 percent, according to
Morten Lange, President of the Icelandic Cyclist’s
Federation and one of the riders on this gray
evening.
060-94ICELANDAtl406.indd 78 23.6.2006 12:42:11