Iceland review - 2002, Qupperneq 21

ICELAND REVIEW 19
sun (the likes of which comes along “three times in ten years”, we’re told), and I find
my priority has shifted from seeking human contact to pilfering a cup of coffee from a
French bus tour. “Tous finis,” I am assured. I watch cagily as the group of 27 loads their
tour bus with aluminium thermoses. A coifed woman in shorts and a T-shirt lounges in
the grass, spinning a flower between her manicured thumb and forefinger. She waves
across the parking lot to a bus mate. “C’est jolie!”
Broddi emerges sleepily from his cabin at 10 AM. He and his fiancee, Berglind, have
run this hut for six summers. As it turns out, Smári and Nína of Landmannalaugar were
the visitors in their cabin last night. Broddi and Berglind run the facility for 90 days each
summer, doing “everything the tourists expect us to do”. Today, they will haul back-
packs for a hiking tour to their next campsite, install a solar panel system on the roof
of their cabin, fix the showers, and put a table, stove and sink into a new cabin before
the next group arrives.
“This autumn we have to decide whether we’ll continue to do this for another five,
ten, or 15 years,” Broddi speculates. They rent the land from the county. He’s wearing
a blue T-shirt that reads ‘Íslenskur Landsbunadur’ and shiny blue warm-up trousers.
“What are you going to do?” I ask. He shakes his head, watching a German hiking
group pack up their jeeps. “I don’t know.” He’s 29, and comments that he’s 20 years too
old. He’d rather be nine? “It would be nice,” he agrees.
Out from behind the mountain
F208 leaves Broddi, Berglind, and their nameless waterfall to cross an easy hour of high
meadows. Only green grass flanks the road now, and if you were to run out of petrol,
you could just hire a happy cyclist to peddle off and find you some. Or so it feels. F208
descends from the Highlands into a rolling, verdant farm named Búland, complete with
cows, horses, and curtains in its windows. The road 208 picks up here – losing its ‘F’
because there is no more fjall, and the route stays open year-round to deliver supplies
to its residents. The mountain road is over.
The end of Fjallabaksleid is unceremonious. It is not an official stop; no exit sign or
plastic-encased, wood-framed tourist map heralds the end of your journey. There is no
Roberto looking nervous at the prospect of this road, because from this end, Roberto
probably would have gone the distance. This landscape is palatable. Slow tour buses
and a silver Volkswagen pass in a steady flow of traffic, and in the manicured hay fields
of Hvammur, the first farm on 208, Icelandic horses graze in the sun. This is the post-
card you send home to the people who worry.
Iceland’s road behind the mountain evolves from black to green, from stark to pas-
toral, and lifeless to fertile over a short 110 kilometres. The west-south route eases from
unmitigated solitude into farmlands until its traveller will barely notice being swept on
to the pavement of the Ring Road, heading in a line of cars toward the coastline, where
the conveniences of the city quickly advance, and everybody’s figuring out the next
weekend they’ll be able to get back to that first sense of solitude.
Krista Mahr is a freelance writer from Los Angeles.
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