Beauty and Punk in Reykjavik and camping in endless daylight

I promised a beautiful and an ugly thing in Reykjavik and I will deliver though a lot has happened since.

The beautiful thing is a marvelous modern church that rises like a delicately pointed  iceberg over the city.  It is huge and white and almost floats like a diaphanous sheet that has been picked up in the middle by a giant. It is called Hallgrimskirkja and has a very big organ at one end,which is being played twice a week for concerts over the summer.  While we were there amongst the tourists, a timid young Icelandic woman who was wearing a red tutu over her clothes went up towards the altar and began to sing slowly and respectfully “Silent Night” in Icelandic.  Others gently joined in and everyone gave her a round of applause at the end and she scurried back to her friends, delighted.  Was it a dare or a dream she had to sing there? Who knows.

The purposely ugly and funny thing we stumbled across was an old public toilet that had been energetically repurposed as a Punk Rock museum.  Down some steps from the street, it was smothered in gross graffiti. Inside were smashed toilets and simulated torn posters providing  the patchy history of punk in Iceland – its failures and successes including an occasion when the police were called because a band member was waving a chainsaw on stage.  It turned out to have no chain but made a point I guess. The place is cared for by a wild looking fifty something year old called Thor.  I first saw the spiral of his cigarette smoke as I looked down into the slightly hellish   entrance beside a sign that said THIS IS NOT A TOILET. IT IS A MUSEUM 1000 ENTRANCE.  I talked to him about living in Iceland and he told me that it wasn’t so easy.  “You see the cranes around,” he said “It was like that before the financial crisis and people fear it will happen again”  He told me that there had had to be soup kitchens because people had lost everything and when compensation was made in the end it was worth very little.  He took our photo for his website even though we protested that we were not quintessential Australians.  I hope he doesn't make too much fun of us silver haired punk aficionados

Certainly the tourist boom that we were warned to expect is not here, perhaps because everything is very expensive now.  Could it be that the boom created by the cheapness following the 2008 financial crisis led to a scarcity of resources which pushed the prices up, and now they haven’t returned to rational levels and so tourists are staying away?  Maybe the current state of affairs here is yet another ripple caused by the corruption of the banks in 2008.

One trace of the tourist boom was the state of the camper vans in the yard where we went to rent ours.  The first two offered us were pretty beat up despite chirpy messages on the side about the benefits of travel and turned out to be non functional.  We were offered a third which had also seen life but sufficed and we set off .  It was lovely to be free and out and about on the good roads in the amazing scenic world that is west Iceland.

 I’d decided to do a tour which offered a trip into the magma chamber of a volcano.  It was hugely expensive but I love volcanoes, and it was just me because G thought it was an appalling idea and was happy to read a book.  I was a bit nervous as the trip involved a mile of trekking across a lava field and decent hiking gear was recommended.  Apart from the fact that I haven’t hiked for years, all I had was my little nursing shoes, but the young woman on the phone reassured me.  Other 70 somethings had done it.

The first night of camping is always gruesome and G and I both thought we had been crazy to think we could clamber in and out of our van in the wind but eventually snuggled up and finished the last of the gin.  We’d fetched up in a little fishing town called Porlakshofn to be near my take off point in the morning.  It had a lot of fish factory buildings and a petrol station café where we had fish and chips.  Restless little boys came in and out looking for something to do and sometimes bought small quantities of sweets before truculently heading off.

The campsite was simple with man-made elongated hills on two of its boundaries, presumably to protect us from the wind, and a big sports hangar next door.  A detail I will always remember with gratitude is that day and night, a lovely radiator heated the single ladies toilet, such a comfort at 5am when I tumbled out of the van to take advantage of it.

Mention must be made of the endless light which is so strange to people from most parts of the world.  Thoughts like “We’d better get there before nightfall” and all the associated cautions to do with darkness just fall away.  It is always day, though the mood of the sky changes towards the late evening with tinges of colour in the clouds.  The temptation to put off sleep is strong because it never seems as late as it is.

Perhaps I’ll save the adventure of the magma chamber till tomorrow as it’s time to move on.