The Westman Islands

It is months now since we were in Iceland and for some reason I have found it impossible to get down to writing my last Iceland blog.  There is a sadness about coming home after a long absence.  The lively fire that was my life before we left seemed cold and ashy when we returned.  It took a while to get going again.  Just now, though, I reread my Iceland blogs and realise I must rectify matters and write about perhaps the most beautiful and strange place we visited – the Westman Islands which are raw and volcanic in origin and from time to time host devastating eruptions still.

   To get to the islands you need to go to a ferry terminal close to Rekjavik.  Like all ferries this one is lovely and even has a little cinema. You disembark after about an hour and a half  into the little town of Heimaey which seems to huddle in the middle of group of fierce volcanic peaks. The one and a half hour ferry is relatively new.  In the past it took several hours to cross the often stormy water.

The weather was bleak and windy when we drove our van off the ferry and made

 our way to our campsite just before midnight. In fact it turned out to be situated in the crater of an extinct volcano whose sides stretched up around us and had seabirds nesting high up and soaring back and forth in the everlasting daylight.  There were buttercuplike flowers in the crusty volcanic grass. It amazed me.

To our delight we found there was a proper camp kitchen out of the weather so we fried up our Icelandic lamb chops  and quaffed one of our precious bottles of red before creaking into our sleeping bags in the back of the van.  Despite the huge influx of tourists who hire campervans every year, Icelandic camp sites are usually pretty basic so this one was special not only for its beauty but its hospitable amenities.

When I woke to go to the loo at about five am there were two puffins nearby who took to the sky,flapping clumsily. It was cold and rainy but yet again the toilet had a no nonsense heater. On thinking back now, heat and cold were so much part of the rhythm of life in Iceland. Horrid rainy winds but thermal springs, puffing geysers but snow capped mountains.  All a far cry from the balmy English summer we had left behind. 

There were fascinating things to see on the island. A volcano museum and a cultural museum as well as an aquarium that has provided a home for an unfortunate puffin that has never learnt to swim The Westman Islanders have suffered at the hands of both man and nature over the years.

In 1627 Algerian pirates led a series of raids on Iceland and came to the island.  They took over 200 people as slaves and murdered thirty four in gruesome piratical ways, cackling with laughter as they did so, according to a blog on the subject (that can be found by googling Algerian pirates in Iceland)..  There is a very good simple illustration of these events in the cultural museum.  Rather surprisingly, close to this heartbreaking account there is a roomful of pirate costumes for children to put on. I suppose it was a long time ago and children play cowboys and Indians after all, but at the time I was a bit shocked by the museum’s response to such a terrible event.

The cultural museum also had lots of accounts of the fearsome job of being a fisherman in Iceland’s stormy waters and the vicissitudes of being a fisherman’s wife.  Most of them were apparently bad tempered and impatient of their spouses when they got home and interrupted the calm business of child raising and housekeeping.

I was cold and wet when we arrived at the aquarium and was given a cup of coffee by the very hospitable curator for which I was very grateful.  It’s a small museum but gives a chance to get up close and personal with a puffin that stands bemused on a table.”Every so often we try to get him to swim but so far he won’t” said the curator.  On the wall beside the stairs are pictures of children cuddling pufflings (baby puffins) that they rescue each year when, instead of heading out to sea to start their adult bird lives, they get confused by the town lights and land up in the streets.

“Aren’t you sorry you are not a little Iceland boy with a puffling to cuddle? “ we text to grandson Jacob with a photo. Daughter in law Fredi replies “I too would like to cuddle a puffling.”,  and indeed they look very bewitching and fluffy.

But of the three museums the one that sticks in my memory and comes back in dreams is the Volcano Museum.

 In 1973 the Eldfell volcano erupted, sending up vivid flames from a chain of fissures and eventually engulfing a portion of the town and forcing the evacuation of all but a few residents who stayed to try and salvage what they could.  By, what islanders still talk of as a miracle, the weather had been so bad the day before that the whole fishing fleet had stayed in port and been there to evacuate the islanders to the mainland, where they stayed for months with many never returning.  Apparently only one person died from the poisonous fumes and that was because he was robbing the pharmacy for drugs.

After we returned to Australia we had dinner with our Icelandic friends Villi and Aldiss.  Now Aldiss was from the Westman Islands  and that night I asked her about the eruption and what effect it had had on her.  She wasn’t on the island during the initial eruption but she spent a lot of time in the deserted town afterwards while the lava was still flowing and the salvaging was going on. She told me interesting things – how slowly the lava moved – you could be swimming in a pool and have reluctantly to get out as the lava crept towards the other end. She told me how prosperous the island had been because of fishing and how the houses were very good solid buildings and the enormous loss their slow interment represented. She told me how the American soldiers took part in emptying houses  before they were buried and how you could pick up your goods on the mainland by finding the address on the bundles.  When asked if the experience had changed her Aldiss  said “Yes, I am not at all materialistic now. I know that all you own can go, just like that”

In the early two thousands an enterprising islander had the idea  of creating a “Pompeii of the North” by excavating some of the houses that had been buried in ash.  Those under the lava were beyond recovery but the ash, like that at Pompeii proper would have had a preservative effect.  The museum is both a memorial to the lost part of the town and a record of what happened.  It is built over the first of the houses to be unearthed which stands damaged and shabby and naked in the smart main hall of the modern building  It reminds me of my childhood in post war London when bombsites were such fascinating places to play with random abandoned household items to be found amongst the rubble. A mirror, a baby bottle maybe and grimy bits of cloth.  There was a film showing where people talked about the night of the eruption and the silly choices they made about what to take with them when they fled.  “We took the cake but not the plate” laughed one man.  Valued new kitchen appliances were rescued instead of irreplaceable family photos..  A photo shows a young girl with a cat inside her coat arguing on the quayside.  Apparently  a lot of animals had to be put down when the population was evacuated.  The shock and heartbreak are palpable as you watch footage of rocking boats with lines of faces leaving their homes behind. 

After seeing the museum the little town seemed very vulnerable to me. I wondered how people living there were able to sleep easy but apparently warning systems are better now.

I was sorry to board the ferry again after a couple of days.  The beauty and sadness had got under my skin somehow, but the promise of the fleshpots of Rejkavik and the comfort of a bed in the Peace Centre were a consolation.  However I will never forget our time in that strange place.