MSN has retired its earlier pieces so this is the original copy Simon Busch Like all Icelanders, Gaddi had no surname. When he wanted to distinguish himself with absolute certainty from all the other Gaddis in this bleakly beautiful land, he just welded "son" on to his father's name. (With women it's "dottir", daughter; try it at home.) Garoar Hrafn Sigurjonsson: that was Gaddi's full handle. Say it by lowering your chin while growling a bit and vibrating your tongue, and you'll sound vaguely right. But you still won't sound like Icelanders do. They have been pronouncing such names the same way for a thousand years. Likewise they can read medieval sagas as if dipping into a daily newspaper. (Try the same with Chaucer, the old­English bard.) Icelandic society is that undiluted by outside influences. Partly that has been because Iceland was long so expensive. Six pounds for a beer, anyone? Twenty times that for a brown and mediocre hotel room? Haul tourists to such an isolated place as Iceland, the theory seemed to go, and they would be unable to escape being squeezed for their currency. No longer. It may be bad news for Icelanders themselves but the virtual bankrupting of their country has sent the krona down a metaphorical moulin (a nasty sort of glacial sinkhole, of which more later). Make that £3 for a beer now, thank you, and £11 (rather than £19) for a meal out. Iceland, once of the most expensive places in the world, has become so much cheaper it is like a new country. Well, in some ways. But the Icelanders still look like Vikings. Many of them, anyway. Their genes are so pure, so easily traceable to the renegade and just adventurous Danes who settled their country more than a millennium ago, that scientists use the Icelandic population to test genetic truths about the whole of humankind. Gaddi certainly looked like a Viking. So did all his fellow guides. They had the same straggly, shoulder­length hair, wild beards and a middle­distance gaze as if fixed upon a longboat fully loaded with supplies, bobbing at the quay. These Icelandic things we discussed, Gaddi and I, in utter darkness. And I mean deep­space dark ­ except that we were in a tunnel bored by lava beneath the Icelandic earth and ice. We had turned our headlamps off to get a taste of the quality of darkness there. "Close your eyes," Gaddi said. "See?" Or, rather, not. That was his point: it was as absolutely dark with your eyes open or not. "Put your hand up in front of your face," Gaddi said. Frightening: I might as well not have had one. "Your other senses get much sharper after a little while," Gaddi went on. It was true: I could almost smell the ice now ­ sharp, metallic, slightly stale ­ around us. Inevitably, I began to think, What if I am stuck down here with Gaddi forever? And soon afterwards, funnily enough, switching our lamps back on and crawling along the remaining half of the tunnel to the other end, we found the "other end" had become an impenetrable snow plug thanks to a recent blizzard. "Oh," said Gaddi, after scraping at the snow awhile with his helmet. "This has never happened before. We shall have to go back." (Icelanders' English is terribly proper.) And so we went back, slipping and stumbling along the rough, icy rock lining the 460m­deep tunnel that was like the oesophagus of some huge, long­asleep dragon. Just beyond the entrance we found the star­shaped tracks of a snow fox: creatures as white as you imagine them to be and with fur on the pads of their paws so they can hunt on ice. Horse­rustlers and smugglers used to hide out in the lava caves, Gaddi said. Understandably: it was until relatively recently legal in Iceland to murder an outlaw on sight. A young local girl had discovered our cave, vanishing into it for weeks only to reemerge in a town leagues hence with her mouth stuffed full of gold. Or so went the myth. Icelanders seem fond of myths. You can't quite tell whether they believe them or not, but they seem far less disenchanted than the British. Consider the hidden people, about which you hear a lot in Iceland: elven creatures but with none of the curly­shoed whimsy bestowed upon such beings by the Victorians. The hidden people were to be respected. They were particularly attached to the stones and boulders that litter the Icelandic landscape, and if one such stone of boulder were unthinkingly moved while building a road, say, all sorts of things could go wrong: machinery break down, costs go hideously awry. Better if the lead engineer on the project consult with a farmer or someone else who could communicate with the hidden people and arrange for the road to be rerouted or the stone moved somewhere dignified. Such things commonly still go on in Iceland. I had started my caving day at the Drowning Pool, nearby Parliament Rock, outside Reykjavik. Parliament Rock was admirable: the Icelanders claim to have invented parliamentary democracy, in the ninth century, and here is where the early settlers would gather from the four corners of Iceland to hear the lawman recite the law he had to learn by heart. The Drowning Pool, on the other hand, is where they did just that: tying all sorts of people, but with a bias against female "sorcerors", into sacks and prodding them into the icy middle of the pond to drown. Incest was a very common capital crime, which tells you something about those early days. I was about to experience what it was like ­ drowning, that is, only without all the heckling and with several layers of sophisticated modern insulation between me and the 2C water. My time in Iceland really was all about negotiating the ice after which the country is called. In the cave I had climbed under it; soon, on a glacier, I would clamber over it; now I was to dive into a water­filled crevice splitting the icey surface. This shivery fluid went 30m deep but, flowing off a glacier and filtered though laval rock, it was so clear ­ among the clearest diving water in the world ­ that it was like a breath, you could barely see it. Preparing to descend I felt like a seal must. Or, rather (how would I know how a seal feels?), perhaps how a seal would feel if it were suddenly human, which is to say, ungainly. Over my longjohns I put on a duvet­like body suit, then a dry­diving layer airsealed at ankle, wrist and neck. Next, the cold biting really nastily now at my fingers and toes, I hauled on gloves and booties, followed by flippers and goggles and trudged across the snow to dive into this famous crack. Is all beauty painful? That has certainly been my experience. I plunged into the gelid water and immediately reeled at the ethereal sight revealed beneath me: a jagged rockscape spattered with fragile layers of settled brown sludge and crawling with ultra­tenacious green­grey plants, the whole revealed with that eerily crystalline clarity. And, almost as soon, I began screaming, inside, at the cold. Flipper­wagging nonchalantly, I hoped, to take in more of the deathly beautiful aquatic view, my fingers began to feel genuinely endangered. "Oh, the gloves all have holes in them," Gaddi had said. "Just move your hands about." So I did, but my mental images of digital amputation still felt very real. Iceland is cold, you realise, stupidly: from very, very cold to bracing. It is never what you would call hot. Who knows how many more minutes would have passed before I began thrashing about, panicking, like a harpooned narwhal? But we had reached the end of the crevice and I was reprieved, just as the victims of the drowning pool were not. The weather had changed when we made for the glacier, as it can in Iceland six times in a day. Brooding dark clouds had chased away a faultless blue sky. We trudged across the endless barren wasteland of black gravel strewn with boulders that the retreating glacial tongue Solheimajokull had left in its wake, a landscape that leaves an impression on the soul like etching upon chilled glass. At the base of the glacier, as we strapped on our crampons, Raggi, a blond Viking guide, this time, explained about moulins. The melting water rushing down the glacier created these swirling sink­holes that reached, eventually, to a freezing pool at the bottom of the ice. People tended to fall into moulins headfirst, leaning over to take pictures, Raggi said, and soon afterwards I fell into one. What had looked like a dusting of snow was in fact the lightest encrustation over a moulin. Stepping on it, I vanished immediately up to my waist. Odd, half­disappearing into a glacier. Had I stepped perhaps a foot further forward, I could have plunged a hundred feet into the presumed pool at the bottom. It is that heat­sucking water, Raggi explained, that makes it so hard to extract people, by rope, in time. Iceland is not Majorca (thank God) but I defy anyone not to be moved by its icy, sometimes dangerous beauty. And now ­ quite cheaply ­ anyone can. GETTING THERE For more information on Iceland, go to VisitIceland.com ​
www.visiticeland.com Simon stayed in Reykjavik at the Fosshotel Baron​
​
www.fosshotel.is​
, which has standard double rooms​
from ISK12,600 (around £62) a night, including breakfast. Arctic Adventures' ​
www.adventures.is​
​
Black and Blue ​
http://www.adventures.is/Iceland/WinterDaytrips/BlackBlue/​
c​
aving & snorkelling expedition costs from ISK15,990 a person (around £80), including pick up from Reykjavik hotels and lunch. Glacier hiking h
​ttp://www.adventures.is/Iceland/WinterDaytrips/UDriveThor/​
, including a self­drive super­jeep tour, costs from ISK 30,990 ISK a person (around £152), including pick­up from Reykjavik hotels, packed lunch and a private guide in your jeep. Iceland Express w
​ww.icelandexpress.com​
(0870 240 5600) flies daily from London Stansted to Reykjavik, with prices start from £69.00 one way including taxes. The airline will begin flying five times a week between London Gatwick and Reykjavik from Spring 2009. DRAFT 2 Like all Icelanders, Gaddi had no surname. When he wanted to distinguish himself with absolute certainty from all the other Gaddis in this bleakly beautiful land, he just welded "son" on to his father's name. (With women it's "dottir", daughter; try it at home.) Garoar Hrafn Sigurjonsson: that was Gaddi's full handle. Say it by lowering your chin while growling a bit and vibrating your tongue, and you'll sound vaguely right. But you still won't sound like Icelanders do. They have been pronouncing such names the same way for a thousand years. Likewise they can read medieval sagas as if dipping into a daily newspaper. (Try the same with Chaucer, the old­English bard.) Icelandic society is that undiluted by outside influences. Partly that has been because Iceland was long so expensive. Six pounds for a beer, anyone? Twenty times that for a brown and mediocre hotel room? Haul tourists to such an isolated place as Iceland, the theory seemed to go, and they would be unable to escape being squeezed for their currency. No longer. It may be bad news for Icelanders themselves but the virtual bankrupting of their country has sent the krona down a metaphorical moulin (a nasty sort of glacial sinkhole, of which more later). Make that £3 for a beer now, thank you, and £11 (rather than £19) for a meal out. Iceland, once of the most expensive places in the world, has become so much cheaper it is like a new country. Well, in some ways. But the Icelanders still look like Vikings. Many of them, anyway. Their genes are so pure, so easily traceable to the renegade and just adventurous Danes who settled their country more than a millennium ago, that scientists use the Icelandic population to test genetic truths about the whole of humankind. Gaddi certainly looked like a Viking. So did all his fellow guides. They had the same straggly, shoulder­length hair, wild beards and a middle­distance gaze as if fixed upon a longboat fully loaded with supplies, bobbing at the quay. These Icelandic things we discussed, Gaddi and I, in utter darkness. And I mean deep­space dark ­ except that we were in a tunnel bored by lava beneath the Icelandic earth and ice. We had turned our headlamps off to get a taste of the quality of darkness there. "Close your eyes," Gaddi said. "See?" Or, rather, not. That was his point: it was as absolutely dark with your eyes open or not. "Put your hand up in front of your face," Gaddi said. Frightening: I might as well not have had one. "Your other senses get much sharper after a little while," Gaddi went on. It was true: I could almost smell the ice now ­ sharp, metallic, slightly stale ­ around us. Inevitably, I began to think, What if I am stuck down here with Gaddi forever? And soon afterwards, funnily enough, switching our lamps back on and crawling along the remaining half of the tunnel to the other end, we found the "other end" had become an impenetrable snow plug thanks to a recent blizzard. "Oh," said Gaddi, after scraping at the snow awhile with his helmet. "This has never happened before. We shall have to go back." (Icelanders' English is terribly proper.) And so we went back, slipping and stumbling along the rough, icy rock lining the 460m­deep tunnel that was like the oesophagus of some huge, long­asleep dragon. A young local girl had discovered the cave, vanishing into it for weeks only to reemerge in a town leagues hence with her mouth stuffed full of gold. Or so went the myth. Icelanders seem fond of myths. You can't quite tell whether they believe them or not, but they are far less disenchanted than the British. Consider the hidden people, about which you hear a lot in Iceland: elven creatures but with none of the curly­shoed whimsy bestowed upon such beings by the Victorians. The hidden people were to be respected. They were particularly attached to the stones and boulders that litter the Icelandic landscape, and if one such stone of boulder were unthinkingly moved while building a road, say, all sorts of things could go wrong: machinery break down, costs go hideously awry. Better if the lead engineer on the project consult with a farmer or someone else who could communicate with the hidden people and arrange for the road to be rerouted or the stone moved somewhere dignified. In Iceland such things commonly still go on. I had started my day at the Drowning Pool, near Parliament Rock, outside Reykjavik. Parliament Rock was admirable: the Icelanders claim to have invented parliamentary democracy, in the ninth century, and here is where the early settlers would gather from the four corners of Iceland to hear the lawman recite the law he had learned by heart. The Drowning Pool, on the other hand, is where they did just that: tying all sorts of people, but with a bias against female "sorcerors", into sacks and prodding them into the icy middle of the pond to drown. Incest was a very common capital crime, which tells you something about those early days. I was about to experience what it was like ­ drowning, that is, only without all the heckling and with several layers of sophisticated modern insulation between me and the 2C water. My time in Iceland really was all about negotiating the ice after which the country is called. In the cave I had climbed under it; soon, on a glacier, I would clamber over it; now I was to dive into a water­filled crevice splitting the icy surface. This shivery fluid went 30m deep but, flowing off a glacier and filtered though laval rock, it was so clear ­ among the clearest diving water in the world ­ that it was like a breath, you could barely see it. Preparing to descend I felt like a seal must. Or, rather (how would I know how a seal feels?), perhaps how a seal would feel if it were suddenly human, which is to say, ungainly. Over my longjohns I put on a duvet­like body suit, then a dry­diving layer airsealed at ankle, wrist and neck. Next, the cold biting nastily now at my fingers and toes, I hauled on gloves and booties, followed by flippers and goggles and trudged across the snow to dive into this famous crack. Is all beauty painful? That has certainly been my experience. I plunged into the gelid water and immediately reeled at the ethereal sight revealed beneath me: a jagged rockscape spattered with fragile layers of settled brown sludge and crawling with ultra­tenacious green­grey plants ­ the whole revealed with that eerily crystalline clarity. Almost as soon, I began screaming, inside, at the cold. I wagged my flippers, nonchalantly, I hoped, to take in more of the beautiful alien scene, while my fingers began to feel seriously endangered. I wanted to cry; I imagined digital amputation. Who knows how many more minutes would have passed before I began thrashing about, panicking, like a harpooned narwhal? But we had reached the end of the crevice and I was reprieved, just as the victims of the drowning pool were not. W​
hen we made for the glacier brooding dark clouds had chased away a faultless blue sky. The weather can change like that in Iceland six times a day. We trudged across the wasteland of black gravel strewn with boulders that the retreating glacial tongue Solheimajokull had left in its wake, the landscape leaving an impression on the soul like etching upon chilled glass. As we strapped on our crampons at the base of the glacier, Raggi, our latest Viking guide (blond, this time), explained about moulins. Melting water rushing down the glacier created these swirling sink­holes that reached, eventually, to a freezing pool at the bottom of the ancient ice. People tended to fall into moulins headfirst, leaning over to take pictures, Raggi said, and soon afterwards I fell into one. What had looked like a dusting of snow on the hard ice was in fact the lightest crust over a moulin. Stepping on it, I vanished immediately up to my waist. Odd, half­disappearing into a glacier. Had I stepped perhaps a foot further forward, I could have plunged a hundred feet into the presumed pool at the bottom. That heat­sucking water, Raggi explained, is what makes it so hard to extract people, by rope, in time. Iceland is not Majorca (thank God) but I defy anyone not to be moved by its icy, sometimes dangerous beauty. And now ­ quite cheaply ­ anyone can. GETTING THERE For more information on Iceland, go to VisitIceland.com ​
www.visiticeland.com Simon stayed in Reykjavik at the Fosshotel Baron​
​
www.fosshotel.is​
, which has standard double rooms​
from ISK12,600 (around £62) a night, including breakfast. Arctic Adventures' ​
www.adventures.is​
​
Black and Blue ​
http://www.adventures.is/Iceland/WinterDaytrips/BlackBlue/​
c​
aving & snorkelling expedition costs from ISK15,990 a person (around £80), including pick up from Reykjavik hotels and lunch. Glacier hiking h
​ttp://www.adventures.is/Iceland/WinterDaytrips/UDriveThor/​
, including a self­drive super­jeep tour, costs from ISK 30,990 ISK a person (around £152), including pick­up from Reykjavik hotels, packed lunch and a private guide in your jeep. Iceland Express w
​ww.icelandexpress.com​
(0870 240 5600) flies daily from London Stansted to Reykjavik, with prices start from £69.00 one way including taxes. The airline will begin flying five times a week between London Gatwick and Reykjavik from Spring 2009.