Day 27 – Middle of nowhere to Þórshöfn

My tent has been my best friend for the trip. It is light, incredibly easy to assemble, completely waterproof and most importantly very toasty inside when it is cold. But all relationships have rough patches, and occasionally my tent will conspire with the sun to cook and eat me while I sleep. This morning was one of those days. I awoke covered in sweat and suffocating. I slithered out of my sleeping bag, but the very tent itself was an oven. I opened both entrances and let the cool air in. It helped, but only when the occasional gust hit the tent side on. I sighed, put on my shoes and escaped the confines of the tent and into the scorching 10 degrees Celsius sun.

The plan for today was to check out Kópasker, a tiny town a few kilometres north, and then head across the cape coming very close to the Arctic Circle, an imaginary line that means almost nothing but certain people seem to get very excited over.

The ride to Kópasker was uneventful save for a near constant rain of Artic Tern trying to murder me. Like Magpies, these coastal birds are very protective of their nesting area and will not hesitate to swoop any intruders. Unlike Magpies, they tend to hang around in large groups so you will sometimes have a number of birds all swirling around in the air above you trying to line up a good strafing run. Fortunately between the wind and my bike moving at a pretty good pace the birds struggled to really get close, but I could hear their angry squawks above me for a good while.

I stopped by the campsite in Kópasker to make lunch, and ran into the most Germanest German cyclist I had met so far. Tiny round glasses, thick wool socks worn with sandals, and an Ortlieb map bag strapped to his chest. His name was Martin, and I had actually spotted him previously in Asbyrgi. He offered to chat over a coffee and disappeared into the town to buy supplies. He was gone a long time. I made my lunch and wrote several blog entries by the time he finally returned, exclaiming that he was not used to towns with no town centre. Which is true, Icelandic towns tend to be a very loose collection of homes with the odd school or shop mixed in with no real organisation. That said, we are talking about a town with maybe 15 buildings stretching across 500 metres of coastline so how he got so completely lost will remain an unexplained mystery for the ages.

Having finished my lunch I was impatient to get going, so I said my goodbyes and set off. While Martin was on his epic quest to get coffee from around the block, I had been studying the wind direction and had come to the conclusion that the North was not the place to be. Instead, I would cut across to the east where the wind was much calmer. The scenery was nothing to write home about, but I could see that the northern cape I was initially going to traverse was not much better; mostly flat swampy farmland. In the distance I could see a mountain range looming ever closer, and as “night” fell I arrived at the base of a pretty big climb. Rather than being a series of switchbacks (the classic back and forth zig zag), it was just a straight steep road so I made my own switchbacks and slowly zig-zagged up to the top. It wasn’t a particularly pretty mountain, but from the peak I could see the start of the snow capped fjords I would be visiting in the coming days and my attitude changed for the better. The sunset was streaking out through gaps in the cloud and lighting just the tips of the distant mountains. I took a few photos from my perch, then settled in for a relaxed coast down the mountain back to sea level.

It was getting quite late, and having spotted my next destination in the far distance I worked out that I wasn’t going to make it by any reasonable hour so instead I decided that the next best thing to a campsite would be to live under a bridge. To be specific, I found a nice flat camping spot on the stony remains of an old abandoned bridge that lay almost directly underneath its modern replacement. I was shielded nicely from the wind and the rushing water below me helped drown out the sound of passing cars.