Stykking it to Iceland

I was stuck in Stykkishólmur. Waiting for any bus to come to town, I watched the blond adolescent at the next table bang his cigarette lighter against his palm. He eagerly snorted the black dust from the lighter's innards. It was the kind of pathetic "high" that completed the dumpy ambience of this convenience store on the edge of Iceland.

It was at that moment that I realized I was not alone in despising the country. I had the hope of a bus and an airplane out of there — this kid had nothing but a chemical escape from "Stinkies-holmer," as my travelling companion called it.

Quite simply, my friend and I had been viciously fooled into thinking Iceland was "an adventurer's paradise." We read enticing travel guides written with the same whimsical prose as Ms. Lipman's article for this magazine.

But consider yourself warned! Iceland is for the descendants of exiled Vikings, and any sucker tourists they can entice onto their island of misery.

Stykkishólmur's youth hostel. Note the charming corrugated tin siding.

Reykjavík has all the appeal of a shanty-town, with its architecture of corrugated tin siding and tiny institutional windows. There are no public monuments or museums of note; no fierce Viking memorabilia; no heroic stanzas from Icelandic sagas etched in stone. The president's house perfectly embodies the bland understatement of the capital: a very small clapboard house with fading white paint set outside of town on a pile of rocks and ocean water.

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By far the biggest myth of the city is that there is a brilliant nightlife. The one bar we could find open before 2:00 AM was glad to welcome two men. Very glad. It was rumored that after 2:00, the party really got rocking at the one dance club in town. I was already too bored and sober to wait.

And broke - did I mention Iceland is one of the most exorbitantly expensive countries in the world? Not that the food inspires lavish spending. There are several foul offerings beyond the ordinary fish fare of any Atlantic coastline. Hákarl, or putrefied shark meat, is one. Hrútspungur, pickled ram's testicles, is another. The only nuts I eat dangle from plants, thank you.

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Randy and I decided to leave Reykjavík and really get out there and explore the "land of fire and ice." We didn't need tourist frills like "things to see and do" - we were doughty adventurers who could traipse through the hinterlands and boast to National Geographic wannabes back home, "yeah, we climbed that steaming volcano above the glacier. Wish you could have been there, man."

We got out the tourist pamphlets with the volcano pictures and maps and strolled down to the tourist information center .

"We want to go there," we pointed on the map.

"Yaaa," she said, oddly sucking in air rather than exhaling. "There is no bus going there this time of year. The roads are blocked with snow."

It was early September.

"How about here?"

"Yaaa. No bus."

We had to settle for a coastal city, and after counting our Kronas, a close one at that. And so we decided upon Stykkishólmur. The mountains didn't seem too far off in the pictures and on the map. Yaaa.

On the bus we were surrounded by noisy American children from the NATO base in Keflavík. Their stories were much the same: "I'm from Illinois, but when I was 9 my father got transferred here." All agreed that Keflavík was the Siberia of NATO posts. "I hate Iceland. There is nothing to do here," summed up one girl. They proceeded to tell us of their sex and drug-addled lives with a level of detail that belied their ages.

The bus dropped us off at a convenience store at the edge of town that boasted three "dining-in" tables with green formica tops covered in hot-dog mustard. Strapping on our internal frame packs, we hiked to the youth hostel.

As we walked, we could see and smell for ourselves that Stykkishólmur was an ordinary, small, fishing village. There were piles of fish, and groups of people that caught them. More hopefully, there were mountains on an ambiguously-distanced horizon.

We stayed the night and checked out the next morning. We intended to camp out for the remaining nights on our outdoor adventure. This was going to be just like in the travel books: skirting around fjords, dashing over borgs, teetering along cliffs.

We indeed skirted around fjords. Unfortunately, there came a point where we couldn't "skirt" any longer, and we were forced to ford the fjord, which made my hrútspungurs jam into my pelvis.

The ground was igneous: undulating with hard volcanic rock and little vegetation, forming a terrain that resembled an endless series of enormous frost heaves under asphalt. After a full day of boot grinding, we looked ahead to the mountains and saw that they were no closer. Desiring rest, we searched for a place to pitch the tent. Not a patch of smooth land was visible. We finally compromised and started to pitch the tent on a small tar mogul when Thor unleashed a great rain storm.

Knowing that we were beaten and feeling silly for ever thinking Iceland's landscape was suitable for hiking, we hiked to a road and stuck out our thumbs.

For a while, no one stopped. Finally a tiny Italian-model automobile screeched to a halt. The driver opened his door, gesticulated at us wildly, exclaimed "Stykkishólmur, No!", and drove off. We walked every dejected mile back to the youth hostel.

Two days later we spent our morning in the convenience store, watching Iceland's future snort butane. Randy suddenly brightened and pointed to a bumper sticker under the cash register that read: "London, Paris, New York, Stykkishólmur".

What a lie.