Don’t wait for please!

Icelanders are a bit blunt and to the point (Karen thinks that why I get on so well with them). Friendly and polite but don’t expect a please. There is no such word in Icelandic and even though they all speak English (apart from the bus drivers, it seems to be a prerequisite!), they think in Icelandic. So when Ivar, the manager at the glacier, needed one of us to work on our first day off in three weeks he didn’t say please! He did ask though. That’s the difference. A question is polite, a request is in-formal, a demand is them being rude. When you remember that you’ll find them as friendly and polite as any other culture.

We are in Reykjavik at the moment on holiday. Yip, Holiday. That’s what we do for a holiday, we go to the city to get away from all the stress and pressure of living in a wilderness area surrounded by nature. We are being forced to rough it in a modern flat in the city, with a bed, central heating, electric lights, and a dish washer. Its tough but I think we’ll last the week. Cheers Ivar!

On the way back here to the city we took a bus trip through the highlands. It’s a very desolate and inspiring landscape of volcanoes and glaciers and lava fields. Very much the Mordor of middle earth! Do you know that Tolkiens work is based on the Icelandic Norse legends? And many of the characters are shared. Gandalf is a dwarf here though.

Reykjavik is a pretty cool city. Really just a big town with a lot of history. It has a great bus system but it’s expensive. It’s 250IKR for a ride. It doesn’t matter if you’re going one stop or the whole route. So when running around getting our paper work sorted so we can be paid takes five bus trips for the both of us, that’s 25000IKR or about $50 NZ. Reykjavik is a mix of modern and old buildings with well dressed people and it’s very clean. The Reykjavik Pizza Company is well worth a visit and it’s pretty easy to find acceptable espresso coffee. The bakeries are a good bet too. Almost every second shop seems to sell expensive home spun woollen jumpers that are ugly! The best thing though, is the heated outdoor swimming pools that are pretty much everywhere. They’re cheap (relatively) and great. The water is hot. There is nothing worse than tepid hot pools but the one we visited was perfect.

Karens solitary confinement .

SOLHEIMAJOKULL

After three days in Skaftafell I left the mighty Svenafell glacier for the greener (whiter) pastures of the Solheimajokull glacier about 2hrs drive away.
The trip started well as we stopped at my companions’ family house and had a real Icelandic feast of lamb and veg – two things that were missing from my diet of pasta and tuna.
It was delicious and I learnt a lot about the real Iceland – did you know they have 13 Santa clause and they are all evil!!!! Cool
Then we carried on to my new palatial accommodation,
This consisted of a 1 room house tent, the air conditioning was fabulous with a constant through breeze keeping things cool – you wouldn’t want it to get above 10deg now would you, I believe this was due to the design feature of the tent that stopped the fabric about a foot above the ground, my pup tent/bedroom I pitched inside.
The company car is something else (that is something other than a car). On the first day the tyre went flat and we had to discover how to work an Icelandic jack and 4 days later replace all of the tyres as they all had slow and not so slow leaks– interesting, after a fine day running around a brand new glacier with clients I dropped my companion off at the bus stop (2hrs drive in the other direction) and was left to my own devices for the next 9 days.
The time passed reasonably quickly with 3 walks a day. A 2hr at 9:00, a 3hr at 11:30 and another 2hr at 4:00. If the clients turn up, otherwise you wait in the car park for about ½ an hour then if no one is there, you go home!
The glacier is really easy guiding it is basically flat and has a cave and some pretty water filled crevasses, plenty to keep people going ooooh and ahhhhh and hardly any hazards to speak of. The great thing is you don’t need to cut steps which mean that all the general public can’t follow you up onto the glacier – so they come and buy a walk off you, heh heh heh.
I also went to the museum at Scogar and wow it is the most amazing museum i have ever seen. It has everything from boats to animal skeletons, houses with grass roofs and saddles made of driftwood. Its just great and I spent plenty of my time warming up and getting out of the rain wandering around it. Other cool things were the 62ft waterfall that lands about 30m from my tent! Really good hot showers and watching the stumpy horses taking really tall people for rides.
The main down side ....... its really really lonely.
Karen.

Glacier swimming.

Yesterday I was guiding a trip with one of the Icelandic guides who is working for his first season. The idea being that I lead the trip and he comes along to see a different way of telling people about the glacier and what I think is good route selection. The first thing I did was lead the group through a series of ponds and lagoons at the front of the glacier to look at the rate of melting. Crossing over a small water filled crevasse I warned the group not to stand on the ice in the middle but to skip across to the other bank. It was a distance of about 40cm. Doddi (the other guide) promptly ran up to help people across this section and jumped on the ice in the middle, which sunk taking him with it, up to his neck in freezing water. I of course acted with speed, skill and professionalism and doubled over in laughter! To add insult to injury, Doddi was then pulled from the water by the very clients he was trying to help, and was forced to return to base having completed about five mins of the trip. Not a good look for the guide!!
Later.
Ben.

Hvannadalshnukur and being an Icelander!

Two days ago I guided the highest summit in Iceland, “Hvannadalshnukur”! Yeah you can climb it but can you say it? It’s a big mountain. You start at just above sea level and climb up to 2100m over a distance of ten km. That’s a 20 km round trip with half of it on snow cover glaciers. Its pretty easy ground but challenging to guide when you have eight clients on the rope with you! We did not make the very summit as there was a high avalanche hazard for the final slopes. However it was still a 12 hour day. The neat thing about Iceland is that you don’t need torches when you start climbing at 4am.
Today I was the guide on a commercial the company is having made to be played on the plane to Iceland. I was chosen because I was the most Icelandic looking guide. Not that there are no hulking, blond Viking boys for Lou, just they weren’t working today.
Ben.

At two am it’s light enough in the tent to read without a torch.

Not direct sun light, the sun is below the horizon but not by much. I could do with a bit of dark to get to sleep. We have been guiding for a few days now and it’s very enjoyable. Small groups, lots of space, and people laugh at my jokes. We give all our clients trekking crampons. Just strap them to what ever shoes they bring. Even put a pair on some skate shoes. The guiding is very relaxed and the trip is up to the guide. If I want to take some ice climbing gear on the day walk for a play with the clients I can. If I don’t like the way the clients behave then I can come back. If it is raining too much then I can cut the trip short. I can talk lots and lots if I want or not at all. The general idea is that if the guide is having a good time then the clients will too. This could be a total flop but the other guides are keen and motivated and maybe it’s just the Icelandic way but it all seems to work. They are very safety conscious here but there is also an expectation that you challenge the individual clients. They have high expectations of kiwi guides so James and Tracy (kiwi guides who worked last year) must have done a good job. They expect us to be able to guide a walk after one trip with another guide. Since the clients come back in one piece and with smiles on their faces we must be pulling it off. Karen has been sent away for a week to another glacier to run a new operation by herself. A smaller glacier near the town of Vik, halfway between here and Reykjavik. She guides shorter trips, but up to three trips a day. Its closer to Reykjavik so people can do day trips from the capital. I’m currently the only one who can drive the bus so I’m staying here for now. The glacier I work on is one of tens of glaciers that drain the largest ice cap in Europe. The total size is 8000km2! Its one monster volcanic plateau with the craters being the accumulation zones for the snow and the valleys on the flanks having the glaciers. It’s much older and slower than the Fox but also retreating. This is not that bad a thing as there are still old farms covered with ice from before the mini ice age a few hundred years ago. I seem to have trouble posting phots by wireless conncetion. you all might have to wait a while to see them.
Ben.

Greetings from the midnight sun!

Greetings from Iceland.
We are now happily ensconced in our new home for the next two months. Two days before we flew out from the UK we received an email from Icelandic Mountain Guides to say that they were busy and wanted us to start work as soon as we got to Iceland. So much for our planned settling in over a few days. We were meet in Reykjavik (the capital) at one in the morning and taken back to the managers flat to kip on the floor for a few hours. Then at seven am we were up and off to the bus station and on to the bus to the glacier. About half way there, after three hours we were dropped off in the middle of a rural high way in the rain with instructions to find a farm house and rent a 17 seat bus off the farmer and continue on our way. I had visions of this all turning into a total epic but the Icelandic people and very helpful and friendly (although this is not at first obvious), and we managed to pull it all off. Home for us now is a company tent in the campground at the Skaftafell National Park at the southern end of the Vatnajokull ice cap. The guiding base is a large family camping tent with two rooms and a porch. This is the reception, office, gear store, staff room and kitchen for the whole operation. Currently there are two other guides working with us. There is free (but poor quality) wire less at the park HQ cafe, so feel free to email us. It’s not good enough for skype though. The glaciers and mountains here are amazing. The Mts are smaller than back in NZ but the glaciers come right own onto the farm land. I imagine that this is what Wales or the Mackenzie Basin looked like during the last ice age. I’ll post some photos when I work out how to do that. The guiding is very laid back. I’ll tell more once we have done a bit more work. But for those in the game, I did two half days yesterday, spent two hours on the ice on each, cut five steps total!
Bye! Ben.