Rain scurried across the window as the plane passed through the clouds. Behind the wing in seat 45D, I looked out at Iceland’s landscape. It was lush, green, cold, remote.

I always liked the perspective of the world upon landing. At thirty thousand feet, the world is cut up in large, segmented swaths of land passing under us at a snail’s pace. At some point, the pilot pulls back on the thrust, a bell rings, and an announcement is made as the plane descends. The city blocks form, and soon skyscrapers and commercial buildings expose their hidden mechanics. Houses come closer. Cars, just slow-moving dots, grow in size, and the world starts to speed faster and faster. Trees soon seem to be within reach as the runway emerges out of nowhere, and suddenly, the jolt of touchdown.

“Welcome to Iceland, where the time is 6:35 a.m.” Isolation was the first feeling that came over me as we landed on the tiny archipelago positioned between the Arctic and North Atlantic Ocean. It was summer in Iceland. The temperature would reach fifty degrees today, and not having a clue as to what to expect, I was ready. I watched my backpack travel down the conveyor belt, rain pelting it as the rampies threw the bags one by one onto the tug cart.

Ten months ago, I took a leave of absence and left Minnesota for a two-month bicycle ride to California. After arriving in California, I decided not to return to ordinary life and headed south. For seven months, I ventured through Mexico, Central America, South America, and finally Antarctica.

My months of adventure in South America planted so many seeds. Places I wanted to go, activities and food to experience, people to reconnect with. One person in particular was Cindy. An Australian lass I met in Chile and became very fond of.

I met Cindy on a multi-day ferry ride through the Chilean fjords. We then trekked Torres del Paine and went our own ways. She went to Carnival in Brazil; I went to Antarctica to run a marathon. We agreed to meet later in London, where she planned to work for two years.

After Antarctica, I returned to the United States for the sole purpose of selling my house. Once sold, I would be off to London.

With no official date set to arrive in London and after selling my house in record time, I decided not to pass up the opportunity to visit Iceland before getting settled before my rendezvous with Cindy, who was no doubt waiting patiently for my arrival. Although we had been in limited contact with each other, assumptions were made. I had decided that if reconnecting with her went well, I would stay in London, find some work, and then move to Perth after her work visa expired.

I was in Iceland now, and having not established any solid day for Cindy and I to reconnect, it would be a huge mistake to pass up the opportunity to see what this little country had to offer, to walk in the footsteps of Leif Erikson, Eric the Red, Egill Skallagrimsson, and the great female Norse explorer Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, whose son, Snorri Thorfinnsson, is said to be the first white person born in the Americas.

KEFLAVÍK – Driftwood Bay

Immigration was organized. Most people, if not all, had taken advantage of the deal Icelandair offered: $250, one way, from New York to the UK by way of Iceland.

The government put together the Icelandair deal in hopes of generating tourism, something that Iceland lacked in 2002. The flaw in the plan, in my opinion, was that there was no required multi-day stay in Iceland. All one had to do was simply deboard the plane, process through immigration, and board the plane heading to the UK. Final destinations of choice were Glasgow, Edinburgh, or London. I had opted for Glasgow.

“Where will you be visiting in Iceland?” the immigration officer asked each passenger.

The responses from everyone in line were consistent. “Not staying, just a quick layover on the way to London.” Or “Just taking advantage of Icelandair’s amazing deal to Edinburgh.”

Each response seemed to remove a sliver of joy from the immigration officer’s face as she stamped each passport with an entry. It seemed that no one wanted to visit her small but impressive country.

“Where will you be visiting in Iceland?” she asked me, cheerlessly reaching for my passport with one hand, stamp in the other.

“Oh, I’m thinking about seeing as much as I can,” I responded.

It was like watching a flower bloom. “Really?! You are going to stay and visit? How very exciting!”

“Yes, of course. It’s Iceland?!”

She stamped my passport with great enthusiasm. “Have a great stay!”

I was considerably more prepared than I was in South America or during my bike trip, for that matter. First and most importantly, I had my new debit card. While in South America, my credit union had a security breach, shut off everyone’s debit cards, and reissued new ones. I had no way of getting my new card in South America, so upon returning to the States, I finally acquired the new one.

Additionally, my small yet diverse wardrobe had enough variety to get me through the cold Icelandic summer as well as a weekend on Ibiza.

As for trekking and camping, I acquired a new MSR Fusion 2 tent, an Optimus Polaris stove with two 20-oz. fuel bottles, and an MSR Alpine mess kit for cooking. The rest were incidental items like a compass, Swiss Army Knife, two Nalgene bottles, hat, gloves, socks, and so forth. All of it crammed tightly into my 90-liter Lowe Alpine Contour IV backpack, weighing in around seventy pounds. This was everything, everything I owned aside from some photo albums and family heirlooms I had stored away back in the States. With the selling of my house, I was officially homeless.

My book of choice for Iceland was The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America by Magnus Magnusson.

I could have taken a bus to Reykjavík, but I was not quite ready to immerse myself into the backpacker hostel culture. Listen to all the stories being told. Respond to all the questions being asked. No, I needed a night to decompress from the flight and get myself dialed in time zone wise, I was five hours off. So, I found a hostel, more of a bed and breakfast, in Keflavík for my first night. Its Scandinavian design was clean, purposeful, and empty.

In the living room of the bed and breakfast, reading my book, my quiet time was interrupted by two women from Lithuania. They were wrapping up a year of working at a fish processing facility just outside of Reykjavík. The average annual salary in Lithuania (2002) was $3400 USD. They didn’t complain about how shitty the job was, but rather, they were upset that their visas were expiring. They were sad to be leaving as they were so happy for the money they were able to make and save. It would take them about five years to make the same kind of money back home.

We hit it off, and I asked them if they wanted to have a beer someplace local. I offered to buy the first round. They took me to an Irish pub with live music.

During WWII, the US Military kept a base in Keflavík and built what is now the international airport. The G.I.’s brought rock and roll to Iceland, and soon after, Keflavík became Iceland’s “Capital of Rock n’ Roll” with the nickname of “the Liverpool of the North.”

I was only familiar with one Icelandic band, the Sugercubes. Their song “Life’s Too Good” was released in 1988, led by Björk.

The Gull beers I bought for the three of us came out to $30 USD. It was actually 4100 krona, which made the tab look even steeper. Iceland, my friends, was expensive. Iwasn’t in South America anymore, haggling over $1.75 rooms. I soon accepted I would be spending a lot of nights in my tent whilst here on the archipelago.

REYKJAVÍK – Bay of Smokes

The next day, I took a shuttle to Reykjavík. The Lithuanians told me about a hostel that had camping for five dollars a night. This included showers, toilets, and relatively inexpensive internet. This was 2002; we didn’t wander around with laptops or smartphones. We had 35mm cameras, each picture carefully orchestrated, and we sought out internet cafés, paying by the quarter hour for a very slow network. Browser of choice was AOL; free email doled out by Hotmail and Earthlink.

Dalur Hostel International was a bit away from the center of the city, but public transportation was easy, and the hostel was just a bus ride away from two places I had put on my list to see while in Reykjavík.

First stop: Hallgrímskirkja, the largest church in Iceland, completed in 1986, stands 244 feet high. Its architecture is a representation of Iceland’s unique and diverse landscape.

Out front of the church, a gift from the United States, a statue of Leif Erikson stood facing north by northwest, keeping a close eye on the shoppers wandering down Reykjavík’s first main street: Skólavörðustígur.

Here you could find souvenir shops, tattoo parlors, art galleries, jewelry stores, the Handknitting Association of Iceland, where all products are 100 percent Icelandic, and Iceland’s oldest prison, built in 1872, anonymously located across the street from a clothing boutique. Sixteen prison cells and not one with a toilet or sink. The prison was shut down fourteen years after my visit.

The second place on my must visit list whilst in Reykjavík was the Icelandic Phallological Museum. Why would anyone pass up the opportunity to go to a museum with a collection of over two hundred penises? From the blue whale to the barn mouse, this museum was made for you and me. The owner claimed there were troll and elf penises, but since neither trolls nor elves can be seen, the same held true for their penises.

With a serious case of penis envy, I walked up toward Faxaflói Bay and hiked along the paved Sculpture and Shore Walk, passing by a few wonderful sculptures:

The Sun Voyager (Sólfar) by Jón Gunnar Árnason. “A dream- boat, an ode to the sun. Symbolizing the promise of undiscovered territory, a dream of hope, progress, and freedom.”

Íslandsvarðan by Jóhann Eyfells. Known as “the Cairn of Iceland.”

The Partnership Sculpture by Pétur Bjarnason. A gift from the United States for fifty years of a good diplomatic relationship.

Skolpa Sewage treatment plant. Just what its name suggests and where I decided to exit the path and head back to the hostel.

Ducking into a grocery store, I loaded up on food, a few tins of tuna and boxes of pasta. That was going to be dinner for the next few days. Easy to cook with my stove and just as easy to clean up. For breakfast, it would be porridge, and lunch would be hard cured meat, cheese, and rolls. Lastly, I grabbed a few packages of chocolate biscuits to snack on, but mostly to share with others. A rather easy way to speed up the friend-making process at hostels.

The grocery store was offering samples of hákarl in a small bowl. It was extremely fishy tasting, a bit chewy, and stunk of ammonia. Hákarl is a fermented Greenland shark, a national staple of Iceland. Fermentation requires up to five months, if done traditionally. The process is required to remove the neurotoxins from the shark’s flesh, which can either leave you feeling intoxicated or kill you.

Much like the piranha I had in Los Llanos, Venezuela, I’m happy to have tried it but wouldn’t be up for seconds.

In the open frozen bins, mixed in with the bags of frozen vegetables and other frozen meats, were piles of sheep heads cut in half called Svið, a traditional Viking dish of Iceland. Waste not, want not, I suppose. I thought about trying it, but the head wouldn’t fit in any of my cooking pots. I promised myself I’d try it along the way.

That night at the hostel, a campfire was blazing. The smell of hashish mingled with the smell of the campfire and smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes. Conversations between strangers in broken English circulated around the fire, as did the wine and exaggerated stories of adventures.

Inserting myself into one of the many conversations, I learned that I could buy a one-way bus ticket that would take me around the entire country along the Ring Road. The ticket allowed one to hop off and on anytime along the way if the direction was the same way.

The other thing I learned was one could dive in some of the clearest glacier water in the world at a place called the Silfra Fissure. The Silfra Fissure was also the only place in the world you could dive between two tectonic plates, the North American plate and the Eurasian plate.

A Kiwi gave me the name of a dive guide, and I immediately proceeded to the front desk of the hostel and requested the phone book in search of the dive guide’s number.

If you are old enough to remember, we had the white page phone book for looking up people and the yellow page phone book for looking up businesses. When you looked up a person, the names were listed last name first. Example: Mortensen, Cory.

Then you looked at their address to confirm that this was the droid you were looking for, and then there was the phone number. Stalking in the 1970s and ’80s was easier than one might think.

Iceland doesn’t work that way. Iceland lists all 288,0007 citizens by first name. In Iceland, last names are patronyms of the father’s name and are not passed from one generation to the next. So, for example, Jón Einarsson’s son’s last name would be Jónsson and his daughter’s last name would be Jónsdóttir.

Iceland is very traditional with its names. The law dictates that the names of children born in Iceland must, unless both parents are foreign, be submitted to the National Registry within six months of birth and be approved by the Icelandic Naming Committee.

I never was able to connect with the dive guide, so diving the Silfra Fissure would have to take place another time.

Setting up my tent, a guy plopped his rucksack right next to me. It was Edward from Austria. Perhaps it was a subconscious urge, but suddenly, names felt like they needed to be shared in some sort of old-fashioned description.

“I am Stephan of Dresden, son of Gunther.”

Or...

“I am Loic, poet and lover of women.”

Edward had just arrived in Iceland, was traveling alone, and asked if I wanted to travel with him on the Ring Road. Over a beer, an alliance was formed, and after a second beer, Edward and I bought tickets for the Ring Road, sold at the front desk of the hos- tel. Like my recent journey where the Andes guided me south, the Ring Road would guide us around this volcanic rock sitting violently in the North Atlantic Ocean.