There was a bit of a wind and, therefore, because it was a big lake, a bit of a chop, but there was nothing to warn me about what was to come. What came the first time I hit a wave hard was a series of large icicles which ploughed into my face, at exactly the same time that a sub-zero fist took hold of my genitals and squeezed. This was cold like you simply would not believe.
‘Yes,’ said my Icelandic guide later. ‘Ten people died of hypothermia last year after they fell in there.’
Worse was to come when he introduced me to the fantastically named Sudberdur Gudbergson who, two years ago, rode his snowmobile to an island 1.2 km off the coast. Now, it should be explained at this juncture that a snowmobile is designed for use on water in a rather more solid state. A snowmobile has all the buoyancy of a cathedral. If you put a snowmobile on water, you will need a new snowmobile, and in Iceland, that would cost about the same as Blenheim Palace.
Sudberdur Gudbergson’s would cost even more because it is tuned to develop 180 bhp, which makes it more powerful than your Golf GTi. In terms of power to weight, it is more powerful than a Lamborghini Diablo.
To make it suitable for use on water, Sud, as I shall call him, had simply taped over the radiator grilles — overheating is rarely a problem in Iceland — and that was it. ‘Have a go,’ he said, ‘only remember that, no matter what, keep it on full power. If you lift off for a second, she will go down.’
Now, I rode it up and down the beach a couple of times and discovered that flat out equated to about 120 mph, which was awesome enough on dry land. Could there be something more terrifying than Gisli’s Jeep?
Yes.
To begin with I kept to the shallows, which enabled me to learn that the two skis up front are no substitute for a rudder and the tank track at the back is not really a very good propeller.
But what the hell. I swung it round, hit a max and plunged onto the water on a course that would take me right across to the other side of the lake, half a mile away. The speed started to bleed off immediately and the skidoo began to rock from side to side but I knew that to lift my thumb from the throttle would mean a loss in momentum and frozen knackers all over again.
I guess I was down to about 50 mph halfway across when the strangest thing happened. Gisli came past in his Jeep. I’m not kidding. I felt pretty manly and hirsute on my lightweight skidoo but here was a man driving his 900-bhp Jeep on water.
They tried to explain the physics of it later but frankly, I kept trying to match the man’s face with the boat race on the Turin shroud. I guess if Jesus wanted to come to earth again for a bit of a poke around, Iceland makes sense — lots of fishing, no one bats an eyelid when you walk on water, bikers who look like disciples anyway. It’s the perfect cover.
And should Pilot Pontiusson come round with some centurions, lots of places to hide.
Iceland’s interior is deserted, by which I mean no crofter’s huts, no pylons, no people. Think about that. Imagine being able to go from Newcastle upon Tyne to Oxford without seeing any evidence at all of man’s existence. This is one big chunk of nature.
And the biggest chunk of the lot is the glacier. Vatnajokull is bigger than Yorkshire.
I guess it’s time to get all
They’re basically big four-wheel-drive vans which have been described by one American magazine as the best snow vehicles in the world, and you can’t argue with that, as they cruise over crevices so deep that mammoths still live at the bottom. You also can’t argue when you see how much they cost — ?60,000 is by no means uncommon.
I should explain that every square metre of Iceland has been plotted and, with the right satnav equipment, you can drive across the middle in a car with blacked-out windows.
But a glacier moves. Your pet satellite can tell you which way you’re going but not what’s between you and your destination. It’s no good thinking, as you plummet down a kilometre-deep crack, ‘That’s odd. This wasn’t here yesterday.’
Plus, you need to be mindful of the weather. Not even in the uppermost reaches of Scotland’s taller bits will you find changeable conditions like this. You can be sunbathing one minute and dead the next. We’re a few miles from the Arctic Circle here and they have blizzards which would give Michael Fish a heart attack. Sometimes, they’re even more powerful than his jackets.
So why, then, do Icelanders bother to go up there? Well, first of all, they’re mad, and second, they go because there’s no reason not to.
Why, for instance, go into the African bush when there’s a better-than-evens chance of not getting out with all your legs on? Why climb Everest and why, in British terms, have a barbecue when you have an oven?
The first thing you do before hitting the ice is drop the tyre pressure down to just two pounds per square inch, so that the rubber makes a bigger footprint on the snow. And don’t worry about it coming off the wheel because you only need a Zippo and some lighter fluid to put it back on again. What you do is spray the butane into the tyre and light it. The resultant explosion pops the tyre back on the rim and gives just enough pressure to carry on. And carry on you must because journey’s end is a huge slash in the ice.
And to give you an idea about how huge, you could play hide-and-seek in there with Canary Wharf and not find it.
I don’t want to get all religious here but when you stand on the edge of this absurd crater you do start to wonder a little bit about the puniness of man. I mean, not even the most powerful nuclear bomb could do this. The power that created it is beyond the ken of even our most sophisticated computer. We really are pretty pathetic and I suppose that if I lived near it, and all Iceland’s other wonders, I might have a slightly lower opinion of myself.
Perhaps this is why Icelanders, more than anyone else I’ve ever met, live so close to the edge.
Either that or they have the fishing industry to thank. I mean, if a country relies for its huge wealth on fish, which can only be caught by ploughing the North Atlantic in small boats, playtime is going to be pretty special.
I also think, though, that quite by chance we’d stumbled on a nation that simply likes cars. Certainly, it’s hard to see the internal combustion engine as a threat to mankind up there.
When you stand in a normal city street, and the whole thing is clogged up with tail pipes, smoky buses and the interminable din from a million diesels, it’s easy to see why the environmental argument can get a toehold.
But in Iceland, one exhaust pipe on a glacier the size of Yorkshire doesn’t seem so bad.
Then we have the queues. It’s easy to see the appeal of public transport in Britain where every motorway is clogged, and every B-road alternative a washboard route directly to the osteopath.
They have queues in Iceland too, but never so severely that you’d think about taking the bus instead. And anyway, you can always call the transport minister whose number — and that of the President herself — appears in the phonebook.
‘Oh people call me up all the time,’ he says. ‘If there’s the slightest problem, they’re straight on the phone to me. This is a small place and everyone knows everyone else. Just because you work in the transport ministry doesn’t mean you stop knowing people.’
The transport ministry needs to be defined though. Put it like this. When he goes out for lunch, it’s closed.
Sure, he has the planes, the buses and the cars to worry about but, thankfully, no trains. There are none.
However, outside California, Iceland does have the highest car-ownership levels in the world and the roads have to keep pace with a demand that just won’t slow down.
To cope, they have Road One, which circumnavigates Iceland and is paved for very nearly its entire length. The best stretch is in the south where you’ll find the Big Bridge which was paid for by Iceland’s lottery and is fashioned from wood — odd in a country without any trees. Well there used to be some, but the original Irish settlers — Reg and Vic — chopped them all down.
There is no Road Two but there is a myriad of unnumbered and unpaved tracks which litter the coastal plains. On these you should be very, very careful indeed because Iceland’s growing band of rally drivers use them for practice in their homemade cars.
In Britain they’d call it joy-riding and the transport minister would appear on television with a stern face. But hey, this is Iceland and the transport minister thinks it’s OK so long as they’re careful.
He’s also not that bothered by the microlighting fraternity, who simply land on what, in Britain, would be the
