Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [66]
Secondly, words like Hvolsvöllui are virtually impossible to pronounce at all and especially in the correct rounded Icelandic manner. A Big John Hamburger eaten at a local roadside fuel stop was a Big John Hamborgarar, and if you wanted it with an egg it was og egg and cost £18. Liquorice Allsorts were Apollo Lakkris, coffee was kaffi and milk was mjólk. It's not a real language at all, it's just a sing-song version of our own brought on by too much Viking Bjor.
Thirdly, the weather was always crap. The next day, earmarked for our first attempt at the glacier, was foggy and rainy again. If we reached our objective I wouldn't be able to see it and wouldn't be able to say, 'The vast plateau of the Myrdalsjokull glacier might have served as a model for the torque curve of the excellent BMW-derived V8,' so instead we visited the Skogar Folk Museum.
I recommend this. The curator, who is called something like Thor, is completely bonkers. Most of Iceland as we see it today is modern – its oldest hotel was built in 1930 – but Thor entertains us with evidence of earlier civilisations, including numerous artefacts wrought in desperation from the shrivelled genitalia of animals. I recall a short rope made from an ox penis and a money bag formed from a pig's scrotum. The first settlers, he explained, were Irish monks who built monasteries from 'turds and stones'. Then he sat at the harmonium and played 'O Susannah' and 'Rock of Ages' while forcing us to sing along in Icelandic. And then we ran away.
That night, in another abandoned hotel in a place called Vik, the wind roared again. The following morning the weather was even worse. This sort of thing went on for three days, the temperature gradually falling and snow and sleet joining the dizzying cycle of wind, rain, darkness, herring, Viking Bjor, empty hotel, bed. The postcards seen in Icelandic hotel receptions are less than honest. One popular example seen everywhere shows a brightly coloured puffin sitting atop a sunlit, moss-covered rock. The reality, as Newton's own picture records, is a rain-lashed clump of black volcanic debris with no puffin on it.
We had already covered some 750 miles around Route One in our attempts to snatch evocative pictures in rare bursts of late-afternoon watery sunshine. I was convinced of the Range Rover's luxury car credentials. The engine and gearbox are good and a suitable war reparation following the shenanigans over the ownership of Land Rover. The ride is simply outstanding for an off-roader and almost Jaguar-like at times. I'd worked out what everything on the dash did without recourse to the handbook, which in any case, this being a prototype, hadn't been printed yet. I could make it rise and squat on its magic suspension and Newton even managed to tune the telly in, though the picture was affected by what the TV repair man would call 'snow'. And so, with 24 hours remaining before the car had to be back at the docks, we finally made our bid for off-road glory and the tip of the glacier.
It started well. We scrabbled easily along the vague track leading north from Route One. We bounced over rocky mounds and forded streams; we selected low range, dived in and out of gullies and drove on for mile after breathtaking mile, a towering primaeval mountain vista to our right, a wilderness still awaiting the moment of creation on our left. This was more like it.
Everything seemed to go wrong at once. First we came to what looked as if it could be a frozen river, so I took the precaution of sending Newton ahead to probe the terrain with the extended leg of his camera tripod. One moment he was a six-foot specimen of fine European manhood striding forth into the unknown, the next he was a legless, flailing torso. Then the temperature