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I can’t see anything, and nor can current driver Kristján, who stares intently at a GPS navigation screen on his laptop, mounted on an aluminium spar sprouting from the centre console. The medieval-looking map is overlaid with a small flashing boat icon (the GPS, we find out later, is actually for ships) and you half expect the next corner to reveal a ‘here be dragons’ legend. Distressingly, the most accurate the GPS has thus far been had us some 400 yards to the left of Highway One. At one point we were technically in the sea. |
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A sharp turn pulls a low-pressure tyre off its rim, swiftly fixed by digging out the car and inflating the tyre until it pops back into the bead. But then during the recovery from the hole we pull another tyre off. I almost cry real man tears. The Icelanders shrug and repeat the process; what point would there be in getting upset? You’d just waste energy.
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The whiteout caused by the continuing blizzard means the only points of reference are the other trucks. But sometimes even they prove confusing, and it’s hard to tell whether you’re moving forwards or backwards, up or down. There’s no horizon and no place to get your balance. It’s actually quite nauseating, like travel sickness but without the promise of relief if you stop. I try to follow Chef closely, just in case we have to lighten his truck by eating the food.
And then, after 13 hours, we decide to turn back. Even though we could make it to the top, we’d never get back down again without extra fuel. The Icelanders are devastated, I’m relieved. But we still have to get back, and just look how long it took us to get here…
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But in fact the trip back to the base of the glacier takes two hours. How? Well, the tracks we made on the way here are compressed snow, almost a highway. We subsequently find out that the record to the top of the glacier, the full 50 miles, is just 55 minutes. Talk about the wrong kind of snow. It isn’t until I overhear a brief conversation that I realise our base camp hut has become so cold that we won’t be able to spend a second night there; we’re going to have to drive down the cliff road to a small guest house on Highway One. The cliff road has no barriers but does have a tendency to prodigious unexpected landslides. I try to tell myself the Icelanders are making it up to add some extra spice. They aren’t.
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