Nine lives later

When one goes on holiday at my time of life (think hot flushes and temper tantrums), one looks to relax in beautiful, fascinating and safe environments. One does not expect to spend an entire day in a state of stomach-churning anxiety, wishing one had packed Diazepam as well as Stugeron.

Even the day before the volcano excursion, the omens were ominous. The drive to and across the Icelandic Highlands would take about 12 hours (an arduous ride in a Jeep, over magma fields, across rivers, through snow, then a 5km return-trek on snowshoes across a caldera to a geo-thermal pool). When we checked into the hotel the afternoon before, we asked if we could order packed lunches for the next day. No we couldn’t. They required 48 hours’ notice. To provide sandwiches, cakes, biscuits and crisps (keeping it simple). The same grub they provided 18-hours-a-day for room service.

Supermarkets were closed because it was National Day and opened too late the next day, so Hubby problem-solved and decided we had to raid the breakfast buffet: rolls, sausages, bananas, apples, cakes and cheese slices it was.

While pilfering food, the wind outside howled and the rain lashed against the picture windows. Did I really want to walk over a volcano in this? Remembering adventures of my youth in the Yorkshire Dales, I stuffed two extra fleeces, over-trousers and a second hat into my rucksack, squashing the stolen food in the process, and we headed off to the meeting point, a hotel down the road that probably would have given us a packed lunch had Hubby’s problem-solving skills been any good.

“Bad news,” said the tour guide to us and five other petrified tourists. “The weather is very bad so we are cancelling the trip.”

I wasn’t too disappointed under the circumstances.

“Instead,” he continued, “we will take you to other wonderful places. We can offer you caves or glacier walks or geo-thermal sites.”

Having potholed in the Dales as a teenager, I said I liked the sound of the caves. Hubby said he might get claustrophobic. I suggested sweetly that he might like to man-up a bit. I began to day-dream about my potholing days, getting stuck halfway up, or was it down, a rope-ladder hundreds of feet (maybe) below ground, crawling on my stomach through tunnels half-filled with water, scoffing Mars Bars while ogling the most gorgeous stalactites and stalagmites …. 

“That’s decided,” I heard the tour guide say. “We’ll meet back here at noon and by the time we get up into the Highlands the weather might have improved.”

Whoa! What? How? Why? Who decided that? And what does he mean by “might”? What if the weather doesn’t improve? Would we crack on regardless? Everyone else seemed ecstatic so I thought I’d better go with the (lava) flow.

We drove back to our hotel room, intending to chill for a few hours. But I didn’t chill very well; all I could think of was what would we do for supper if we didn’t get back to the hotel until after midnight. Sighing, which he does very well, Hubby said we’d buy a late lunch from the supermarket down the road, have a coffee and cake to tide us over at 11.30am as soon as the bar opened next to the meeting point; the stolen breakfast bits we’d have for supper.

Placated (somewhat), I settled down for the next couple of hours to blog, taking my angst out on one or more of my usual blog-victims – socialists, Remainers, the EU, civil servants, the Guardian, the BBC and anyone I’ve crossed off my Xmas card list.

At 11am while preparing to go to the supermarket, Hubby started to take the hotel room apart. Where was his camera? Must be in the car. No it wasn’t. I asked at reception if anyone had handed in a camera. No they hadn’t. We drove to the hotel where we were meeting the others. Nothing there either. We dashed round the supermarket as quickly as possible, each item in the basket punctuated with, could it be here or there or there or here?

Then we went for coffee and cake. Except we didn’t because the bar didn’t open until noon, not 11.30am as Hubby had found out on Google.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this trip,” I said to Hubby.

“I’m sure you’ll blog about it,” he grimaced.

Five-hundred calories down already, we headed to the meeting place, to be met by the tour guide clutching Hubby’s camera that had been left on the table earlier in the morning.

The seven of us piled into a huge ‘stretched Jeep’ with monster-truck tyres and headed along Highway 1 towards the gravel track and the Highlands. After only a couple of miles, the tour guide stopped the Jeep in the middle of the road – they do that a lot in Iceland – and got out to check the tyre pressure. The state-of-the-art, uber-clever, automatic tyre-pressure monitor and adjustor wasn’t working, the same gizzmo he had boasted earlier was essential for such a trip.

“We have a saying in Iceland,” he reassured us. “Everything will be fine.”

“And we have a saying in England,” I said under my breath. “Get a lawyer.”

Tyre pressure ok for now, we carried on and broke the journey at a warden’s station to take advantage of the facilities, a.k.a one of those disgusting long-drop loos, even the thought of which immediately cures incontinence.

We crossed a gentle but wide stream. All seemed good. Before the next crossing, of a fast-flowing, wide but shallow stream, the guide got out of the Jeep and reduced the tyre pressures all round. Luckily, it worked. Then we stopped at a faster-flowing, wide but deep river. The guide rubbed his chin and peered over the steering wheel before tentatively entering the river and driving slightly upstream, as if anticipating we’d be carried downstream. Somehow we crossed over (I don’t mean into Hades), and carried on along a suddenly much bumpier and winding trail around mounds of lava and mega-rocks that we couldn’t decide were there because lava had carried them or they’d been spat out by an eruption and lay where they landed. Whichever, it was like being on the moon.

One more long-drop visit at another station and we headed towards snowier territory. We got stuck several times. The guide let out so much air from the tyres I thought we’d be driving on the rims. He rocked the Jeep back and forth. Reversed a bit then took a run at it. Finally, out came the shovel.

I really ought to keep my thoughts to myself, because at one stage I said out loud, “I can smell the clutch.” The next time I opened my mouth, I asked, “What happens if we run out of petrol,” at which point, Hubby grabbed a supermarket sandwich and stuffed it in my mouth to keep me quiet.

Eventually the combination of, in effect, hitting it, kicking it, and squirting it with WD40 freed the Jeep from the last of the snow obstacles and we got to the carpark at the base of the outer rim of the caldera.

Armed with snowshoes, we plodded up the slope, over the ridge and there we were, from the moonscape to Antarctica in the space of a few minutes. This part of the day was so glorious I couldn’t possibly blog about it, otherwise my reputation for bad-tempered negativity would be shot.

On the way back, we stopped off at the warden’s station to reflate the tyres with a little help from the warden, which took a while so some of us walked down to the stream, crossed the stream or walked up a track to the top of another waterfall. Me? I relived my Munro-bagging holidays in Scotland, scrambling up sheer rock faces to get to the top of an outcrop, one of those ‘don’t do this at home’ activities. Once at the top, I suddenly remembered that I always had trouble scrambling down again. Luckily, my problem-solving skills are superior to Hubby’s and I searched out a gentle way down some steps that normal people normally take to get to and from my viewing point.

And that’s it. The journey back was uneventful, possibly because I kept falling asleep. Except, back at the hotel, Hubby nearly lost another life when he said it was too late for a gin.