The Eastern Fjords of Iceland will bring you to your knees. The landscape is overpowering because everything towers over you at close quarters without any space to measure scale. And it smells different, like fish and freshwater mixed with cut grass and the ocean. Sounds get swallowed by the immensity of the land and water. Light swirls and throbs with something much stronger than different colors. It’s like walking into the biggest church on earth and you’re the only one there. I often wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
Up until we got to the FJORDLAND, our journey was defined by the stops at the famous attractions—Godafoss, Dettifoss, Akureyri, Lake Mývatn, the Dimmuborgir Lava formations—distinct places on a map. But the eastern fjords are a dreamscape of ten majestic peninsulas jutting into the Norwegian Sea. From outer space they look like ten arthritic fingers with dark blue fjords dividing the oddly-shaped peninsulas. They aren’t a specific spot, but rather, a moving target.
Scattered at the water’s edge are small fishing villages where the lifestyle is not just simpler, it’s deliberate. And it takes a sturdy person to live in such a place.
There’s Breiðdalsvík which is nestled in a picturesque harbor with hunkered-down homes. We stopped for lunch in Djúpivogur where we caught some great views of Berufjörður Fjord and the tiny toy ferry that services the isolated Isle of Papey where there’s a lighthouse, a private house, a church, an automated weather station, and a large colony of Atlantic puffins. Papey is said to be named after the monks called Papar.
Every village in FJORDLAND has a small fleet of brightly painted fishing boats that look way too small to work in the angry ocean. But they undoubtedly do. Talk about some hard crabs! And there is usually at least one fish processing factory where large vessels take on shipments for Europe and beyond.
The variety of fish in Iceland’s waters is a wonder to behold. I had never heard of many of the fish appearing on the menus of the restaurants where we ate, like wolffish, plaice, redfish, lumpfish, saithe, whiting, and capelin.
As we drove along the Ring Road, hugging the edges of the shimmering fjords, we also saw expansive salmon farms, taking up long stretches of the fjords, where millions of salmon are raised inside ocean nets. Salmon is big business in FJORDLAND. But the whole nasty business is also quite controversial because the nets allow the free flow of diseases into the wild fishery, and an escape of thousands of a Norwegian strain of salmon last year from a FJORDLAND fish farm has already spread genetically modified fish into 32 rivers.
According to “The Guardian: “The escape – at a pen in Patreksfjörður owned by Arctic Fish, one of the country’s largest salmon-farming companies, which is owned by Norwegian salmon giant Mowi – has reignited calls from environmentalists, sport fishers and some politicians to restrict or ban open-pen fish farming. It is not the first big escape: just last year, another salmon farming company, Arnarlax, was fined £705,000 for not reporting an escape of 81,000 fish in 2021.”
Right now, money and jobs for the rural economies are doing the talking, as would be expected.
The next biggest economic player in FJORDLAND is aluminum. International behemoths, like Alcoa and Rio Tinto, ship raw bauxite to Iceland where it is turned into aluminum. Many small villages like Reyðarfjörður are home to big-boy factories, churning out building materials for the world. Why Iceland? It’s simple: Cheap power and less regulatory oversight than in the EU.
FJORDLAND constantly reminded me of the Scottish Highlands. The landscape is remarkably similar though more overpowering and less green. And they both share the Norwegian Sea. Unfortunately, the people are nothing like the Scotts. The Scotts are quite chatty and born poets. But not the people of the eastern fjords in Iceland. They are the strong silent type.
That said, the people seem genuinely happy, even if they aren’t exactly friendly. They are what you might call “reserved”, and they seem to be wound up rather tight. When you wave at them in passing, they usually don’t wave back. And while they are rather gabby amongst themselves, they ghost most strangers. And it’s not a matter of language because they teach English from an early age in all Icelandic schools. So, almost all Icelanders speak fluent English.
Inna said, “They’re doers, not talkers.” Yeah, maybe. They definitely follow the cold weather characteristic of being inherently industrious. They reminded me of the maniacs from the great state of Maine.
Inna described them best. “They don’t have much, but what they do have is of high quality. And they don’t need or want more from life. And that’s why there is such a deep sense of peace about the place.”
There is also a certain eccentricity in each village. For instance, the hotel we stayed in in Eskifjodur was a former bank and the layout was a bit odd. To get to our room we walked down some steps and through a dark corridor that led us past the old bank vault filled with cheap clown and horse paintings, and then up two flights of steps—few hotels in Iceland have elevators—to a small wing of former offices that were now hotel rooms. The receptionist, a sweet young lady with a friendly disposition, gave us a key to the front door because she had to go home and cook dinner for her family.
Each house in the small FJORDLAND villages usually sits on a good-sized grass yard. Most are tidy and well-taken care of, though some have boats or fishing gear scattered around with careless abandon. And small greenhouses have become quite popular, allowing folks to harvest some cheap veggies year-round.
The average income in Iceland is $5,500 a month. Take THAT America! But wages need to be high because EVERYTHING is terribly expensive. We thought prices were high in Hawaii, but they are much higher in Iceland.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in Iceland in the winter. Of course, I live in Florida every winter, so I’m probably not a good judge when it comes to enduring cold weather. But apparently escape isn’t part of the Iceland life equation.
At the headlands of each fjord, there are meticulously maintained farms that had us scratching our heads, going, “How could you live out here without going crazy? There’s no place to shop, no movie theater, no neighbors, no nothing, and the weather totally sucks. You’d be stranded out here for months on end. What would you do?”
And on the subject of crazy, we saw many cyclists with their bikes laden down with bulky panniers, bicycling around FJORDLAND. Having ridden my bike twice across the U.S., I can say without fear of contradiction that every person who does it is nuts, and lying if they say they enjoyed the ride. It is not uncommon to get two or three days of non-stop rain. And wind? We’re talking about a country that can’t grow trees because it’s too windy. And hilly? Forget it. Every cyclist we passed looked miserable and ready to die. I waved and they scowled, and I felt no pity for them because five minutes of weather research would tell you to find some other place to go touring on your bike. I would sooner walk around Iceland than bike.
Arts & Crafts are big in every FJORDLAND village. They are pretty much all the same: a small nondescript building selling Icelandic wool sweaters, gloves, and hats; baseball caps with a whale or puffin logo; folklore books about faeries and trolls; hand-painted greeting cards; candles; paintings of birds and fish; hand-carved wooden bird statues; sketchy local sauces and spices; knitted towels; and weird knick-knacks you might find in a hoarder’s house. These shops are quite popular with the tour bus crowds and I think it’s a match made in heaven.
We spent the night in Höfn, home to almost every fish processing company in Iceland. And every plant looked abandoned. I didn’t see a single soul. Maybe they only work at certain times.
But there were two very interesting attractions in Höfn.
The first was a ginormous indoor soccer complex with several artificial turf fields. The fields were lined and there were goals and balls. But the place was completely empty. I kicked a ball around and scored some easy goals before heading on to a monument by the sea, commemorating the first around-the-world airplane flight that finished its 5-month and 22-day epic journey from Seattle, Washington when they landed safely in the waters off nearby Mikely Island. It remains the most important thing that ever happened in this part of the world.
But the highlight of our stop in Höfn, was our dinner at the Pakkus restaurant where we dined on their famous langoustine dinner. We had never heard of a langoustine.
Langoustine are known variously as the Norway lobster, Dublin Bay prawn, and the shlobster (shrimp-lobster). The langoustine is a slim, coral-colored lobster that grows up to 10 inches long and is the most important commercial crustacean in Europe. It lives in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean and parts of the Mediterranean Sea.
They are rather expensive. We paid $75 for about 8 langoustine tails oven-grilled in Icelandic butter, garlic and parsley, served with a baked sweet potato, fried potatoes, some local bread, and tzatziki lathered in cold langoustine sauce. It was out of this world!
All in all, FJORDLAND might not grab the Iceland headlines when people tell you where you should go, but it totally rocked our world. And it will rock your’s too!
