10 Days in Iceland

Iceland was far from the first country outside of my own that I had visited. It was mid-May, months into my gap year, and my family had gone on holiday abroad even before I saved up enough to send myself travelling. But Iceland was the first country that I visited with a purpose that went beyond sightseeing and relaxation; I was going as a volunteer, and I was incredibly excited.

My first two ventures into travelling alone had been depressingly boring. Apparently, I am a lonely traveler, and without the company of other people, I find myself floundering in strange places. Volunteering seemed to be the ideal solution to my problem - here I would be surrounded by like-minded individuals, and even if we did not get along, we would hopefully be too busy to mind.

My flight was relatively peaceful. The plane was mostly empty and I had the luck of getting an entire row of three seats to myself. I attempted to stretch out and get some sleep, but unfortunately for me, I was directly over the engines and the lights stayed on for the entire trip, so I was eventually forced to give up.

Arriving was an odd experience, due to the rapid approach of the Icelandic summer. I had set up my phone in preparation for the time difference, but it was one thing to know that the nights would be short, and quite another to look and a clock and see that it is approaching midnight and the sky is still painted in cool blues and greens from the sunset.

Sleep deprivation made itself well known as I reached the hotel that would only see me for the one night before I got into the taxi that would transport me and my fellow intrepid explorers to our destination on the other side of the country, and I ended up going to bed without the lights or heating working because my tired brain couldn't figure out which way the key card should be placed into the control switch. I managed to figure it out come morning, but it wasn't much use to me then, after a night spent shivering. It was a shame, since the room had been very nice.

Paranoia drove me to the meeting place early; childhood with a scrupulous mother had given me uncontrollable anxiety about somehow being late and missing my bus, despite knowing that the chances of that happening were slim. The side-effects of this kind of promptness, though, meant that I had a lot of time to sit outside of the community center which was our designated meeting place and worry that I had somehow gotten the date or address wrong, and that I would be trapped in Reykjavik with nowhere to stay.

To my great relief, neither of those things turned out to be true, and soon enough, other people began to arrive. Most of us were young - in our teens and twenties, though there was one woman who looked closer to middle aged. There were people from France and Belgium, a boy from Serbia, two women from Japan, a girl from Canada. We were all unknowns to one another, and that was strangely relieving.

The trip from the city to the tiny village that would be our home for the week and-a-half we were there would take the better part of twelve hours; Iceland has one main road which circles the entire island, and we were a long way from where we needed to be.

Spectacular is the best word I can come up with to describe the scenery. It was a land of extremes, the towering mountains surging up and away from the bleak flatness of the sea. The road hugged the coastline for the majority of the journey - looking up at the unforgiving sheerness of the inland hills made it very easy to see why. On a map, it is hard to tell that, for the most part, the middle of Iceland is untouched, but passing through the land itself makes it impossible to ignore the fact that we were skirting the very edges of this great landmass, trapped on the rocky ledge of lowlands that existed bravely between the hungry ocean and the indifferent mountains.

We stopped frequently. Clearly, whoever was in charge of organizing our transport had been kind enough to give us the chance to sight see. The late spring weather meant that the waterfalls and rapids were flowing with great enthusiasm, and the freshly melted glacier water shocked me with the fact that it was a brilliant blue, bright as any cartoon I had ever seen.

I'm a little ashamed of the fact that I spent so much of the journey sleeping. But a restless night before had left me in desperate need of the rest, and given that I woke up every time the taxi stopped at whichever natural wonder we had reached next, I'm fairly confident that I at least got to see all of the highlights. Late in the afternoon, we stopped at a bay filled with slowly-bobbing icebergs, which every so often would flip over entirely. There were seals there, carefully keeping their distance, but mostly unbothered by the humans crowding along the shore. Every few minutes someone would shout and point at a dark head emerging from the water, and everyone with a camera handy would snap a picture.

Our building was beautiful. I suppose that, really, it wasn't anything special, but for me, weary from my trip and cold from the undeniably bitter Icelandic climate, it looked like paradise. It was comfortably built, with open rooms and a lot of windows that looked out over a truly breathtaking fjord, with enough space to house double the number of people than were there. I had now met everyone, had arrived safely, and finally, my brain could find no more things for me to worry about. I slept like a baby.

With the morning came an establishing of routine and a laying-out of ground rules. Chores were divided equally, work was from nine to twelve and then from two to five, and weekends were days off for everyone. Until that moment, I had not known that there were two separate groups of volunteers. I was in the conservation group; we were going to be helping to build a greenhouse and picking litter from the coastline. Some of the others were going to be working online, as journalists and website designers. It made sense, though I was a little disappointed that the girl from France who had become closest to me on the drive over was not going to be with me during the work day.

Things settled into a rhythm very quickly after that. We ate breakfast, tidied up, went to work, ate lunch, worked some more, relaxed before dinner, had dinner, relaxed some more. Walks became a frequent pastime. Hardly surprising, given the fantastic amount of natural space we had around us, and the fact that, although cold, the weather was frequently dry and sunny.

I don't know if you have ever climbed up a mountain with a glacier on top of it, but it is a remarkable experience, passing by all of the streams and brooks that wind their way down the slope, right up until you hit the first blocks of frozen ice that have yet to succumb to the spring thaw. It's usually at that point that the going gets harder, the incline fiercer. Most of us would stop there, though one or two people would sometimes push on, clambering up onto an outcropping and taunting the rest of us while we laughed from our lower perches, content to be mocked if it meant we got our breath back.

There was something about the mountains themselves which was almost ominous to look at. I think that it is because of my own ideas of mountains - how they look, where they are. Previously, my mind had only ever considered the mountains of the alps and the Himalayas. Great, craggy, grey sheets of rock that jutted upwards like knives. Some of the Icelandic cousins of those formidable giants looked quite different.

There were less angles, less sharp edges, though certainly there were still some. The mountains bulged and rolled up from the landscape, swollen and rounded in a way that I had never seen before. They reminded me of nothing more than the muscles of some gargantuan beast, slumbering under the skin of the earth, seconds away from moving. There was something organic about them, something alive, and not just because of the purple-green mosses and scruffy grasses which clung so determinedly to their sides. It was breathtaking.

The first day of work that I did in Iceland involved an awful lot of digging. The wooden frame of the greenhouse had already been constructed, presumably by the previous group of volunteers, but the next step was to put in the foundation, so that the finished project would not be ruined by a night of Icelandic storms.

It was hard work, but enjoyable despite the chill of the wind and the heavy clumps of earth which sometimes had lumps of granite in them that you didn't see until your shovel made contact with them and jarred your arms hard enough to rattle your teeth. Being part of a team made it fun, with a great deal of teasing and bickering, all of us helping one another when we needed it.

Later on in the week, once the frame had been hammered into place, we switched to installing the translucent plastic windows and building the planter boxes out of scrap materials, which was much easier on the muscles, though also more complicated than just shoveling earth. It looked like I wouldn't be staying long enough to be involved in painting the planter boxes we made, which was probably for the best. I am a terrible artist on paper, let alone on wood.

There came an issue on the second morning of my stay, when I woke up and was informed promptly by my body that, for all I was a fairly active teenager, my muscles were far from used to multiple hours of hard labor. I was so seized up that even laughing or stretching hurt, and I had no idea how I was going to be able to pick up a shovel again without some time to recover.

Once again, though, luck was on my side. A front of rain had moved in, and working outside was deemed impossible. The cloud in Iceland comes in swiftly, rolling in over the sea, pouring down from the mountains in a thick grey fog until you can't see two feet in front of your face. If you sat by the window, as I did that day, you could see the bands of dense water vapor move in, seeping over the fjord and onto the land. It was eerie, watching the landscape be swallowed up like that.

It turned out that my first two days would set the precedent for the weather we experienced during our stay. One day of brilliant sunshine - cold but clear, perfect for being outside and active - followed by one day of dismal grey skies and howling wind that kept us indoors and watching the windows with dramatic shivers and proclamations of "Glad I'm not out there!"

Even on the days without work, we were not bereft of things to do. Board games were played voraciously, and someone unearthed a badminton set which, in the absence of a net, we played over the dinner table, which took up a massive portion of the main room. Meal times were always interesting - with so many different cultures present, the style of food changed every day, depending on who was on kitchen duty.

Personally, I preferred to be on the cleanup crew. There isn't really a wrong way to wash a dish or wipe down a surface, but one mistake at the stove and you might end up subjecting a dozen people to terrible food. Fortunately for me, we were always in teams, which meant that I was mostly able to defer to others expertise.

The exception to this pattern came towards the end of my stay, when I and the girl from Canada were given charge of the cooking. She was one of the few people who was younger than me, and she had less cooking practice than I did, which left me in the uncomfortable position of authority. It had been established that we should attempt a meal from our home countries, and with limited ingredients our options were not brilliant, but in the end we decided to attempt a traditional roast dinner, using the frozen chickens we found stored in the downstairs freezer.

We actually managed to pull it off. Nothing burned, everyone finished their plates, and no one got food poisoning. It remains one of my crowning achievements to this day. However, it was with a deep sigh of relief that I hung up my apron and returned to washing up duty.

One of the best evenings of my stay came at the weekend, when we took the two cars provided out to the next town over, which had what our tiny village did not: a pub. Even with two vehicles, there was not enough room for the fourteen of us going out, so one of the drivers was forced to make two journeys, and one of the girls ended up subjected to the indignity of riding in the boot, which was made even more uncomfortable by the sharp turns of the Icelandic roads.

At eighteen, I was not legally old enough to drink in Iceland, where the drinking age is twenty, but at that point I still despised the taste of anything stronger than fruit cider, so I wasn't bothered at all. They had a pool table and a dart board, and my friends were all loud and cheerful, and I was mostly just delighted to be involved. Being too young also saved me money; the biggest complaint of the night was that all of the drinks were incredibly expensive.

The return trip took us around the far side of the country. I suppose that's the benefit of Only having the one main road; you get to do a complete tour without having to go off track. There was a lot less sleeping done as we made our way around the north side of Iceland. We saw a lot more mountains and waterfalls, sheep and horses grazing alongside them. We made a stop at the famous geothermal vents, walked the crater of a dormant volcano, got lost in the maze of incredible rock formations that was said to be the home of elves.

It was a beautiful journey, but we were all a little sad to be on it. Ten days doesn't seem like a long time, but working and eating and playing together forges bonds faster than you realize. We all had lives to go back to, and we knew we likely wouldn't see each other again. There was talk of organizing a reunion, and many of us exchanged phone numbers and facebook profiles, but it wouldn't be the same.

Arriving at the airport, our group had been whittled down from almost ten to just me and one other person, a man from Paris. Both of us were exhausted at this point, and we both had long waits for our fights - and that was after we caught the bus from Reykjavik to the airport, which did not leave until one in the morning. We ate breakfast together, and said our farewells, and then I was alone again, for the first time since I had gotten into the taxi on my first day there.

My experience of Iceland was very different from the one that most people have when they visit, I think. I didn't visit the hot springs, or see the northern lights. The most I saw of Reykjavik was the buildings I passed on my way to and from my hotel on that first night. I wish that I had gotten the chance to interact with more of the people who lived there. The only real Icelanders any of us spoke to for any length of time were the taxi drivers that ferried us too and from the volunteer building.

Maybe one day, when the world is a little less in turmoil, I can go back there and be a proper tourist. Maybe I'll go in the winter and catch the aurora. Take my family with me and see the sights without the haze of sleep deprivation. But I wouldn't trade the experience that I did have for the world.