After the constant rain of the last few days, it was wonderful to be out in the bright sunlight, so I thought some hiking would be in order. I walked through the quiet valley of Skálafell, a place of no particular importance from a touristic point of view. The valley, tending northwest by southeast, is defined by high plateaux on either side. Even this early in the year, there are some patches of fresh snow on top. The slopes curve down in almost perfect arcs. The bottom of the valley has some rich grazing land, and is dotted with sheep, cattle, horses and ducks, all amiably grazing together. Icelandic sheep, which are very fluffy and look like cartoon sheep, don’t seem to flock as tightly as the breeds I’m familiar with. You see them alone, or in twos or threes, but seldom larger groups. The Icelandic horses are very strong looking, with muscular-looking shoulders. The ones I saw had a broad mix of coats. At this time of year, they don’t have their shaggy winter coats, so they don’t look strikingly different, other than being a bit small. I saw some of them grazing far up the slopes, where it was extremely steep.
I passed numerous gulleys, side valleys, and narrow waterfalls tumbling down the slopes. Off the road, the ground was sometimes hard going. Where there is soil, there is usually a tangle of berry bushes, saxifrages and sedges, with intermittent patches of grassy pasture. Where rock predominates, the going can be very tough, as the ground is littered with jagged boulders and cut up by confusing creeks and patches of bog. The boulders are everywhere — fragments that have been pushed around randomly by glaciers over millions of years.
Buildings are few and far between, despite the fact that this is good agricultural land by Icelandic standards. The valley terminates dramatically at Hvalfjörður (Whale Fjord).
I got a ride going west along the fjord, around Mount Esja, and back into Reykjavik. The driver was a retired sheet-metal worker, who had owned a small factory that processed raw metal from Belgium into siding and roofing. He had sold it for his retirement shortly before the Crash, so he and his wife, a retired elementary school teacher from a fishing village in the north, were doing fine. But the factory has since gone into receivership and shut down, tossing its employees out of work. How many honest enterprises like that must have perished in the melt-down, engineered by Conservative crooks and ideologues? These were not the con-artists lolling about in the chic restaurants of Reykjavik, and renting million-dollar apartments in Manhattan or Paris. They were hard-working, practical people doing useful work before Everything Fell Apart.
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