HOW TO RUN ACROSS ICELAND?

Most travellers spend weeks to find out the best way to travel around the country. Since there are no trains in Iceland, my partner and I were left with only two options, to take a bus or hire a car. Instead, he decided to run across Iceland and were amazed by its beauty and wonderful discoveries.

RUNNING ACROSS ICELAND. The funny thing is that running in this glorious scenery is often intensely boring. Why? Because the sky and the landscape of glaciers, mountains and lava deserts are so immense, the road so damned straight that nothing changes over long distances. It’s like being on a treadmill in a palace. You glance up occasionally and marvel, but most of the time you’re just praying for a bend in the road that will offer a change of scenery or pace.

ICELAND IS GREEN. When Erik the Red, banished from Iceland for football hooliganism or the contemporary equivalent, sailed west and made landfall, he did a bit of creative labelling to entice his countrymen to go and live in this ice-covered territory, naming it ‘Greenland’. Iceland, by ironic contrast, is green. Not all of it, but when it is green, it is glaringly, dazzlingly, eye-rubbingly green. Lime-coloured moss meanders through the landscape, lining the edges of streams. Grasses glow. Shrubs shine. And in among them are alpine and meadow flowers of all colours.

EGLISSTADIR – ON THE EDGE. On a fine sunny morning, my partner and I reached Eglisstadir, the eastern tip of Iceland and much to the amazement of the school going children, started to run back in the direction from which we had come. “Where are you going?” asked one. “To Reykjavik”, we said with a smile. 

We were running across Iceland. We decided to do so, because we thought it would be fun and a great way to see Iceland. We were taking the southern route, part of which climbed over passes and along the tip of the Vatnajokull Gracier. The first half of the journey was a great experience when mountains, rivers, glaciers and volcanoes began to unfold in front of us.

THE GOLDEN CIRCLE. After Vík we pretended part-time to be tourists and headed inland to see some of the sights in the so-called ‘Golden Circle’. This route encompasses Geysir, site of the geyser after which all the others in the world were named and of other spectacularly spouting, bubbling and boiling thermal features; Gullfoss, a waterfall of Niagaran splendour with a right-angled bend between its two enormous drops; and Þingvellir, a rift valley that separates the North American tectonic plate from the European and is widening by 2 cm a year.

ABOUT ICELAND. Iceland stretches about 540 km east to west. Norwegians were the first to settle it, in the 9th and 10th centuries, beginning in 874. It claims many firsts and oldest. Icelandic is the oldest continuously existing language in Europe and has changed little since the days of the sagas, except in its pronunciation.

Life expectancy in Iceland is high, unemployment is low and the country has a literacy rate of close to 100%, the highest in the world. Reykjavik, the capital, with a population of around 175,000, in a national population of a bit over 285,000, has an astonishing variety of cultural offerings: seven libraries, eight historical museums, nine art museums, nine theatres and more than 30 professional drama groups.

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