Sleeping Around

by Brian Thacker

  ‘Yeah, a scorcher,’ Smári replied without looking up from the screen. ‘We’re expecting a high of zero today.’

  Once you get over the smell of rotten eggs, having a shower in Iceland is heaven. Because there is an endless supply of hot water, you can shower for as long as you like. I only got out after 30 minutes when Smári enquired if I’d fallen through the plughole.

  Smári had an Algorithm Analysis class to go to, so I went in search of some Icelandic goddesses. Ever since I’d seen this photo of fifty of the most perfectly gorgeous Icelandic girls posing in the Blue Lagoon, I’d wanted to go there. I was also hoping that the therapeutic and invigorating waters might help get rid of my cold.

  When I left Smári for the bus station, he was still in underpants watching Babylon 5.

  I began my therapeutic program with a sauna. I had no choice. The inside of the bus was so hot and steamy that I soon stripped down to my T-shirt. I was a little worried that by the time we got to Blue Lagoon, I’d be just like Smári in his underpants (except I’d be wearing my own underpants).

  On the drive out of town it looked as if someone had plonked a brand new two-lane highway on the surface of the moon. Just as bizarre were the brightly coloured houses, a splash of red here and a drop of yellow there, sitting in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility.

  As I caught my first sight of the Blue Lagoon, my attention was caught by the cottonwool balls of smoke drifting up from the geothermal power station alongside. In the midst of this extraordinary vast, monochromatic volcanic landscape was the lagoon itself, which looked more milky than blue.

  ‘The Blue Lagoon holds six million litres of geothermal saltwater (two-thirds saltwater and one-third fresh water), which is piped directly from the source 2000 metres beneath the surface. The water in the lagoon is totally renewed every forty hours.’ I was reading this inside the very sleek and modern information-centre-cum-ticket-office-cum-changing-rooms-cum-souvenir-shop.

  It felt very odd indeed running barefoot in my bathers across a lava field dotted with frozen puddles. Steam was rising in sheets from the lagoon into a bright blue sky as other bathers loomed up in the mist like ghosts. Most were just floating about, while a few were sipping cocktails at the water’s edge.

  The water temperature was perfect. I slipped in and wallowed in the biggest bath I’m ever likely to encounter. There is something surreal about bathing in an open-air, steaming hot pool while the lifeguards are wearing ski jackets, gloves and balaclavas—and wouldn’t have a hope of seeing anyone who was drowning in the mist anyway. The rising steam often blocked out the bright sun, then it would clear to reveal glimpses of the pipes and large domes of the power station.

  There were quite a few people in the lagoon, but no gaggles of gorgeous Icelandic girls. It must have been pension day, because the clientele was mostly drawn from the wrinkly set. Mind you, after 30 minutes in the water I was well and truly wrinkled myself.

  I was doing some serious wallowing when, like angels rising up out of the mist, I saw two girls. They were tall and lithe, with eyes as blue as the Arctic sky, hair the colour of sun, skin as creamy as French vanilla and smiles to warm the coldest northern night. I’d found my dream Icelandic girls. Then one girl turned to the other and said, ‘This place is fuckin’ wicked, innit?’ My Icelandic girls were from East London.

  After almost three hours in the water, even my original wrinkles were getting wrinkly, so I waddled out and had a fifteen-minute shower just because I could. The Blue Lagoon may have nearly taken my breath away, but the job was completed when I saw the price of a hamburger in the Blue Lagoon cafeteria. Thirty-five dollars, and that was without tomato sauce. I was happy to pay the exorbitant price, though, because I’d had the most marvellous morning. And best of all, my nose and stuffy head had magically cleared.

  In my couch request to Smári I told him that I was good at washing dishes and in his reply he had written:

  I don’t do dishes. They happen to end up being done by a grumpy somebody who otherwise resembles me once in a while. You’re welcome to them.

  Every single glass and cup in Smári’s apartment was dirty. He’d even resorted to drinking out of bottles instead of having to wash a glass. When I’d resolved the dirty dishes dilemma, I started to pick up a few of the empty Pepsi bottles and by the time I’d finished I’d filled two huge black rubbish bags.

  ‘Ah, is that what my apartment looks like?’ Smári said when he returned from his Applied Linear Statistical Models class.

  We went next door to the small mini-mart to get some dinner. We both got some pot noodles and some savoury-pastry-type-donut-things. I had no idea what they were, but they were the cheapest thing in the mini-mart. ‘Right, let’s go drink some cheap beer,’ Smári said when we’d finished dinner.

  The cheap beer was to be found at the Mathematics Club, which was housed in their very own ‘clubhouse’ near the university. As we stepped outside the apartment, I glanced up into sky and stopped dead in my tracks.

  ‘Oh my God! Wow!’ I gasped.

  ‘Oh, that’s the aurora borealis,’ Smári said casually.

  The heavens above were dancing in a light show that glimmered and seemed to swirl as pale curtains of brilliantly shimmering green light were drifting across the night sky. I stood there mesmerised.

  ‘That’s just an average one,’ Smári said, as he marched ahead. He had more important things to think about. ‘If we get there too late, they’ll have drunk all the beer,’ he groaned.

  The Mathematics Club was in one of those building-site workman’s huts and was full of seriously intoxicated mathematicians. It took my eyes a while to adjust when I stepped inside because the room was glaringly bright under the industrial-strength fluorescent lights. One entire wall was taken up with a whiteboard that was filled with incomprehensible numbers and symbols. About a dozen students were lounging on couches around a large coffee table covered in empty beer bottles watching two spotty students playing chess. The boys were either tubby and spotty or stick-thin and spotty. There were also three girls in the room and they were all drop-dead gorgeous. Some ‘stadium rock band’ music was blasting out from an iPod plugged into a computer, while a student with long greasy hair jumped around playing air guitar.

  Smári introduced me to a few people, but I didn’t stand a chance of remembering their names. I couldn’t even pronounce them. There was a Gunnlaugur, a , a and a . Or maybe they had simple names, but because they were so drunk that’s what their scribbles looked like when I asked them to write their names down. One fellow was so inebriated that he was barely able to stay upright as he scrawled some complicated formula on the whiteboard. He kept swaying back and forth so he could focus on his chaotic computation.

  We stayed for a couple of hours and everyone was really nice. Oh, except when the swaying student cornered me for twenty minutes to argue that mathematics is better than physics. ‘Do you agree?’ he slurred, poking me in the chest.

  The air mattress did its deflation routine in the middle of the night again, so Smári earned the ignominy of having the lowest couch rating so far:

  Couch rating: 4/10

  Pro: The bed was soft and flat

  Con: The bed went very soft and very flat

  Smári had an Acute Angle lecture (or something similar) to go to, so he suggested that I should go on a tour and see some of the natural wonders of Iceland. I did a quick search on the net and contemplated booking on an Elf Spotting Tour in the lava caves of Hafnarfjodur (many Icelanders apparently believe in elves, fairies, gnomes and trolls), but decided instead to book on a Golden Circle Tour (and for you Australians, it had nothing to do with pineapple pieces).

  I only just made the coach departure from the bus terminal and by the time I got my breath back we’d already driven out of town. After 40 minutes of travelling through moonscape, the landscape changed to the plains of Mongolia, with faded-brown rounded hills dotted with Iceland’s famous little horses. I find that the more I travel,
the more new places remind me of somewhere else.

  As we drove past a small group of trees, our guide announced that it was the largest forest in Iceland. The entire ‘forest’ was no bigger than a football field.

  ‘If you are lost in an Icelandic forest, how do you get out?’ the guide asked us. ‘Stand up!’

  There was a howling wind outside and the trees in the ‘forest’ were being blown horizontal. The wind was also throwing the bus around as if it was a toy, but this semi-cyclone was ‘just a slight breeze’ according to our guide.

  Our first stop was the small village of . ‘The houses in the village are a fine example of baroque architecture,’ our guide told us with a wry smile. The Japanese tourist behind me snapped away with his camera. ‘Ahh, baroque style!’ he gushed excitedly. All the buildings in the village were very simple wooden houses.

  We were stopping in to visit one of the town’s many greenhouses, which are heated by volcanic hot springs and grow most of the island’s fruit and vegetables. The largest was called Eden, but we had to walk through the huge souvenir shop, and past the Adam and Eve toilets, to get to the actual greenhouse. Inside was a lush tropical garden with meandering paths, park benches and a few tweeting budgerigars in cages. Locals come to Eden when the country is under the winter’s gloomy embrace and wander around and have picnics under bright lights pretending they’re in a park on a summer’s day (but not an Icelandic one, because then it would only reach 13 degrees).

  Back on the bus I sat next to a Canadian fellow. I was quite surprised to discover that Nick was also a member of the couch-surfing collective, but he’d bypassed the couch on this particular leg of his journey. He was only in Iceland for a few days, so he’d opted for a comfortable hotel instead (where he probably didn’t have to pump up his bed in the middle of the night). Nick had booked himself on a different tour for each day of his stay. As well as the Golden Circle Tour, he was going on a whale-watching boat trip, a horse-riding tour and a flight to the north of the island to go snowmobiling on a glacier.

  ‘I have done quite a bit of couch surfing in other places, though,’ Nick said.

  ‘Do you have any good stories?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, most people I’ve stayed with have been really nice.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean have you like stayed with any nutters or had any weird shit happen?’

  ‘Um, yeah, I couch-surfed with this guy in St Petersburg who lived in an empty apartment. He had a couch and cupboards and stuff, but there were no pictures on the wall or books in the bookshelf or anything lying about. I arrived late at night and he was just sitting there in this gloomy empty room. The next day I went to check out the city and I dropped into an internet cafe to update my blog. When I got back to his apartment, he said “So you think I’m creepy and you’re worried I might axe you in your sleep?” I’d forgotten I’d told him that I had a blog and he’d read it.’

  ‘Shit, what did he do?’

  ‘He actually turned out to be quite nice and he didn’t try to axe me once.’

  ‘No one has tried to axe me either,’ I said. ‘Actually, everyone I’ve stayed with so far has been lovely, too. I can’t believe how nice people are and how much they go out of their way to help you.’

  ‘I did stay with one couple in San Diego who weren’t very nice,’ Nick said, ‘to each other. They had just split up before I arrived and had moved into separate bedrooms. Over breakfast on my first morning they had this huge fight. When I asked the guy if I could have some milk for my tea, he said “Ask the fuckin’ bitch!” Then she threw her bowl of cereal at him.’

  Gullfoss is a huge and majestic waterfall that roars into a sheer boulder-strewn canyon. Well, that’s what I had been told. I couldn’t see much of it because I couldn’t really see much through my tear-filled eyes. The force-twelve wind was unrelenting and icy drops from the waterfall kept pricking my cheeks, making me gasp. It was the most ferocious wind I’d ever experienced. I fought my way, leaning heavily into the wind, towards the viewpoint, but gave up halfway when a petite Japanese tourist went sailing past me.

  Our next stop was Geysir, after which all other geysers are named. In the middle of yet another vast and desolate expanse was a bubbling hole in the ground next to a colossal souvenir shop and cafe. Like everyone else, I stood with camera pressed to face and finger poised on the shutter waiting for Geysir to erupt. And just like everyone else, I had just put my camera down when it belched spectacularly in front of me. And, yet again just like everyone else, I quickly swung my camera back up and took a photo of the tiny puff of steam that was left drifting from the hole.

  Our last Golden Circle attraction was Þingvellir, where Iceland’s first parliament met in 930. Getting there involved traipsing from the bus across a boardwalk over streams that trickled between undulating, moss-covered lava flows, then climbing up past rocky fissures that reared up like old Viking warriors. The site itself was just a pile of old rocks, but the views over Þingvallavatn, Iceland’s largest lake, were lovely (although that loveliness had a lot to do with my relief that there was no buffeting wind blowing me away).

  After all the other passengers had been dropped off at their hotels, the tour guide asked me where I wanted to be dropped. That was a good question. Where could he drop me? I didn’t know Smári’s address.

  I thought about it for a minute. ‘Um, the deCode Genetics Corporation,’ I said.

  Both the driver and guide gave me very odd looks when they dropped me off at the entrance.

  I got quite excited when I walked into Smári’s apartment. There was a proper-non-collapsing foam mattress on the floor. ‘Johann dropped it off because the Australian girl is staying here tonight,’ Smári said, when he saw me eyeing it off with a longing gleam in my eye. ‘Johann’s girlfriend is coming from the country for the weekend and he wants the apartment to himself.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said glumly.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Smári said. ‘We’ll give her the air mattress.’

  Johann invited us around for an interesting dinner. It was interesting because it’s not often you get served a plate piled high with boiled horse meat and potatoes. Sadly, Benjamin couldn’t join us for dinner. His battery was flat. We were also there to pick up fellow couch surfer Anna, a 21-year-old tall, bubbly girl from Perth. Anna was taking a year off from university, where she was studying literature and history, to travel around the world.

  Johann drove us into town after dinner and dropped us off in the middle of rúntur. Rúntur means ‘round tour’, but Smári more aptly described it as ‘a pub crawl where the entire population gets absolutely wasted’. Every single Friday and Saturday night, the young folk of Reykjavík stroll into and stumble out of bars, dance clubs and beer-soaked coffee houses until dawn.

  It was after ten by the time we got to Laugavegur, where most of the action takes place, and we had to navigate our way through the crowded footpaths, where a sea of Icelanders and tourists, many already in moderate to advanced stages of inebriation, was already partaking in some serious rúnturing.

  We had our first drink and I had my first heart attack at the Pravda Club. A glass of beer was sixteen dollars. You know the drinks are expensive when you buy just one beer and put it on your credit card. In fact, most of the locals were using their credit cards to buy drinks. I imagine there would be quite a few shocked faces when monthly credit-card statements arrive. Cards were simply swiped through a machine and you didn’t have to sign anything or get a receipt.

  After one drink we moved on to a funky, tiny wood-panelled pub (or a pub-ette if you like) where we met up with Smári’s friend Alli, a jolly, huge (in the girth department) fellow. As soon as we walked in, Alli insisted that he buy us all a drink nicknamed, rather ominously, ‘Black Death’. This local concoction, called Brennivin in Icelandic, is made from fermented potato pulp and caraway seeds, and its name literally translates into English as ‘burning wine’.

  ‘Because it burns the shit out of your throat an
d stomach,’ Alli explained just after we’d burnt the shit out of our throats and stomachs.

  The Celtic Cross was next and it looked identical to every other Irish pub in every city around the world. Smári celebrated his Irish heritage by having a Guinness. Smári really was quite the beer connoisseur and he even had a website listing, and ranking, all the different beers he’d tried. So far he had tried 317 beers. And he was only 22. By that age I would have been lucky to have tried three different beers (and one of those was only because there was a beer strike one summer, so you could only buy Swan Lager from Western Australia). The fact that Smári could get hold of so many beers is impressive considering selling beer in Iceland has only been legal since 1989.

  I got the next round and I was a bit worried the barman would say, ‘I’m sorry, but you don’t have enough money on your card. Your credit limit is only five thousand dollars.’

  We sat in a small room where the central table was a large black coffin. Not long after we arrived, we were all standing on the coffin singing Icelandic songs. After the beers and Black Death I was probably singing in fluent Icelandic as well. We met more of Smári’s friends, but it was hard to tell if they were friends he’d only just met. Everyone was hugging each other.

  After the Celtic Cross, I was whisked through dance clubs and bars so quickly I couldn’t keep track. Live rock and dance music boomed out from venues up and down the street, while slim blondes in slinky cocktail dresses waited with their dates behind long rope lines to get into the town’s hippest clubs. To be honest, I couldn’t really remember which clubs and pubs we went to. I seem to remember dancing a lot and handing my credit card over the bar as freely as if I was Eidur Gudjohnsen.

  At some point I lost everyone and wandered aimlessly around the streets because I couldn’t remember the way back to Smári’s place. I must have been a little drunk, because I gave up my child’s inheritance and caught a taxi. ‘Whatever you do, don’t catch a taxi,’ Smári had warned me.