Iceland’s Berserk Lava Field in Snaefellsnes a geological wonder
Iceland’s remote west coast is a region rich in sagas and bad-tempered superheroes.
“Trek the Berserk Lava Field.” How do you resist an invitation to “go berserk”? And better still, do it in Iceland, birthplace of the term? You don’t.
Signed-up, I investigate the Old Norse word berserkr, meaning “bear shirt”, which refers to the bearskins worn by Icelandic warriors heading into battle. Locking horned helmets with their enemies, they fought with such fury they’ve been immortalised in both legend and language.
We’re hiking the Berserk Lava Field in Snaefellsnes on Iceland’s remote west coast, a region rich in sagas featuring those bad-tempered superheroes. Snaefellsnes might mean Snow Mountain Peninsula but there’s no snow, at least in midsummer. Or is this another example of the Nordic misnaming technique that sees Iceland having far less ice than its neighbour Greenland, which boasts almost no greenery?
Our trek crosses a lava-blitzed landscape where about 4000 years ago the Earth’s core went, well, berserk. The result is shattered hillsides of red-grey volcanic reflux and surrounding plains that look like a time-rusted desert. Amid this stark beauty small flowers and yellow hawkweed bloom between the rocks, and silence prevails.
The trail is way-marked by tall, conical piles of stones built by travellers. At times it drops down into meadows where summer campers pitch their tents against the rocks. As our half-day of Viking hiking comes to an end, our guide sends us off with a suitably nautical, Icelandic flourish: “May the highest waves of your journey be behind you.”
Twenty million years of volcanic tantrums here have thrown up ridges, craters and lava fields interspersed by a landscape that, in places, is as naked as an Andean Altiplano. To explore it further next morning, we drive 50km northeast of the capital, Reykjavik, to Thingvellir National Park, a doubly historic site. It is, thanks to Iceland being at the meeting point of the North American and European tectonic plates, the most accessible tectonic fissure in the world. We hike here for several hours along the deep rocky clefts formed where the two great plates collide.
Perhaps it’s ascribing too much to geology or coincidence that Thingvellir, where those vast, opposing forces clash, should be the perfect spot for the world’s first parliament. Iceland’s national legislative assembly, known as the Althing, was founded at Thingvellir (“Assembly Fields”) in AD930 and is regarded as the world’s oldest. We find no reconstructed grand long house here, just the elevated Law Rock from where the decisions of ancient chieftains were pronounced al fresco.
“It’s a relief to walk where nothing in the landscape wants to eat you,” reckons Andrew, one of my travelling companions. We’ve just come from east Greenland where our treks were accompanied by a rifle-toting guide on the lookout for polar bears. For our final Iceland hike we head to the roaring Gullfoss Waterfall, which in full flood can flow at 2000 cubic metres a second, which would fill 60 shipping containers a second.
“No waterfall in Europe can match Gullfoss; in wildness and fury it outdoes Niagara Falls,” noted an early tourist in 1907. We first see it as a broad but unremarkable glacial torrent that’s gouged its way through the basalt plain. Rounding a bend, we’re stopped in our tracks by the sight of the massive flow pounding like the hammer of the gods down through a series of stepped cataracts into a fuming chasm.
Come late afternoon it’s time to return to Reykjavik, a prosperous, low-rise city. There’s a decorous old town and a spectacular, pixelated glass opera house, while the rest seems to be architecture neatly incarnated from an Ikea flatpack. Hunting for dinner, we skip local delicacies such as seal, whale and reindeer, and find a simple burger bar with a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack.
Right on cue, along with our burgers and beer, comes Led Zeppelin’s signature Nordic anthem, Immigrant Song, with the Viking-maned Robert Plant howling like a true berserker.
John Borthwick was a guest of Inspiring Vacations and Hurtigruten Cruises.
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