Kuku Cooking On The Go - Iceland

 

All travellers know this. Exploring Iceland in the cold and misty season is not to be taken lightly. You need to make sure you have everything you need to not die. That includes, of course, having a heated mode of transport that you won't freeze in. If you don't know that before landing in Iceland, hopefully a couple of locals will explain the importance of it to you before you get on the road (...thank goodness for the conversation with Ásgeir and Hjalti).

The trusted heated steed of these ukulele adventures in Iceland. And a guy waving a ukulele.

A very important part of keeping warm, is eating warm food. And another part of it is the nice warm fuzzy feeling you get when the food is delicious. If you're lucky and/or super smart, you'll be touring the land of easily upset giants with a mobile house that has everything you need to do both! And as I was pretty lucky, I did just that.

The kitchen, living room, bedroom and music room all parked next to the Borgarnes Church

So, to demonstrate survival with a taste for tasty food, a first in these Ukulele adventures, a cooking show straight from the Icelandic roads:

As you can see, the trick is to adjust the dosage of the butter.

Not only is it a useful and probably necessary way to survive, cooking can also be a welcome distraction from the vast stretches of fog.

"Fog!"

If ever it feels like you're driving on the moon, and the landscape is more repetitive than a charts song, except with lots of fog, just pull over, and make soup.

The trick is to use an instant soup, and then add small bits of random vegetables. It counts. It's cooking. And the bread was fried in butter, so, definitely, cooking.

Not vital, but also very important: cleaning up after the warmth of the food has settled into your body.

Keeping the workstation orderly: number two priority

These Ukulele Road Trips are cooking, driving, and all round adventure-ing with Kuku Campers, the life saving exploring-enabling very nice people from Reykjavik., and playing and singing with CloudMusic ukes, perfect for misty mornings. And afternoons.

Support the adventure by donating or on Patreon !

another picture of the fog, in case you mist it

Bárður's Lament - Rauðfeldsgjá Gorge, Iceland

 

Lost in the bewildering Snæfellsnes peninsula, West of Iceland, a natural landmark speaks volumes of a grief still bare. In an eery ravine carved in the wayside mountain, the walls echo the pain of loss, the water trickles with restless doubts, and birds above swirl like unwanted memories of wrath-filled deeds.

Down by the entrance of 'the ravine of Rauðfeldur'

It is in the Rauðfeldsgjá gorge, in the IXth Century, that the revered and powerful half-giant Bárður, blind with fury, committed the murderous irreparable:

Two of his young nephews had been playing with Bárður's beautiful daughters. The eldest daughter, after a tussle, landed on an iceberg by accident and drifted away to the North. The half-giant, fuming with anger, took his nephews high up into the mountains. One of the them, Sölvt, was pushed off a nearby cliff, and the other one, Rauðfeldur was thrown to his death in this very ravine, which now bears his name (Rauðfeldsgjá Gorge means the Gorge of Rauðfeldur in Half-Giant).

The bare landscape of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, where the Giant Bárður's still roams

It is believed that Bárður to this day, comes by this open tomb still. And as you sit by it, and wings flutter above the gorge, you may hear wandering thoughts, the pain of the one who did wrong, and unbearable answers, though never question asked.

After breaking the skull of one boy from a cliff and throwing the other in the ravine, Bárður was confronted by their devastated father, his half-brother Þorkell. They fought and Bárður broke his borther's leg, leaving him to crawl home.

"When I do wander, aimlessly far,

When the whirlwind brings thoughts from a distance,

And in the walls of my dungeon, the ceaseless blame of the water

Cousins do lay in the canyon, echoes of a grief I did father"

Rauðfeldsgjá gorge, themystical crime scene, home to sea gulls and echoing grief

After this event Bárður became unstable and recluse, the tormenting grief getting the better of him.

"And I've had many a sleepless night, beneath this roof, and beneath these stars

Where I lay my weary head, and doubt builds a stronghold,

For to see the guilty let free and roam,

or to bear the pain of the one who did wrong, I hear their distant call, piercing from beyond"

Bárður is an essential charachter of Iceland's history and this tragic event changed him forever. Son of a titan and of Mjöll, a beautiful human woman, he led the very first expedition to establish a settlement in Iceland when refusing to pay tax to the Norwegian King. He brought many men as well as his 9 daughters with him.

Waging war, fighting, killing Titans and traitors were no strangers to Bárður's life. But after the events at the gorge, he left his farm Laugarbrekka  with all his belongings and retired secretly to caves inside the mountain. After this disappearance, the repentant warrior came to be known as Bárður Snæfellsás, ever watching over the Snæfellsnes peninsula.

Bárður would later be revered as a God and called upon for blessings and the safety of the Snæfellsnes peninsula

If you like happy endings of sorts, or irony, you'll be glad to know that Bárður's daughter Helga was actually fine. She drifted for a few days, landing in Greenland. She stayed there for a while with one of her dad's friends who happened to have settled there a year before. She then made her way back to Iceland a couple of years later via Norway.

But the peninsula will have been marked forever by these dramatic events.

A view from onto now peaceful (probably because it's Winter) peaks of Snæfellsnes

Thanks for reading,

The adventure #GoingNorth is made possible by the good people on the Patreon, of which you can become one here,

and by KukuCampers as well as the ukes I'm travelling and singing with on this frosty adventure, CloudMusic Ukuleles.

Checking the itinerary at the wheel of the Kuku Camper Van, you don't want to get lost on the peninsula and bother Bárður

A Landscape 'from Ymir's Flesh' in Djúpalónssandur, Iceland

 

"From Ymir's flesh

was the earth created,

from the bloody sweat, the sea,

cliffs from bones,

trees from hair,

and from the head, the heavens"

from "The Lay of Grimmir" quoted in "The deluding of Gylfi"

Many men and women, through centuries and civilisations, desire to know how the Universe was born, how it all came to be. A small number of those only, refuse to have their thirst for knowledge unquenched.

Gylfy, a King, was one such man, defying ignorance.

He tricked his way into the company of the great trinity of Gods, High, Just-as-High and Third. And then he asked them:

'Who is the highest or the oldest of all the Gods? Where is he, what is he capable of?'

High replied: "The wisest most powerful God, the All-Father, lives through all Ages and governs all things in his realm." Then Just-as-High said: "He made heaven, earth and the skies and everything in them." Then Third said "Most important, he created man and gave him a living spirit that will never die, even if the body rots to dust or burn to ashes."

'What was the beginning or how did things start? What was there before?'

High said: "Early of ages when nothing was. There was neither sand nor sea, nor cold waves. The earth was not found nor the sky above."

Gangleri's quest for knowledge is rewarded with stories of Seeresses, Wizards, Sorcerers and Giants. "The old frost giant, him we call Ymir". As the icy rime melted it revealed a cow, which then nourished the 'evil' Ymir. And as the cow fed herself, licking salty blocks of ice, Buri, the first man, beautiful and strong, appeared from them. He had a son called Bor.

'The sons of Bor killed the giant Ymir.'

'They took Ymir and made from him the world. From his blood they made the sea and the lakes. The earth was fashioned from the flesh, and mountains from the bones. They made stones and gravel from the teeth, the molars, and those bones that were broken'.

Blood, sweat, flesh and bones of an ex-frost Giant on the black beach of Djúpalónssandur

Gangleri is well impressed:

'It seems to me that they accomplised great things when the earth and the sky were made, the sun and the moon set in their places and the days divided.'

Surrounded by a living landscape...

"And from his eyelashes

the gentle gods made

Midgard for the sons of men;

and from his brains

all the oppressive

clouds were formed"

The remains of a tooth, on Djúpalónssandur beach. I think it's a molar?

As recounted in Snorri Sturluson's The Prose Edda 

Thanks for viewing/reading. This #GoingNorth Adventure is strumming away on CloudMusic Ukuleles and travelling in the coolest vans of Kuku Campers !

If you're as brave and gracious as a son of Bor, you can (if you fancy) donate to the adventure or support me on the Patreon !