An inauspicious journey

Reaching for my toothbrush in the darkness of an October morning, my phone threw itself out of my pocket and into a watery toilet grave. Its untimely death - and miraculous resurrection in the stuffy cabin of an Airbus over the North Atlantic - was indicative of things to come.

Arriving at our hire car (a Toyota 4x4 covered in scrapes with a large dent in the side) we laughed at the cheerful mechanic’s reassurances not to worry about scratching it. One day later, I was between the underside of the car and a pile of frozen snow, hacking at the ice coating the axle with a tripod for an ice pick.

I had watched as we crossed black sand covered with yellow grasses and huge boulders like some kind of alien prairie, tiny flowers just surviving in the openness. Rivers cut across the road, and we splashed through with glee. We passed higher and began to see small mountains, snow piled up on the side of the tracks in places: and then the car wouldn’t move further.

Despite the initial panic that accompanies being stranded in the middle of a landscape which looks like Mars on a remote Icelandic road, I felt surprisingly calm. The blueish stormclouds appearing in the sky turned the grass amongst the black rocks dark; the snow on the surrounding mountains appeared all the brighter. I retrieved the trangia, and set us to work boiling and funnelling water to melt the ice accumulated on our journey across the soon-to-be-closed F225. I suddenly realised that instead of fear, I felt genuine elation. In the most bizarre and entrancing environment I had ever experienced, I was responsible for the outcome of my situation. It even began to be funny – the two of us flopping around on the floor, heating water on a trangia with comically uncontrollable flames, desperately hacking at a car with hugely unsuitable tools. Three hours later, our companion spun its wheels and reversed free of the snowbank we’d been stuck in. Whilst it was clear we were no longer going to reach our destination, I forgot the photographs I’d planned. I opened my eyes and my lungs to the amazing place I’d found myself in, and appreciated the incredible, stark beauty of the landscape which had changed our course.

And after all, with an experience like that on the first day, what else could go wrong?

Sixteen days, a broken tent, a smashed camera, an exploding trangia, a (very large) chip in our windscreen and many meagre meals of pistachios later, we drove back through the heavy snow to drop off our car.