Iceland has been my mania for a long time. Kayaking has been bubbling up but has been my newest mania for a little while, but particularly right now, as I attempt to enact a plot I actually have no control over whatsoever. Anyway, the moment I discovered that this book existed, via Lee-Anne Fox on Twitter, I had to run off and order it. Iceland by Kayak is by Nigel Foster, a man who writes books about kayaking and adventures and married the two together here, about his expedition to circumnavigate Iceland by kayak back in 1977. As this was only published in 2023, it’s also a nice reminder that if you want to write a book, it doesn’t have to be about a recent experience – maybe not the takeaway he expected when he wrote it but something I like to keep in mind. This book was pieced together from his journals, mostly – invaluable things! – and probably with some help from old photos and videos and now here it is in one nice chunky book.
The book starts with his journey to amateur kayaker – actually, it starts with yet another of my loves, with him caving. For Foster, caving “was both love and hate”. Paddling, presumably, was more or less pure love. Throughout the adventure, you see plenty of negatives – bad weather, lack of food, the sheer physical challenge – and yet at no point does he complain about how he hates it. I guess this is type 2 fun, so far removed that it seems inconceivable he could have hated it at the time. Anyway, we follow his journey into kayaking, into building and modifying kayaks, into having the idea and finding a partner and then we set off via the ferry. In 1977, the ferry made stops in Scotland as well as Denmark and the Faroes and it was realistic to drive up to Scotland with two kayaks strapped to your Mini and jump on a ferry to Iceland. Of course, that’s where the adventure begins.
The ferry gets into Seyðisfjörður and the journey is done clockwise, following the south coast, up the west coast, round the Westfjords and back via the north coast. The reason for this direction is that the south coast is a vast expanse of absolutely nothing, just mile after mile after mile after mile of grey sand and they wanted to get it over while it was all still pretty fresh and while they still had food supplies. No shops, no shelter. This is the hardest part of the journey. And it absolutely is, even if my land-based tourist mind says “that’s the most-visited part of the island!”. It is, but even today, there are barely half a dozen points along the entire south coat where tourists actually stop. Even with the expanded network of roadhouses, cafes and small supermarkets, I’d want to be well-provisioned before setting off from the east. In fact, I made that very mistake myself last summer. I drove from Egilsstaðir without stopping for lunch, just eating crisps off the passenger seat, wondered why I was in such a bad mood by the time I reached Skaftafell ten hours later, had nothing but a slice of cafe cake there, and had to wait another 24 hours before descending on the big supermarket at Vik. Even in a car, that’s basically two days with no convenient food stops. Imagine it in a kayak!
The bit that stuck with me the most, therefore, was the difficulty in getting food during the early part. They’d brought long-life food specifically for the long south coast but it got eaten by mice while they waited for the ferry in Scotland. I don’t know what Seyðisfjörður was like in 1977, whether it was practical to go to the supermarket there before setting out – presumably not – but they went with very low food supplies and spent a chunk of the south coast hunting and fishing. There’s a particularly… is gruesome the right word? page about catching and preparing herring gulls and my 2024 sensibilities winced at hunting and eating puffins.
The food situation gets better. Their adventure gets into the Icelandic newspaper and journalists and curious locals catch up with them from time to time. Pretty much everyone they encounter is quick to feed them, almost invariably inviting them in for coffee and cakes, regularly sending them off with fish or taking them on bumpy gravel roads to the nearest shop. Back then, it seemed unusual to encounter Icelanders who spoke much English, whereas now it seems unusual to encounter any who don’t speak it at all. The journey is frequently broken by bad weather preventing them from launching and they often find or are given somewhere to shelter – “we’re not using this house this week, you can stay here”, “this is my uncle’s lighthouse, you can stay here” etc. On the south coast, they often stay in emergency shelters, a bit like Scottish bothies, which were built for the survivors of shipwrecks to wait for conditions to improve enough to be taken back to civilisation. I wondered if those still exist. I’ve never noticed them along the south coast – along a lot of it, they must have been swept away by glacial floods over the last few decades.
When I picked up the book, I wondered if I could paddle around Iceland in a kayak. I’m a sea kayaker, if not a very skilled or experienced one but how hard can it be? I’d barely got to the end of the first chapter after they set out before realising it’s too hard! Quite apart from the sheer distance, the sea around Iceland is a mess of tides, strong currents, rocks, shores you can’t land on and violent North Atlantic storms. It’s one thing to go out with a professional guide for a couple of hours on a nice summer day. It’s quite another to spend nine weeks on your own kayaking all the way around. You’d probably have a support vehicle on land trailing you these days, too. Someone with your tent and your dry clothes and a never-ending supply of food and hot drinks, waiting to pick you up and take you to the nearest campsite, where your tent is probably pitched and waiting for you, or to a guesthouse. These two – Foster’s kayaking partner is Geoff Hunter, who’s a better kayaker but perhaps someone who’s a little less chilled with setbacks – are entirely on their own, camping on beaches in a tent that never seems to dry out and gets more and more ragged by the day. Everything does – the clothes, the shoes, the stove, everything except their determination and optimism.
I guess that’s a feature of this kind of adventure book, the fact that the adventurers don’t give up, that they’re not of a quitting mindset. It just kind of astonishes me that there’s no “lowest point”, where everything is going badly and they have to take a break to mentally swear to continue come hell or high water, there’s no point where the adventurers have to turn to philosophy and mental strength to carry on, there’s no moment of doubt. There are a few moments when they’re delayed by tides or bad weather so the worst you get for not being able to go on is a sense of yearning for the storm to be over and to get the kayaks back in the water as soon as possible. I don’t think there’s any point where you have any doubts about their eventual success. I don’t read a lot of “man vs death big epic adventure” books but the rule of storytelling is that you’re supposed to have a big low in order to have a big high and that doesn’t happen here. And that’s a good thing, it’s not me criticising the way the story is told or the way reality played out. I like that there’s no agonising over “this is too hard, we’re going to die, we’re going to starve, we’re going to cut limbs off, why are we doing this, oh look, we triumphed over the deepest adversity”.
I also enjoy seeing Iceland pre-tourism boom. I guess the open sea isn’t going to change much over nearly fifty years but the idea of some of these places being so remote, where there are no shops, no access to fresh food or water, is just so alien. And some of it hasn’t changed. There really are no settlements within walking distance of the ocean along much of the south coast, even now. If you’re driving the Ring Road, you need to stock up at Egilsstaðir because other than diverting to Djúpivogur or Höfn, you’re not going to find much in the way of settlements until you reach Vik, nearly 300 miles later. I suppose I’m being unfair on Kirkjubæjarklaustur, which does have a couple of small supermarkets. It’s easy to forget that although Iceland is a colossal place for tourism in this day and age, a huge amount of facilities are still concentrated between Reykjavik and the Golden Circle, that the Ring Road doesn’t go anywhere near the coast for a huge proportion of its distance and that little coastal fishing villages don’t often have supermarkets and public water supplies and convenient cafes.
I really enjoyed Iceland by Kayak. I don’t think I want to do that journey myself but I definitely want to see more of Iceland’s tamer bits of coast by boat, preferably self-powered, if I can. I’m not going to be in Iceland this summer but maybe next year, that’s what I’ll do. Instead of hopping from geothermal pool to volcano, I’ll hop from kayak rental to kayak rental. Five stars, recommended, do read this if you have any interest in Iceland, paddlesport or human-powered adventure.