I was initially expecting this to be the harrowing tale of the love/hate relationship between a girl and the vehicle she was tied to as both transport and accommodation – of how I hated driving it but loved that I could stop at any campsite and just climb into the back and go to sleep.
It’s actually a lot more complex than that.
Let me introduce you to the van. It’s a Renault Express panel van, based on the Dacia Dokker which is in turn built on the same platform as the Renault Clio. Two seats in the front and a bed in the back. The last time I hired a van in Iceland, it was the Dacia Dokker and it had a mattress laid in the back and a storage box unit built approximately over my knees. This one has a frame to support the bed and all storage is now underneath. You’re supposed to pull out the second half of the shelf at night and push the second mattress over onto it to make a double bed but I very quickly realised a) that’s a lot of effort b) I can’t get at any of my stuff c) it covers the only door handle that works from the inside. So I left the bed as a single and just slept on a double-height mattress.
Two years ago, I hired a car and drove around the Ring Road. It took seven days, I basically hopped from hot pool to hot pool and by the seventh day, I was still no more comfortable with the car than I had been when I first picked it up. I never got used to where the sides and corners are; I spent more time watching the mirrors to make sure I hadn’t crossed the centre line and wasn’t about to hit oncoming traffic or gone too far the other way and wasn’t about to hit the yellow marker poles than I did watching the road ahead. That’s what I was particularly nervous about with the van, that I’d hate driving it and be stuck with it for two whole weeks.
Driving it turned out to be no problem.
Ok, I never particularly enjoyed the moments when I had to shift down from sixth gear to fifth; my own car doesn’t have a sixth gear and manoeuvring the stick that way feels weird but within a hour, maybe an hour and a half, I realised I was driving merrily along and barely glancing in my mirrors at all – I mean, not out of paranoia that I was veering out of my lane, anyway. By day two, I was overtaking full-size motorhomes on winding fjord roads (Icelandic roads, despite their winds and bends, often have spectacular forward visibility, allowing you to overtake very safely and comfortably on bends because you can see the next car approaching over a mile away). I didn’t love reversing – with no rear side windows, you can see what’s directly behind you and you can see what’s next to you but anything in that massive blind spot, any car coming into the car park and not yet directly behind you is absolutely invisible. On the other hand, with the massive wing mirrors and a bit of empty space, I found I could casually reverse park in a way I’d never dream of doing with my own Panda.
What I didn’t get entirely comfortable with was living in the thing. There’s very little in the way of storage. I put my big red duffel bag under the bed but the food bag had to just live on the floor, where any kind of braking made everything slide forwards at high speed. The shelf at the back where the other half of the bed should have gone made an ok shelf for drying swimwear, where wet stuff didn’t touch anything else and mostly it stayed put. But things like my book and scrapbook and cameras – where does that go? While I was parked, it mostly lived on the little fold-down table that would have been a couple of inches above the other bed. But when I left, that lot was in full visibility from the back windows. So I put it on the bed, under the sleeping bag. Last time I had a van, I just left everything on the side of the big mattress I wasn’t sleeping on and never worried about it at all – all the storage was in the form of a big Ikea drawer set-up that completely blocked the back windows. Better for reversing, terrible for security.
I was thinking this morning (hi from the shores of Mývatn!) that I don’t know how vanlifers do it. But I do. Usually the vans are bigger and they always have carefully thought-out storage. That’s the problem I have here; lack of good personalised storage. A small space like a van needs “a place for everything and everything in its place” and I was just leaving most of my stuff on the floor.
That was the post a few days in, when I thought the van and I had got our relationship settled. Then I got to Akyreyri.
The last time I stayed in Akureyri, the campsite was right in the middle of town. Swimming pool one side, mini supermarket another and diagonally across from the Edda summer-only hotel I stayed at. Two years ago, I discovered that it had vanished, which is why I camped just across the mountain at a little green valley called Systragil. This year, I wanted to give Akureyri a chance (and go to the Forest Lagoon in the evening) so I stayed at the campsite just to the south of the city. For the record, it’s 4.4km on foot from the new campsite to the old one. I know. I walked it. Both ways.
It wasn’t the fact that it’s so far out of town that bothered me. It was the fact that although it was four o’clock in the afternoon, the place was already so busy that finding a space for a small van that wasn’t pressed up against someone else was already difficult. I imagined what it would be like the next night, when I came back from the Forest Lagoon at 8 or even 9pm or even later. Would there be anywhere to camp at all? Would I want to spend a landmark birthday evening after a lovely soak in a lagoon, driving around screeching and stressing because there was nowhere to park?
That’s why I left the van in my precious spot and walked the nearly 9km round trip to the pool that evening and then ran away back to Systragil the next night after the Forest Lagoon.
The same problem the next two nights at Myvatn. Bjarg is a lovely campsite. I camped there in my little yellow tent two years ago and twelve years ago and I automatically return. But when you have a van, you either park in the car parking spaces above reception or on the opposite side of the site and when I came back from Myvatn Nature Baths (shut up, I love geothermal pools) just before 10.30pm, I realised this too was a car park and with nowhere to park. I got lucky; having driven to the bottom and turned around with difficulty, there was a lovely space at the top that I’d initially disregarded. But it was a parking space and that’s not camping.
Another issue I had: I’d picked a spot in a pretty empty field at Grettislaug a few nights earlier and then a van came and parked six feet away and then put up an awning whose ropes were close enough that I’d trip over them if I left my van in a careless hurry. That wasn’t even on a busy site and it certainly wasn’t at a busy time of evening, not at 3 or 4 in the afternoon. There was literally space to park anywhere else and I wish I’d at least been passive-aggressive as I got in my van and moved it to the opposite side of the field. That same night, a couple of girls (with a mind-boggling amount of stuff that couldn’t possibly fit in a two-person panel van like mine) arrived late. Yes, it was a lot busier than when the morons came and pitched on top of me but it wasn’t so busy that they needed to push through the ring of vans around the perimeter of the field and park directly in front of me. That’s effectively my front garden and it absolutely demolishes any idea of camping etiquette to shove in there. If there’s one thing I’ve realised over the last few days, it’s that I do not like van campers. I’m sure vanlifers are fine but people who’ve hired a van are some of the most intolerable people I’ve ever met – and I had a minor altercation with a cruise-coach tour group this morning who needed to be torpedoed so I don’t say that lightly.
I’m surprised at how different the first few nights were to the rest. From Akureyri on, camping was more like parking in a very busy car park. Often on tarmac rather than grass and always with neighbours less than an armspan away. I began to learn to park with the starboard side of the van, where the back door slid open, against something so I could at least have the door open without staring straight into a neighbour’s van.
So my relationship with the van in three parts:
Driving it: to my surprise, great. We’re good. Liking driving it.
Living in it: jury’s still out. It’s not really set up for living but as I listen to the rain on the roof for the third or fourth night in the row and imagine that on my tent again, I see the advantages.
Campsites: on the basis of campsites alone, I’m bringing the tent next time. I’m serious. I can live with the rain. I’ve camped in Iceland for years; I’ve dealt with it. A tent will hold your spot when you get back from an evening dip. A tent doesn’t require you to spend the night in a literal car park. No one pitches up two feet away when you’re in a tent. You can escape the vans and the possibility of headlights being switched on – I admit, it’s because they’re rustling around in the back but there’s a car almost directly behind my van right now with its lights going on and off and the thin little curtains will do nothing to block that out. If I had my tent, I’d be on the other side of the campsite with half a dozen tents no less than twenty feet away from me and there would be no lights at all – in the whole two weeks I was away, I never saw anyone needing a torch to get across the campsite. It gets a little darker than I fondly imagine, dark enough that you need full lights to drive, but it’s never quite so dark that you need a torch.
I Am A Polar Bear 