Wednesday, July 22
Travel time: 3 hours 20 minutes
Distance: 250km
Destination: Hafnarhólmi rock
Today was supposed to be a non-travelling day. But we’ve only ticked off four of the Icelandic Big Five – whales, geysers, waterfalls, glaciers and puffins – so I decide to drive 125km north through the mountains to a puffin colony. I start the day with a run along the shoreline, which quickly teaches me that Arctic terns can be every bit as aggressive as buzzards if their nests or fishing grounds are encroached on. After a couple of divebomb attacks I surrender and retreat to the safety of the village.
The road to Hafnarhólmi winds up and down a steep mountain pass with hairpin bends before dropping down to the village of Borgarfjörður, which exists almost entirely in servitude to the puffins. The birds‘ own domain is surprisingly bijou, extending to one large rock overlooking a tiny inlet that is teeming with fish. A network of wooden staircases and platforms brings the human visitors close to the puffins, who seem completely unfazed by their presence. They squat on tufts of grass, apparently contemplating the vagaries of their existence, before diving down to grab a fish and fetch it back up. The quirky thing about puffins is that they store their catches in burrows that pockmark the side of the rock. Their second favourite pastime, after diving for fish, is snooping around in empty burrows in search of a free snack, and their third favourite is squabbling with other puffins if they catch them ransacking their supplies.
Rodrigo, our guide from the previous day’s tour, commented that cloudy days were the best time to see puffins, because they find it harder to spot the fish in the water and spend less time flying, so “you can get a good picture”. But I want to see movement, not puffins squatting passively on the edge of a cliff like stuffed toys. The perpetual cycle of puffins shuttling back and forth from the grassy rock to the water and back up again has a metronomic beauty, like a fugue. I’m captivated by the way they take off, waggling their feet in synch with the flapping of their wings, the kamikaze-like dives towards the water, and the turbocharged return to the rock. In between dives they dry their wings in the sun, huddle on the edge of the rock and hopefully peruse the unguarded burrows. I see a puffin disappear into a burrow and wait until its rainbow beak emerges in the grass-fringed entrance as it waddles back into the sunlight.
I take more pictures of these eccentric, diligent birds in an hour than I have in the entire rest of the holiday. My favourite is of a puffin sitting upright on a tuft of grass, one wing outstretched, as if delivering an epic speech to its brethren. Their entire world is a constant commute of a few hundred metres between the rock and the water; in some ways they are a microcosm of Iceland itself, a corner of the world that lives by its own rules and thrives in defiance of the odds.
We stop at the puffin colony café, where three drinks and three slices of cake relieve my bank account of nearly €50, and pick up some souvenirs from The Puffin Embassy, a roadside cabin that sells all kinds of puffin-related memorabilia. We have lunch at the top of the mountain pass, overlooked by a row of snow-capped mountains that are starting to look mundane after a week here. In the evening I go for a walk up the hill behind our chalet with my younger son, to take some pictures of the bay and drink in Iceland’s bewilderingly extravagant scenery one last time. Later on we even see something resembling a sunset, or at least a reddening of the skies behind the mountains, a sign that the season of perpetual light is drawing to an end. It feels like our cue to leave.
