How I arrived a girl... and left a Fisherman!!

I shouldn’t have packed those snow pants, or the five pounds of granola, or the motion sickness pills for that  ‘15 hour drive’ to the work camp.  But when one hears the word ‘workcamp’ all sorts of scenarios come to mind, like forced manual labor/starvation/brutal cold/no running water.  I should have looked at the map, I wasn’t going to North Korea!  It took about 4 hours to get there on nicely paved roads, and we were greeted by being shown to our hotel style housing (with running water!) and a delicious three-course meal (where I was introduced to the bread that I would become obsessed with for the following two weeks).  I was one of ten people coming to volunteer in Heydalur (http://www.heydalur.is/), a developing guest house in the West Fjords, where they offer sea kayaking, horseback riding, and natural hot springs to guests and pool cleaning, rock moving, washing dishes, painting, cement making, and wall building to volunteers (with the fun stuff mixed in).  The people in the volunteer work group were from Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, France, and South Korea. My roommate was a Swedish girl named Emma who within the first few days was bitten by a very mildly domesticated Arctic fox (I even use that term loosely).  I told her that if she started foaming at the mouth I would have to kill her… as far as I know the verdict is still out.  

 We spent most days working around the farm helping with whatever was needed and eating delicious food cooked for us by Stella, the retired school teacher who at ~70ish spent all day in the kitchen cooking us amazing meals (although perhaps a little heavy on the cauliflower).  In order to combat the fatness that was approaching from our daily cake break at 4pm, we spent a lot of time hiking after work and walking down to the waters along the fjords every morning.  On our days off we were able to do some horseback riding, sea kayaking (with seals), and hiking to the ‘top’ of the fjords, which we never seemed to truly reach.

After two weeks we were all ready to leave; I know this because we all began imitating the talking parrot Cope, it wasn’t pretty...Overall it was an amazing experience and I saw and did things that I never expected going into this work camp, such as: learning how to use a hammer!  I also caught a fish, gutted it and removed all of its bones and sliced it up (I left the cooking part to Stella, no one wants a microwaved salmon).  Another unexpected highlight was seeing the northern lights while sitting in a hot pot.

We all became close over the two weeks we spent in Heydalur, and it was strange to be back in the BIG, HUGE city of Rekjavik and saying goodbye.  But I told them not to be too sad, you never know when Derek and I may be crashing on your couch!

As we were leaving we passed on the legend of the Japanese man in the cage to our replacements, compliments of Cecile, the Danish girl working there for about 4 months (that’s a long time without outside communication…).  We told our replacements that in Iceland since there is such a low population it isn’t worth building a prison, so in the West Fjords each valley gets one prisoner and they are to leave him in his cage, but feed him leftover scraps for which the government compensates them .  We went on to explain that the system is all well and good except that sometimes the local prisoner gets loose and tries to bite people; we even showed them a bite that Anna (a German volunteer) had gotten from a horse.  We told them to watch out when they are hiking, never go alone, and to always be alert, because he is stealthy and hungry since all he gets to eat is leftover fish heads.  We thought that it would be obvious that this was just a joke but they really believed us muhahaha…so the legend lives on….