Don't Follow Him............ - a photo on Flickriver

            "You can follow him, but don't follow him!" came the quiet yet authoritative instructions from our driver as he sped us along the dual carriageway that runs through Reykjavík.  "These ones are rental cars, but that one is local.  You can tell by the number on the back of it."  We nodded back at Arni with what we hoped were our most earnest expressions as in turn he examined his new customers carefully in his rear view mirror. 

After all, he was about to hire one of his fleet of VW Campervans to a pair of strangers from a foreign land, neither of whom had ever encountered the notorious roads in his country before.  The fact that Lee once spent 7 months driving his own motorhome around Europe many years earlier was of little interest.  None of those adventures had taken place in Iceland.  Iceland is different.  It has a reputation for challenging road conditions that are almost mythical.  BBC News had reported a terrible accident involving a British family somewhere on the south coast not long before our visit.

When I'd made the initial enquiry a few months earlier, Arni's wife Sigrun wasted no time in getting to the point.  "Are you experienced with a manual gearbox?" was practically the only sentence that accompanied the price for the dates we wanted.  It was a question that surprised me until I realised that quite a lot of their customers would be from North America where rather more people drive automatic cars.  If I'd been asked whether I knew how to drive a car with automatic transmission I'd have been in trouble.

While we waited our turn to complete the paperwork, Arni instructed the father of a Canadian family to drive their rented van around the block.  "We had one man recently who burnt out the clutch after 200 metres," Sigrun explained to me sagely as we watched.  Happily, we weren't asked to show off our driving skills, and a while later we were trundling along excitedly in a northwesterly direction towards the Snæfellsnes peninsula and the black church of Búðir.

It was only a few days later as our clockwise journey along the ring road drew towards a close that a thought struck me.  Iceland is only a little less than half the size of Britain, yet has no more than around 350,000 people living in it, most of whom are in Reykjavík and its outlying towns.  So the rest of the country is almost entirely empty.  So are the roads.  We live in Cornwall, which is rammed full of visitors clogging up our narrow little lanes with high hedges so you can't see around the corners every summer. Driving through Iceland is a doddle in comparison to the journey I have to make just to get a pint of milk.  Well it is in summer anyway.  The 1,700km journey had been entirely without incident.  One man had glared at me impatiently through his windscreen as I rolled very slowly over one of the many single track bridges at Jökulsárlón, but that was about as controversial as it got. This picture shows a busy road in Iceland.  Not a special photo that I'm excited to share, but one that tells a story.

When we arrived back at our hosts in Reykjavík, Sigrun and Arni had headed up north to rescue another customer who'd had an incident.  So perhaps I'm wrong.

Taken in: Iceland / Northeast / Hörgársveit (show map)

Taken on: July 15, 2019

Tags:

Iceland

ring

lorry

travel

Mountain

flowers

outdoor

adventure

Cloud

sky

wilderness

Europe

landscape photography

landscape

emptiness

empty

truck

car « less

Sets appears in: • Book - Landscape • Iceland 2019

Groups appears in: • Iceland. • Amateur Landscape more » • Iceland - Landscape • Flickr Social Club • Flickr Social « less

Camera: Canon EOS 80D, f/11.0, 1/80 sec, 24mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 80D
Lens:	EF24-70mm f/2.8L USM
Aperture:	f/11.0
Exposure Time:	0.013 sec (1/80)
Focal Length:	24mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 9.3 (Windows)
Show full info

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