Iceland Day 9 – Epics

Today is a travel day, I have little planned for my journey back to Reykjavik. I pick up hitchhiker on the ring road. A perky young graduate student of environmental science, she tells me that her boyfriend has told her that she can just hitchhike on the ring road to the airport. He works in the tourist industry, which in Iceland seems largely staffed by foreigners, she was a tag-along.

We do visit the Snorri Sturluson Museum in Reykholt. Fascinating story of Icelandic history, Sturluson was not just a poet, but a renowned politician. Unfortunately he found himself on the wrong side of a civil war in Norway, and was struck down in his home in Reykholt even as he asked for mercy. I bought a copy of the Prose Edda, I will read it someday.

I don’t have the heart to tell my student that the hot dog she consumed at a gas station (Icelandic gas stations have tremendous hot dogs, one of the high points of local cuisine) probably contained beef – as a Hindu she is fine with pork and lamb, but cows are sacred.

I drop her off at the airport, kind of in wonder at her, or her boyfriend’s, faith in hitchhiking such a long distance in such a short time/ I feel compelled to warn her against hitchhiking in the US.