Motorworld (6 page)

They can take you for a ride in a nitro-powered Jeep up a sheer cliff face. You can drive a snowmobile across the sea. You can pay £80 for a bottle of house white and you can have dinner with a girl who has completely see-through skin, but you won’t be paying attention because here, night does not necessarily follow day.

Life for the rest of Planet Earth is a mishmash of unpredictability but there’s always one inescapable fact – every single night, without fail, the sun
will
set.

But up there, from the end of April to the middle of September, night is like easing the dimmer switch down
a couple of notches. And in the middle of June, it doesn’t happen at all.

At three or four o’clock in the morning, it’s as light as it was at three or four o’clock in the afternoon, and that is spooky. You can go up to Sneffels Yokul, where Arne Saknussem set off in
Journey to the Center of the Earth
, to watch the sun kiss the horizon, and then start rising again.

Not surprisingly, this peculiar aspect of life in the far north has had an effect on the people who live there. They don’t behave like human beings. If Darwin had come here instead of the Galápagos Islands, he’d have deduced that, on the evolutionary scale, man followed on from the hedgehog.

In the summer months, the Icelander doesn’t really do much sleeping. And at weekends, he doesn’t do any at all.

When they finish work in Reykjavik on a Friday night, they go home, have some drinks, get changed, have some more drinks and then at 11.00 p.m. they go out: all 125,000 of them.

This can be a bit of a shock if you’ve arrived from Earth. The first time I went there, ten years ago, I wandered around at eightish looking for a restaurant, not really surprised that the streets were deserted. This, after all, was the northernmost capital city in the world and it was a bit chilly.

But as I sat with a plate of fish and coleslaw, I couldn’t help noticing that as the night wore on, the tables were filling up, and then some. By midnight, there were queues of expectant diners going right out of the door.

So I took out a mortgage, paid up and left, whereupon I was thrust into the world’s biggest party. If you could combine Live Aid with a papal visit to Rio, you’d get something that, compared to this, was a village fête.

Everyone was hog-whimperingly drunk. As Björk put it recently, ‘What’s the point of having a glass of wine every day? It’s a waste of money, a waste of time and waste of wine. Why not wait till the weekend and drink a litre of vodka all in one go?’

So they do. The teenagers, those too young to get into the endless array of nightclubs, fill massive Coke bottles with nine parts vodka and one part Coke and get so pissed most of them walk round backwards.

And then, if they’re girls, they get pregnant. Iceland has the highest rate of illegitimacy in the world because most teenage girls have a child at sixteen which is then brought up by their parents. They are then free to have a life without worrying about the biological clock. They say Bangkok is the sex capital of the world: it isn’t – not by a long way.

And nor is Monaco the epicentre of partydom. Reykjavik has that one all sewn up, too.

The gathering, which starts on a Friday at midnight, goes on until Monday morning when people go directly from their disco to work. It’s bizarre but they really do seem to have developed sleep patterns based on the tortoise. You’re awake for six months, and then you’re not.

Anyone planning to invade Iceland would be advised to hit the beaches some time between November and
February because no one’s awake. Mind you, you could go in June too because everyone is rat-faced.

Everyone, that is, except the huge gangs of bikers that roam the streets at night with massive Mad Maxian hogs and biblical hairdos. ‘What,’ I asked nervously, ‘do you do?’

I expected them to say they barbecued virgins and danced naked in front of ceremonial fires but this was not quite the case. ‘Oh,’ said one. ‘We campaign for safer roads and lower insurance rates. That sort of thing.’

How come you’re all sober? ‘Let me make one thing absolutely plain here,’ said another, who was wearing a US tank-driver’s helmet. ‘No one in Iceland drinks and drives. You see, this is a small community and if you get pissed and knock someone down, there’s a strong chance you will know them. And if you don’t know them, it is absolutely certain that you will know someone who does.’

And feeling duty-bound to go to the funeral of someone who you killed is, well, a little embarrassing.

For the same reason, you can leave your car and your house unlocked. When I asked a policeman how much car crime there is in Iceland, he genuinely didn’t know what I was on about.

So you have more time to worry about murder then? And that got him too. In Iceland, in the last ten years, there have only been a dozen cases of homicide and most of those were crimes of passion – the type where Plod arrives to find the wife dead and the husband sobbing away in a corner, smoking gun in hand and explaining to anyone who will listen that he didn’t mean to kill her.

It’s not all sweetness and light, though. For the most
part, people are pleased to welcome foreigners who’ve come to do something other than fish, but there’s a significant number who reckon you’re gate-crashing their party.

They’re living up there, on their funny rock, having a ball in a crime-free, stable and fantastically rich country and they don’t want yobbos from the real world sticking their noses in. More than once I was told to ‘fuck off back to America’.

I stayed though, because Iceland is my kinda town.

It is four-fifths the size of England but they have the biggest glacier in the northern hemisphere, 100 active volcanoes and rivers that change course every day. There are no trees and it’s not unknown for new islands to spring up off the coast from time to time.

Iceland is located right where the American and European continental shelves meet and that makes it the world’s biggest geothermal playground too.

A lot of the rock in Iceland is warm to the touch because, just a few hundred feet below the surface, it’s still molten. Steam pours out of the ground and huge chunks of the place smell worse than the Japanese underground on a bad day.

Then there’s the blue lagoon. Not far from the main airport at Keflavik, where the American air force is based, you’ll find a hot lake of the most improbable turquoise. Below the surface, things go even more bonkers. Here the water is so hot that the whole country gets free baths, central heating and power without having to burn a single hydrocarbon.

One man told me that Iceland has enough free and eco-friendly power under its surface to keep Western Europe going for a thousand years. Then he fell off his bar stool.

And then there’s the town of Geyser which has given its name, the world over, to a huge water spout. The great geyser hasn’t strutted its stuff for years but there is a selection of smaller ones that gurgle and slurp away most of the time and, every seven minutes, shoot a plume of boiling water 70 feet into the air. It would be quite a sight in, say, Barnsley, but in Iceland you might even call it dull.

This is because to get there, you’ll have driven past Gull Foss, a waterfall of such drama and power that your ears start to bleed. My eyebrows went green too.

Then there’s the spongy moss which has turned a monster lava field into the world’s biggest mattress, the black desert and the complete absence of agriculture. Eighty per cent of Iceland’s mad interior is common land, given to the people by the world’s oldest parliament.

And remember, I’m talking here about a people who sleep all winter and party all summer, a people who, by any sense of the word, are crazy.

They just don’t play by the same rules as the rest of the world. There is no Icelandic word for ‘please’. Until very recently, beer was banned, even though spirits were not. There was no television on Thursdays. They don’t even have proper surnames.

When you’re born, you are given a name by your parents, which is normal enough except it must come from a government-approved list.

Your surname is your father’s Christian name with ‘son’ or ‘dottir’ tacked on the end. So, I would be called Jeremy Edwardson and my daughter, Emily Jeremydottir.

Weird stuff, but not as weird as the prices. In 1994, when we were there, petrol was nearly £5 a gallon. A bottle of wine in a pizza joint was £65 and dinner for two in one of the endless fish restaurants cost the same as four television licence fees. I’ve framed my hotel bill and it now hangs in the hall to amuse visitors.

The national pastime up there, apart from going to the bank twice a day, is statistics. Chat to an Icelander for more than a minute and you’ll learn that they’ve produced more chess grand masters and Miss Worlds than any other nation on earth. But this is not surprising because all the men have beards and look like Nordic facsimiles of Greek philosophers, and the women look like angels. Björk is the only one who’s odd, and they’ve exported her.

But you need to delve into their motoring culture to get the real picture – to see just how mad this place is. Take a look in the history books to see what I mean.

The first car arrived on Icelandic soil in 1904 but with no infrastructure and no spare parts it soon died. However, rather than simply throw it away, its owner would push it up a hill and charge inquisitive visitors a small fee for the privilege of rolling down to the bottom in it.

There was even a car factory once. Back in 1941, a ship carrying 104 kits was on its way from America to Sweden, where they would be made into Dodge saloons, when it became stranded in Iceland because of the war.

An Icelandic mechanic was dispatched to the States to get a job in the Dodge factory while a small factory was built in Reykjavik. By the time it was ready, he knew how the cars were made and he did just that in less than a year. Sadly, in rather less time than that, most had been eaten by the winter weather so that today only one remains in active service… as a chicken run.

Then there’s motorsport which, until recently, was impossible because road-traffic laws applied everywhere. You could have built a racetrack but it would have been subjected to the blanket 70kph speed limit.

However, in 1981, they changed the law and Iceland went motorsport barmy, to the point that today, every weekend, central Iceland echoes to the sound of what are by far the most powerful race cars in the known world.

To the casual observer, they’re Jeeps, but this is like calling a Michelin three-star lunch a snack.

They have Detroit V8 engines and four-wheel drive, but that’s about all they have in common with what you see cruising up and down the King’s Road on a Saturday. The tyres, for a kickoff, are two feet wide and equipped with scoop-like flaps to give extra grip. The chassis are massively altered too, elongated and beefed up so that they stay in one piece after a 100-foot drop.

Then there are the engines, which must be capable of getting the car up the 100-foot climb in the first place. They are, basically, tuned V8s of 5- or 7-litre capacity but, for that little extra something, when you hit the gas hard, ultra-cold nitrous oxide is brought into play, giving a total of 900 horsepower.

To put that in perspective, Michael Shoemaker’s Benetton develops somewhere in the region of 600 bhp. These Icelandic Jeeps are absolutely terrifying, a point that was hammered home when Gisli Jonsson, the current champion, took me out for a spin.

The course is laid out over what, in Britain, we’d call a quarry. And what you do is drive up the walls, the idea being that the first part of the climb is nearly vertical and the last ten to twelve feet, completely sheer. And you get no run-up.

Once at the top, you turn round, come halfway down again and then, turn round on a slope that looks virtually vertical, crab along it and then go straight up again. To describe it as impossible is to underestimate the seriousness of the task.

Gisli agreed that some of the slopes were, indeed, out of the question, but added, ‘We’ll give them a try anyway.’ Then he hit three-quarter power and with the wheels spinning like a washing machine on its final spin cycle we rocketed skywards. And, as the front wheels hit the vertical part of the wall, his right foot welded the pedal to the metal, the nitro kicked in, my kidneys exploded and whoosh, we were at the top.

Except ‘whoosh’ is the wrong word. I have stood underneath a hovering Harrier. I have heard a brace of Tornadoes do a combat-power military take off. I’ve seen Judas Priest live and I’ve been in a Formula One pit when they’ve taken a V10 to 17,000 rpm, but these sounds are whisper-quiet compared to Gisli’s Jeep. We’re talking bird song at the World Pile-Driver Competition.

With such a massive assault being mounted on one sense, the others go into shutdown, which is a good thing because my eyes simply refused to believe what was happening.

I’d been told that the nitro needs to come in at the exact moment the rear wheels hit the vertical part of the slope, causing them to bounce away from the rock face and thus, hopefully, causing the car to rock over the lip. It didn’t make much sense at the time and having done it, it makes even less now.

But there was worse to come. On the way down, Gisli swung the wheel over to the left so that we drove across this sheer rock face.

He had no gear-changing to worry about – it’s automatic – but even so, things often go wrong. Cars roll down the banks all the time but that said, in ffiteen years, no competitor has ever been injured. This, frankly, was cold comfort, because I was scared out of my mind – and I’m talking about scared in the bowel-loosening sense. The last time that someone was this scared, he was about eight and he was having a nightmare about some headless monsters eating his mum and dad.

Three things stopped me from asking Gisli to stop. First, I’m British. Second, I couldn’t make myself heard. And third, I was sitting on my arms to stop them flailing about if we rolled. So I simply sat there, wishing to God that I was an accountant.

And then it was over and I went for a ride on a Yamaha Wave Runner.

Nothing odd in that. You did it a hundred times when
you were on holiday. Aha. But have you done it in an Icelandic lake, while wearing jeans? No? I thought not.