Eating rotten shark as clumsy meditation on gradients of travel, or something like that (1)

At the Cafe Loki an Older British Couple tries to describe to a Second Older British Couple just how awesome they are at playing Hearts and as they do the Second Older British Couple looks off into an imaginary horizon and compiles a long list of All The Things They Could Have Done This Weekend If They Hadn't Said Yes To This Stupid Trip To Iceland They Never Really Wanted To Go On In The First Place. The First Older Woman says, "On Monday I go up to the RAF -- those ladies can be a bit mean sometimes, but my can they really play? Which is good for my game because my wits must be about me or otherwise and as such it's improved indeed -- and on Wednesdays we play until 4 and then we break for tea and then we play until we're tired and sometimes the game can go on for hours and I lose all sense of time which is marvelous," and her husband nods his head and says, "You really need to have the terminology down to be competitive strategically in the game but when you do it's just a genuine pleasure."

I do a thing where I think, "Tourists" and I wonder if they came on this trip together or if they all signed up for a Trip To Iceland for Older British People and I decide to transcribe everything they say because: this could be good. The Second British Couple can't even make eye contact with the First British Couple, and then I have one of those complicated moments where I first feel terrible for the Second British Couple because: who hasn't had to sit through one of those conversations before(2)? and then I feel even worse for the First British Couple because: they are just so damn excited about playing Hearts, and how many times in your life do you think you're the Second British Couple when you're actually the First?

Spoiled shark.

I'm thinking pretty much all of that when the two beers and the ramekin of rotten shark I've ordered shows up. In Iceland eating rotten shark is a test of something or other and because it is it feels like something we're supposed to get done. The waiter sets the shark on the table and Brandon says to him, "Do you ever eat this stuff?" and the waiter says, "It's awful" and I drink some beer and Brandon smells the rotten shark and says, "Oh. No."

The rotten shark is "Hakarl", is described in intermittent guidebooks as "awful" and "spoiled" and -- thrillingly -- "putrid", and I've ordered it because I'm vegan(3) and in no danger of ever having to eat the stuff and Brandon is pretty much willing to put anything in his mouth once and so. The Hakarl is about as inoffensive looking a thing as you can imagine -- its just five sugar-cubed sized blocks of shark meat and a toothpick -- but even from two feet away the smell is over-powering and as soon as Brandon puts the first sugar-cubed sized block of shark meat in his mouth his eyes do a thing and he chews and he drops his head and just looks really, really sad. I take a picture of him and a picture of the shark and I drink a little more beer and he eats more and I feel bad for him because he looks so sad and I take more pictures and remind him to check us into Facebook because: he's eating putrid shark, right?

2. About an hour north of Reykjavik there's a crack in the Earth where two tectonic plates are separating(4) at one of those rates that is astonishing to geologists and sounds like pretty much no big deal to anyone else and because this is Iceland a look-out point has been built(5) right at the crack and because a look-out point has been built right at the crack Huge White Tour Buses truck thousands of tourists/hour to check the thing out. The crack is pretty cool stuff: imagine a pair of granite cliffs facing each other separated by a 50 foot chasm and also some waterfalls and clear blue pools of ice cold water and a pretty serious fjord and you've got an idea of what this place is like. But there's the look-out point, and an obelisk inscribed in Icelandic, and one thousand tourists/hour taking pictures of the crack, and taking pictures of themselves standing next to the obelisk.

We had told our driver Eythor that we wanted to get away from the crush of Reykjavek and this is where he has taken us.

We pay two dollars to use the toilet, we take pictures of ourselves looking at the crack and standing next to the obelisk, Brandon buys a post-card in the gift shop, I sit outside at a picnic table. A German family sits down at the picnic table next to me and a sixteen year old German boy gets up and hits the side of the gift shop as hard as he can with his water bottle. The side of the gift shop is tin; the German boy is pretty excited about the quality/volume of noise he has just made and he does it again. Then he does it a lot, and his younger sister starts banging her water bottle against the gift shop wall. Their mother says something in German -- it sounds, you know, German, so I assume she's pretty angry -- and the boy and the girl back up and try to punt their water bottles as hard as they can at the wall of the gift shop. It takes about four tries and then the boy does it and the German family shouts like, "Can you believe what we've just managed to do?"

Blue lagoon

3. National Geographic lists Iceland's Blue Lagoon as one of its 25 Natural Wonders of the World and if you want to visit the Blue Lagoon -- and seriously, you want to visit the Blue Lagoon -- you'll have to fight your way through sixteen or so Big White Buses on your way through the parking lot. Inside, kids run around in their lunatic circles, and American and Danish and Japanese and French families shout across the gift shop at each other in the same exasperated ways that all families shout at each other all over the world, and men with huge camera lenses take photographs of lava rock cairns that the Blue Lagoon staff have pre-stacked for photographers in interesting ways, and ginger-headed Scottish teenagers describe in frank and terrifying ways teenage girls in bikinis they will never actually speak to. Just to get into the lagoon you'll have to spend more time than you'd ever want to spend in a locker room elbow deep in older naked men, older naked men comfortable in their nakedness the way that older naked men can sometimes be, older naked men walking around and making serious conversation with each other naked and elbowing each other naked and showing off This One Dance Move naked and doing that thing where they put one foot up on a bench and just sort of stand there naked.

And if you're anything like me you'll find a corner of the locker room and quietly stand there wishing -- like the Second British Couple -- that you would have done anything this week other than come to Iceland because: all these buses, all these people -- this is just awful.

Bros-in-lagoon...?

And then you'll submerge yourself shoulder deep in a geothermal pool the size of, like, seven football fields and make your clumsy way to the bar and drink the first of the three beers you are allowed to drink at the Blue Lagoon because if there wasn't a three beer limit you'd probably drink 42 of them. You'll smell like sulphur, you'll cover your face in White Stuff because the other thousand or so people in the lagoon are covering their faces in White Stuff too and it looks like fun to smear a bunch of white stuff on your face for awhile? and in the middle of all that noise and joyfulness and heat and steam, in the middle of this milky-white pool of silica and water that the Earth didn't necessarily put-here-for-people-to-drink-beer-in-but-still, 100% of your pretenses about traveling -- pretenses inherited from Paul Theroux(6), and Lawrence Millman, and Andrew Zimmern(7), and Anthony Bourdain, and Every Friend of Yours Who Has Ever Done Anything Cool Ever, which are exactly the same pretenses you have about music, and movies, and television, and pretty much anything -- will immediately drop. That there is any wrong way to travel, that tourism is inherently a bad thing, that gradients of travel exist, that a place where one thousand strangers from twenty or so different countries come together to smear White Stuff on their faces and take pictures of themselves doing it could ever be a bad one.

And your only regret of the day will be having to leave -- wrinkled, pruned, shrunken, photographed -- two hours later.

Tomorrow: We Land in Greenland. And Wow, It's Pretty.
Follow Along on the Twitters: @miketsimpson .

(1). I'm writing this quickly on an iPad from a terrific coffee shop in Nuuk, Greenland whose internet is both a little pricey and "intermittent at best". Apologies for errors in diction, grammar, syntax, typography, factotums, etc.

(2). Yes, you. Of course it has occurred to me also that writing a blog about Things I've Been Doing Sometimes is probably the internet equivalent of the Hearts Conversation.

(3). Every imaginable level of hypocrisy here is crystal clear to me.

(4) I took an Earth Science class in college and came pretty close to failing it because of This One Girl. Which is sort of my way of saying: I don't have any idea what I'm talking about here.

(5) Twice now. The first one collapsed. Because: the plates are separating (see note [4])

(6). Who is the worst writer of his or any generation ever (with apologies to Dale Peck).

(7) Full disclosure: I've spent the last three months thinking my way through a short essay on how much Andrew Zimmern drives me crazy. Right now, the only line of it I have is, "If it weren't for Alexi Lalas, Andrew Zimmern would be the worst person on television ever". Compelling.