I am very fond of a good independent coffee shop. This is Filter and it’s quite fine, but I’m not particular. It’s a special pleasure if you can happen upon one unexpectedly while travelling and then have awhile to linger with the locals.
For one, I loved the title of this article. For another, it made me HUNGRY. I want to go back to New Orleans TOMORROW.
New Orleans
PEOPLE here despise FEMA, insurance companies and anyone who has anything to do with levees.
But in a city with postal service so spotty that delivery of a magazine is cause for a party, a magazine writer from New York has moved to the top of the New Orleans hate list.
For eight pages in the November issue of GQ, Alan Richman, a veteran food writer, talked trash about New Orleans and its food. He did not just take a few jabs at some subpar gumbo. The man essentially called New Orleanians fat, lazy and too hung over to recognize good food. Mr. Richman suggested that before Hurricane Katrina, many of the big-name Creole restaurants — and here he may have a point — had the stodgy stink of 1950s French hotel food and might not be worth saving.
But what provoked the most vitriol was his assertion that there is no such thing as a Creole.
“I have never met one and suspect they are a faerie folk, like leprechauns, rather than an indigenous race,” he wrote. He added that “the idea that you might today eat an authentic Creole dish is a fantasy.”
That claim had the unifying force of an invitation to a seafood boil. An agitated city attacked.
“I’d like to throw him in the back room at Tipitina’s with all the Neville brothers and see if he still thinks Creoles don’t exist,” said Poppy Tooker, a cooking teacher who was raised in New Orleans.
Like some others involved with New Orleans food, she offers a vulgar gesture when Mr. Richman is mentioned. That’s because to say Creoles don’t exist is to deny the very culture that makes New Orleans different from every other city in the United States.
“You cannot live in New Orleans and not know what it means to be Creole,” said Greg Osborn, a New Orleans Public Library archivist and historian who is Creole. “There’s a connection among all Creoles that goes beyond the color of your skin.”
But when you try to get people to agree on just what a Creole is, you start to think Mr. Richman might be right. Ask six Louisianans to define it and you’ll get 12 answers.
“It’s the name everyone wants to be called but no one can tell you what it is,” said Dickie Breaux, owner of the Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, a Cajun restaurant and music spot a couple hours’ drive west of New Orleans.
Louisiana Creole scholars use a textbook definition that transcends race and ethnicity. They say anyone whose ancestors were born in Louisiana during colonial times is a Creole. But Creole also means a genetic mix of colonial settlers, indigenous people and slaves, so it has a racial connotation. In Acadiana, the Cajun homeland in southwest Louisiana, Creole can be code for anyone who is not white. In New Orleans, some use the word to denote people of color with some white ancestry, but it is also claimed by white descendants of the French settlers.
The word has a larger meaning to people who live here. It takes in everything they are most proud of. It encompasses architecture, in the form of Creole cottages, and music, both zydeco and early jazz. And, of course, there is Creole food.
Not that any of that mattered much to Mr. Richman, who never liked New Orleans, although he came here on his honeymoon several years ago. (He is recently divorced, but insists he doesn’t blame the city.)
He says he was simply trying to write the first unsentimental piece about New Orleans food in a world in which having a contrarian opinion is no longer valued. “You have to be behind everything these days,” he said. “You have to be behind the president, you have to be behind New Orleans.”
After his article appeared, Mr. Richman was pilloried by bloggers. An e-mail petition called for his firing, based on “racist invective.” A spitting mad Brett Anderson, the food writer for The Times-Picayune, took him on in print, writing that “Richman’s story is a weakling’s idea of what it means to be tough.”
Despite the public pummeling, Mr. Richman is unrepentant.
“If people want to call themselves Creoles, fine,” he said. “I am now calling myself a tight end for the New York Giants.”
Leah Chase, 83, the city’s most revered Creole cook, hadn’t read the magazine. She is preoccupied with trying to reopen Dooky Chase’s, her restaurant, which was soaked in five feet of water. But she had heard plenty about it.
Last week, standing in front of her Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer, across from her restaurant in the Tremé neighborhood, she pointed out that she happened to be a real live Creole and that she cooked like one, too. But she was too polite to criticize Mr. Richman outright.
“You can never understand what is in a man’s heart,” she said.
One way to understand Creole food is to compare it with Cajun food. Creole is fancy and urban; Cajun is simple and country. Creole gumbo has tomatoes; Cajun does not. Creole dishes rely on butter; Cajun on pork fat.
The most important measure, though, is to remember that what ends up on the Creole plate is determined by who one’s grandmother was. The Creole kitchen has been touched by countries including Senegal, Gambia, Cameroon, Haiti, Spain, Cuba, Germany and Italy. The common denominators are the raw ingredients that grow in southern Louisiana and a cultural dip in French haute cuisine.
“It’s a better cuisine than any of them individually,” said Marcelle Bienvenu, one of Louisiana’s longtime culinary authorities.
Of course, like any culture’s menu, Creole cooking has expanded and contracted with every change that has rolled through town. Sometimes it has been for the better, as when the Italians brought artichokes and red gravy or when Cajun and Creole food met in Paul Prudhomme’s kitchen. Sometimes it has been for the worse, as when the lure of the tourist dollar turned some classic restaurants into Creole Disney.
After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in late summer and early fall of 2005, home cooks and progressive restaurant chefs found that classic flavors like shrimp rémoulade and Creole cream cheese were as important to the city’s recovery as a good contractor, and easier to find. That added extra sting to Mr. Richman’s article. He attacked Creole culture exactly when people in New Orleans had become serious about preserving it.
One positive post-storm development has been the revival of old recipes. This year Ms. Bienvenu reissued her Cajun/Creole book, “Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux?” (Acadian House Publishing). It has helped rebuild many cookbook libraries lost to the hurricanes.
She is also helping The Times-Picayune pull together a new cookbook. Less than two months after Katrina hit the city, the newspaper’s food editor, Judy Walker, began asking readers which recipes they had lost, and engaged more fortunate readers to fill the requests. She prints them in a reoccurring column, rebuilding the recipe files of the flood victims and turning young generations of cooks on to dishes they hadn’t heard of.
One dish that will be in the book is beef daube glace, which speaks to the fancier aspirations of Creole food. A proper Creole table in the 18th and 19th centuries was often set with slices of the daube, which traditionally requires a daunting day’s work boiling calves’ or pigs’ feet to make the gelatin that binds a mixture of boiled beef and chopped vegetables.
It appeared regularly at the réveillon, the meal served after midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and on New Year’s Eve. In the 1980s several restaurants tried to reignite the tradition by offering réveillon menus in December.
A more modern version of beef daube glace was developed in the early 1990s in the kitchen of Mr. B’s Bistro, a French Quarter restaurant that is still being renovated post-Katrina.
Gerard Maras, then the executive chef, dug through old cookbooks and talked to people who had eaten it for years before developing a dish that had the same flavor and texture but a more modern approach. Ms. Bienvenu will include it in the new book.
Barbara Trevigne doesn’t know much about beef daube glace, but she does know about the Creole link sausage called chaurice. A social worker, preservationist and performing artist, Ms. Trevigne calls herself a displaced Creole of color. She is living in a FEMA trailer while her soaked home is being rebuilt in the Seventh Ward, which is considered the most Creole of the city’s neighborhoods and which took on several feet of water.
She is waiting for a chance to fry some local chaurice, which takes its name from the Spanish chorizo and the French saucission. Ms. Trevigne used to buy hers from a local sausagemaker who lost his business to the flood.
“I miss all the food in the Seventh Ward, but I really miss that sausage,” she said.
Chaurice is highly seasoned with a slightly loose texture. Traditionally made with a mix of beef and pork, all-beef or all-pork versions are more common now. Its bite comes from black and red pepper, its depth from garlic and green onion tops, and its color from a handful of paprika.
Vance Vaucresson is from a Creole family that has been making chaurice for more than 100 years. Katrina took out the family sausage operation on St. Bernard Avenue, but a competitor from a nearby suburb of Metairie has allowed Mr. Vaucresson to make chaurice there while he rebuilds.
Mr. Vaucresson can talk about Creoles and sausage for days, but he was more excited last week when he watched rice fritters called calas boil in a pan of hot oil.
The cala (pronounced cah-LAH) has roots in Ghana. In 18th century New Orleans, Creole women of color who had the day off from their domestic jobs sold them out of baskets, shouting, “Calas, belles, calas tout chauds!” (Beautiful calas, very hot!)
Save for a few Creole grandmothers, who made them for special events like First Communion and Mardi Gras, calas had almost faded away.
Since Katrina, they have reappeared in some restaurants, as a dessert or in the form of savory fritters made with wild rice and smoked catfish or with duck confit.
Ms. Tooker, who is not a Creole, became an unlikely savior of the cala. She has been making it for years at festivals and in cooking classes, and has used her position in the national Slow Food organization to raise the fritter’s profile. She makes the batter with baking powder, which traditionalists argue is all wrong. Some people think yeast gives the modern cala the flavor they remember from childhood. Other purists suggest no leavening at all, with a batch simply mixed the night before and allowed to gather natural bacteria and ferment in a warm place overnight.
For modern-day Creoles like Mr. Vaucresson, the leavening doesn’t matter a bit. What’s important is that one more piece of Creole history is being pulled back from the edge of extinction.
He stood in Ms. Tooker’s kitchen last week, eating calas as fast as she could pull them out of the hot oil.
“Whether it’s a good cala or bad cala doesn’t matter,” he said. “Any cala is a good cala because someone is still cooking them.”
He only wished Alan Richman had been in the kitchen to try one.
Roses, a lounge that stays open till 5 a.m.
BERLIN is like New York City in the 1980s. Rents are cheap, graffiti is everywhere and the air crackles with a creativity that comes only from a city in transition. And few cities are changing as profoundly. Nearly two decades after the Berlin Wall tumbled down, the city’s two sides are still locked in a kind of cultural dialectic, as the center of gravity shifts to the once desolate boroughs of the East. Bullet-scarred buildings are metamorphosing from squatters’ homes, to artists’ studios, and then to retail showrooms. Gray Communist alleys are laboratories for trendy bars, restaurants and galleries. And, like the city itself, Berliners continue to reinvent themselves as cultural vanguards, pushing the boundaries of art, fashion and design. With so much to explore and create, the city never sleeps.
Friday
3 p.m.
1) REICHSTAG AIRLIFT
Berlin is a big city, about eight times the area of Paris, so get your bearings. Follow the tourists to the Television Tower, the Sputnik-like needle in Alexanderplatz (www.berlinerfernsehturm.de ; 8 euro admission, about $11 at $1.36 to the euro). Or, for more intimate views, head to the Reichstag. Skip the hourlong line by making reservations for afternoon tea at the Dachgartenrestaurant, or roof garden restaurant (49-30-22-62-99-0; www.feinkost-kaefer.de). Afterward, you’re free to loop around the glass igloo.
5:30 p.m.
2) TRANS-EURO EXPRESS
Sightseeing mainstays like the triumphant Brandenburg Gate, the crystalline Potsdamer Platz (www.potsdamer-platz.net) and the sobering Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (www.holocaust-mahnmal.de) are within an easy stroll. But don’t miss the Hauptbahnhof (www.hbf-berlin.de). Opened in May, the glass-and-steel spaceship is the Grand Central Terminal of Europe, a great place to watch daily life unfold.
9 p.m.
3) NOTHING WURST
Forget Bratwurst. For lighter versions of Teutonic cuisine, try Schneeweiss, a nouvelle German restaurant in the Friedrichshain district, Berlin’s equivalent of the Lower East Side (Simplonstrasse 16, 49-30-290-497-04; www.schneeweiss-berlin.de). Dishes like grilled trout in a red wine sauce and pork ragout in a red berry coulis are served in a sparse, candlelit room that draws young couples and trend-conscious diners. Entrees rarely exceed 12 euros.
11 p.m.
4) NIGHT OUT AT SPROCKETS
Stay in Friedrichshain. The smoke-filled cafes around Simon-Dach-Strasse are full of young Berliners priced out of the central Mitte district; beers are usually under 2.50 euros. Later, cross the Spree River into the borough of Kreuzberg, the former punk quarter and Turkish enclave that is experiencing a Williamsburg-style revival. The bars and clubs along Oranienstrasse offer something for everyone. For rollicking music, strut to S036 and hear live bands like Napalm Death (No. 190; 49-30-414-013-06; www.so36.de). Or, for drag queens and plastic Virgin Marys, sashay a few doors down to Roses, a kitschy lounge that sparkles until 5 a.m. (No. 187; 49-30-615-65-70). The night is still young, so pick up a copy of Zitty ( www.zitty.de), a biweekly arts magazine, or Exberliner (www.exberliner.com ), an English-language monthly, for the club of the moment.
Saturday
Noon
5) MITTE ART MILE
O.K., you’re still asleep. But when you do wake up, you’ll need some fuel before hitting the much-hyped art scene in the Mitte district. Do both at Monsieur Vuong (Alte Schönhauser Strasse 46; 49-30-3087-2643; www.monsieurvuong.de), a Vietnamese restaurant that serves as a kind of high school cafeteria for the neighborhood’s galleries. A spicy bowl of glass noodles with chicken is 6.40 euros. Then hop over to Auguststrasse, Mitte’s Art Mile, where the buzz originated at places like Galerie Eigen+Art (No. 26; 49-30-280-66-05; www.eigen-art.com) and Kunst-Werke Berlin, the city’s answer to New York’s P.S. 1. (No. 69; 49-30-243-45-90; www.kw-berlin.de). Like SoHo in its pre-mall days, the galleries can afford to be refreshingly uneven and irreverent. And new ones open every month. Goff+Rosenthal (Brunnenstrasse 3; 49-30- 4373-50-83; www.goffandrosenthal.com), an offshoot of a Chelsea gallery in New York, opened three months ago and showcases emerging artists from Berlin and elsewhere. For a handy gallery map, pick up the free Index ( www.indexberlin.de ).
3 p.m.
6) POSTMODERN SHOPPING SPREE
I shop, therefore I am. While global brands like American Apparel and Diesel have recently colonized Mitte, low rents mean that concept stores, micro-boutiques and street-wear designers are still around, blurring the line between gallery and galleria. Comme des Garçons opened one of its clandestine temporary stores in a hard-to-find alley (Brunnenstrasse 152; 49-30-280-45-338; www.guerrilla-store.com). Über is a retail chameleon, so it might sell handbags one month and garden crows the next (Auguststrasse 26A; 49-30-6677-90-95; www.ueber-store.de). And the Apartment looks like an empty white box, until you descend into the dark cellar crammed with fashion labels like Bernhard Willhelm and Caviar Gauche (Memhardstrasse 8; 49-30-2804-2253; www.apartmentberlin.de). How does anyone in this underemployed city afford 300-euro shirts?
7 p.m.
7) SAND, SUDS AND SAUNA
Ponder that question at one of the groovy beach bars that have washed up along the Spree. There’s the U.F.O.-themed Space Bar in Friedrichshain, behind the longest extant section of the Berlin Wall (Mühlenstrasse 63; 49-30-4606-84-91; www.space-beach.de). The BundesPresseStrand has two pools and a glass pavilion near the Reichstag (Kapelleufer 1; www.bundespressestrand.de). But the favorite of the skinny jeans and fauxhawk set is Badeschiff, just east of gritty Kreuzberg (Eichenstrasse 4; 49-030-533-20-30; www.badeschiff.de). During the winter, its swimming pool, on a barge, is cocooned under a bubble tent and turned into a floating sauna.
9 p.m.
In another sign of Berlin’s ascension, the city now boasts 10 Michelin-starred restaurants, 4 of them in the former German Democratic Republic. But as in Paris and Hong Kong, good food is not confined to white-tablecloth establishments. Take Altes Europa, a smoky tavern in Mitte (Gipsstrasse 11; 49-30-2809-38-40; www.alteseuropa.com). For around 15 euros, you get Old World ambience, a smart-looking crowd and bistro-quality fare like plump green salads, velvety soups and tender steaks. A neighborhood gem, to be sure, and one that isn’t rare.
11 p.m.
9) NEO-WEIMAR
Few streets have mutated as much as Oranienburger Strasse, the spine of Mitte. A squatters’ row as recently as the late 1990s, the street is now littered with bars and tourist traps that recall Bleecker Street on amateur nights. For a glimpse of Berlin’s quickly fading underbelly, grab a beer at the Tacheles art house (No. 54-56A; 49-30-282-61-85; www.tacheles.de), the ruins of a former department store that feels like the inside of CBGB’s legendary bathroom. Then flee to White Trash, a cabaret and tat- too parlor that resurrects the Weimar Republic inside a gaudy Chinese-Irish restaurant (Schönhauser Allee 6-7; www.whitetrashfastfood.com). Packed with out-of-work artists, punks rockers and assorted freaks, it’s fringe Berlin at its finest.
3:30 a.m.
10) ‘BEST CLUB IN THE WORLD’
Maybe it’s the hypnotic techno, hedonistic frisson or illicit party favors, but globe-trotting clubbers rave about Berghain, a huge disco in a weedy stretch behind the Ostbahnhof station in Friedrichshain (www.berghain.de; admission 12 euros). How else to explain the 45-minute wait at this ungodly hour? According to its detailed Wikipedia citation, “Berghain is best-known for its decadent, bacchanalian, sexually uninhibited parties which often continue into the following afternoon” And some stay even longer.
Sunday
1 p.m.
11) BIRDS AND BEERS
Need a break from the über-hipsters and existential banter? The huge and green Tiergarten — Berlin’s central park — is an urban oasis popular with joggers, bird-watchers and nude sunbathers alike. To shake off last night, take a long stroll through this swampy former hunting ground. Drop in on the pandas and penguins at the Zoological Garden and Aquarium (Hardenbergplatz 8; 49-30-254-010; www.zoo-berlin.de). Or grab an outdoor seat at Cafe Am Neuen See, a calming beer garden and restaurant that sits on the edge of a lake (Lichtensteinallee; 49-30-2544-93-00). It is your quiet time in Berlin.
3 p.m.
12) TRADE YOUR EUROS
Despite the lousy exchange rate, you’ll be surprised by how many euros you have left. Use them along Strasse des 17. Juni, the park’s main transverse, which turns into Berlin’s oldest (and priciest) flea market on weekends. Forage for early-20th-century antiques, used books and a jumble of odds and ends. Alternately, for some East Village flair, make a beeline for the Sunday flea market at Boxhagener Platz. It’s crammed with funky T-shirts, vintage Kraftwerk vinyl, plastic housewares and plenty of genuine junk. Don’t forget your camera: the crowd trends toward purple-dyed punks, nose-pierced vamps, dreadlocked crusties and, everyone’s favorite, aging hippies. In other words, it’s the 80s all over again, but with even more kitsch.
The Basics
Continental Airlines flies nonstop to Berlin from Newark, and Delta flies nonstop from Kennedy. Flights start at about $400 this month and take about eight hours on the outbound leg. Berlin’s tiny Tegel airport is five miles from the city center. The 20-minute taxi ride costs about 20 euros ($27 at $1.36 to the euro).
Sleep in grand style at the Hotel de Rome, the latest from the luxury hotelier Rocco Forte (Behrenstrasse 37;49-30-460-60-90; www.hotelderome.com ). Opened in October, it occupies a former bank in Mitte, just off Unter den Linden. The 146 rooms are spacious, furnished in Art-Deco and neo-Classic styles, and start at 380 euros a night.
For modern style at a moderate price, check into Lux 11 (Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse 9-13; 49-30-936-2800; www.lux11.com ). With rooms starting at 99 euros, the boutique hotel keeps costs down by eschewing daily maid service and 24-hour attention, and focusing on what matters to its fashionable guests: sleek design.
If that’s outside your budget, try the nearby Circus Hostel (Weinbergsweg 1A; 49-30-2839-14-33; www.circus-berlin.de ). Clean, friendly and efficient, the hostel has private rooms with baths starting at 62 euros for a double; dormitory-style bunks start at 17 euros.
A farmhouse near the Ring Road in Iceland.
WE lift off from J. F. K. at 9 in the evening, headed toward Reykjavik, and by the time the bars back in New York have closed, we are tucked in lava rock, submerged to the neck in a hot blue pool with sulfurous steam clouds bursting up around us. It’s the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and the sky surrounding us never darkens.
A monument to Iceland’s fishermen beneath a midnight sky.
A tourist tries on Viking garb at a re-enactment site.
Passengers aboard an amphibious vehicle in a lagoon full of calved icebergs from a nearby glacier.
The week ahead promises us 168 hours of uninterrupted daylight in which to drive the Ring Road around Iceland. Though it’s not a particularly long distance, I already sense that seven days will be about half as long as I would have hoped for. And so we have bolted straight from the airport to the nearby Blue Lagoon.
Here, the phosphorescent saltwater, the bright and flat Atlantic sky and the backdrop of industrial smokestacks give the place an otherworldly feel, which is as it should be: the lagoon is entirely man-made. Icelanders generate power geothermally, boring into the ground for the steam that spins the turbines as it blasts toward the surface; then they recapture that steam as water, pump it to a soaking pond, and charge 20 bucks a head. We are the first to arrive, in the early morning, and by noon the place is packed with Europeans, Japanese and Americans. We crawl between steam cave and hot pot, smeared in a gray silica mud bath.
On this trip last summer, I was traveling with my friends Mathew Gross and Melony Gilles. We lived for many years in a remote nook of the Utah desert where we developed a taste for isolated places and geological oddities. So Iceland was the perfect place for us.
Speeding across the black rock desert in our rented Corolla, we would occasionally pull to the shoulder, running fingers across the bulbous lava figurines or testing the sponginess of the mossy tundra. Iceland’s Highway 1 — the roughly 830-mile Ring Road — is the only route that circles the island, and it feels like someone put the American West in a blender: California’s poetic central coast, the Nevada desert’s barren expanses, Alaska’s glaciers and Yellowstone’s geysers. They’re all crammed onto this island, and if you don’t like one natural phenomenon you’re just a few hours from the next.
After an afternoon of poking around dirt roads and sulfur pits and making our way to a lonely lighthouse atop windy sea cliffs, we checked into a guesthouse in Reykjavik and went straight to bed. Two-thirds of the country’s nearly 300,000 people live in and around this harbor city, and with its famous night life we figured we should rest up before our first drinking binge.
I’d read somewhere — the in-flight magazine perhaps — that during the solstice partying lasts all night. After dinner we wound out way through the hilly cobblestone streets and settled into a bar filled with velvet couches, where a D.J. was mixing a combination of old soul and hypnotic space music. But after a few rounds of Viking — Iceland’s answer to Pabst Blue Ribbon, though in this soberingly expensive country it sells for $9 dollars a pint — we realized that, forget about daybreak, on our budget we’d barely make it to sunset.
Around midnight, as the sun settled into the horizon, the streets were still empty. The bar filled up, and cigarette smoke hung in the daylight streaming through the windows, but it still was nothing like the bacchanalia we were expecting. It felt like any other Monday night. Later we learned that the natives do indeed celebrate the solstice, but not until the nearest weekend.
Nothing, we discovered, cures a hangover like an afternoon in Viking costume. Heading north from Reykjavik, the buildings fell away and we found ourselves crossing green farmland backed by flat-topped snow-covered mountains. After a few wrong turns through sheep-dotted valleys we bumped along a dirt road to Eriksstadir, home of Erik the Red, founder of Greenland and father of Leif Eriksson, believed to be the first European to set foot on America.
As we got out of the car, a woman in Viking-period regalia — a coarsely woven tunic, hair in braids and a container like a powder horn lashed to her waist — emerged from a canvas tent where she had been sitting behind a laptop. She asked if we were there for the tour, and Mel could not contain herself: “Do we get to dress in Viking clothes too?”
THE woman considered the question, then smiled, inviting us to a little hut where her daughter was tending a fox pup. After producing a flowing yellow dress for Mel she led us up to a sod-roof hut, a historically accurate re-creation of Erik’s home. Inside, a Viking hunkered over a fire, whittling at a spear with a long, gleaming knife. Draped around his shoulders was an entire wolf pelt, head and legs included.
Speaking perfect English, the Viking delivered a brief biography of Erik the Red while his mate fried a pancake on a cast-iron skillet. Shortly she and Mel coupled up and began cooking, weaving on the loom, and doting over the fox pup. We men talked of warfare and navigation, handled broadswords and donned battle helmets. “If you’re fighting British or Scandinavian, headshots are not allowed,” the Viking said, explaining the rules for mock battles. “But with the Poles or Russians, anything goes.”
The Viking turned out to be an Englishman, who had lived for 15 years in Norway, teaching lore and technique to school groups and organizing Viking festivals. This summer he’d loaded his collapsible linen tent into his EuroVan and taken the ferry to Iceland. He is a professional Viking.
This time travel seemed oddly in keeping with the drive itself. Driving in Iceland is not for the efficient. Highway 1 is a narrow affair that doubles back into the fiords, like driving up and down each tooth of a comb. Most bridges have just one lane, and many stretches are unpaved.
We wound toward Lake Myvatn in the northeast, finally approaching a landscape straight from Middle Earth: a volcanic crater ringed in moss; outcroppings of lava dotted across the hills. Here we were even closer to the Arctic Circle, and the sun shone an extra hour. At a guesthouse in the tiny village of Vogar, we encountered the same sorts of pilgrims I’ve met in the American Southwest, drawn to a bizarre and inhospitable landscape.
“We’ve been here five days already,” a Dutch woman said. “We can’t seem to leave.”
A gray-haired German woman in the guesthouse said she had relocated full time to Iceland and spent much of her summers up in these geothermal badlands.
A short walk from the house is Grotagia, a giant fissure splitting the shelf of volcanic rock. I scrambled down into the chasm and found a clear pool steaming at about 120 degrees, then followed a footpath for a mile across a field of tundra and lava. The trail leads up one flank of a symmetrical volcanic crater called Hverfell before dropping off the other side into Dimmuborgir, a hobbit’s paradise of towering lava castles, natural arches and countless unexplored grottos. Next we hurried to the gurgling purple and yellow sulfur cauldrons at Namafjall and to the steaming lava heap at Leirhnjukur, an active volcano itching to blow at any minute.
Across the highway from our guesthouse was Vogar’s single cafe, where breakfasters were granted the odd privilege of watching the proprietors milk the cows. Here on the rocky shores of Lake Myvatn, Olof Hallgrimsdottir and her brother, Leifur Hallgrimsson, run this dairy farm, settled by their family over a century before. Ms. Hallgrimsdottir is blonde and pretty with the high cheekbones and upturned nose that are the norm in this country, and when I met her at the cafe she was wearing a red-and-blue jumpsuit and rubber boots.
While her teenage daughter poured coffee at the counter, Ms. Hallgrimsdottir was on the other side of a window, amid four cows and the hoses and tubes of a 16-udder milking contraption. Hanging on the cafe walls was a row of award certificates from the dairy board. Ms. Hallgrimsdottir invited me into the milking room and squirted a half-pint of warm, sweet milk directly from a cow into a glass, and I drank it down. Remarking that, “Cows can’t eat rocks,” she told me that a few years back she converted the dairy shed into the cafe to increase revenue on their boulder-strewn acres. An old German couple took a seat by the window and, spooning up their yogurt, watched the milking spectacle through the glass.
After a long stretch through gray, barren desert, we regained the green hills on the approach to the western fiords. The road turned to dirt, and topped out over a pass into a stunning valley of tundra, yellow and purple wildflowers bursting from its flanks, waterfalls pouring off the rim and a stream at the floor draining toward the sea. At the coast, towering moss-covered cliffs crowded the sea, leaving room only for the narrow road and an occasional red-roofed farmhouse on a carpet of green grass where sheep grazed. Rain fell as a thick mist gathered over the Atlantic, and for many miles we snaked along between a wall of rock and a wall of ocean.
I imagined this was how it felt to drive California’s coast 75 years ago, downshifting on the sharp bends in the gravel road, idling before a one-lane bridge while an oncoming car made its crossing. Cold waves lapped over black beaches, lonely crags jutted up from the water, and with the sea fading from gray to green as the sun peeked through the clouds, the landscape was sublime and melancholy.
And just when I thought I’d traveled to Edward Weston’s Big Sur, we hit the glaciers. A big chunk of southeastern Iceland lies beneath the vast ice field of Vatnajokull, which crept toward the ocean down a series of fingerlike canyons. Off in the distance the cracked sheets of ice were motionless and menacing. At Jokulsarlon a glacial snout calved into an aquamarine lagoon, and the icebergs drifted almost imperceptibly toward open water, penned in like zoo animals where the busloads of tourists could gawk at their beauty.
Occasionally an iceberg floated beneath the highway bridge, was carried to sea, then was dashed on the beach by the windswept waves. We walked along the gray strand where the blocks of glacier rocked gently in the tide, and we gathered in our hands the cocktail-size ice cubes that had washed up on shore and flung them back to the sea.
On the final day around the Ring, we steered our rental car up the steep switchbacks near the coastal town of Vik. We wanted to reach the top of the seaside cliffs, overlooking a jumble of rock towers jutting from the sea, and then find a trail down to a beach. But the little car was scraping bottom before the first turn, so we left it on the shoulder and continued on foot.
The rain clouds had passed, and as we topped out on the bluff, the sun was dazzling and the wind was fierce. The grass spread out far beyond a radio tower toward an abandoned building on the promontory. We walked along the cliff, leaning away from the edge, feeling that the wind could chuck you over. After an hour of forging against the headwind, we realized that there was no trail to the beach. We were treed, here on this towering bluff.
And that’s when we saw the birds. Dozens, hundreds of little white gulls’ heads poked out of the rock wall below. We belly-crawled to the edge and peer over.
The gulls danced in the wind. They banked off a howling gust, almost bowled over backward, then straightened their wings and dived forward. They surfed back and forth, now and then catching an updraft and careening a hundred yards over the sea. The sun glistened on the whitecaps and waves surged in slow motion around the rock towers. A pair of puffins emerged from the rookery and braved the winds, looking a bit unsure of their skills, their goofy legs dangling below like parts of a puppet. We clutched the grass where we lay. The wind was going to blow like this all day long. I could have stayed there forever.
If You Go
Flights to Reykjavik from New York as of mid-June were as low as $880 (www.icelandair.com). At the airport, an economy car rents for about 400 euros ($530 at 1.32 euros to the dollar) a week, and a small S.U.V. is about 800 euros a week (www.geysir.is).
Reykjavik has plenty of guesthouses that are less expensive and more charming than the hotels. Alfholl Guesthouse, the Friendly Elves House, is centrally located; a double room with a shared bathroom is 9,000 Icelandic kronur, about $127 at 71.2 kronur to the dollar (www.islandia.is/alf).
The Vogar Guesthouse in the village of Vogar has rooms for 13,800 kronur (354-464-4344).
MARK SUNDEEN has written for Outside and National Geographic Adventure.
Really, when you can pull all of that from a duffel and a hanging bag totalling $130, it’s quite the bargain.
The other airline (who shall remain nameless to protect poor Adoxography from unwarrented lawsuits) was a mess. On the outgoing flight, we took off half an hour late because the captain’s seat broke and they had to jury-rig it. We learned this from the chatty crewmember, as I contemplated the lumpy seat, the little ceiling-mounted TV screen set at exactly the wrong angle for my viewing pleasure and the lack of space.
On the inbound flight, we also took off late (due to weather, so I can’t blame them). However, none of the e-ticket check-in stations were working, so I had to stand in a looooong line for a boarding pass, although I didn’t have any luggage to check.
And, because I had a later boarding time, I was told that I’d have to check luggage anyway, because the overhead bins were full! I am, however, an excellent packer and experienced traveller who can wedge her bags beneath the seat when necessary.
Checked luggage is for people with lots of time to wait around and for parents of small children. And my next trip will be on JetBlue.
SAVED BY A HURRICANE Interest in making food like calas was revived after Katrina.
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