Little big town

TRAVEL East Iceland

Swimming against the stream

Chef Gudjon Runar Thorgrimsson with wild mushrooms.

There is more to Egilsstadir than meets the eye.

TEXT: Bjorn Halldorsson PHOTO: Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson

Most of the people on the plane are there for the swimming. The swim across lake Urridavatn is an annual event held at the end of July that attracts many former locals to Egilsstadir. “Last year there were so many swimmers, they almost ran into trouble,” says Svandis Sigurjonsdottir, one of the proprietors of Bokakaffid, a small coffee shop and bookstore just across the bridge over Lagarfljot river. “This year, we’ll see...” she adds, eyeing the rain outside.

Crammed to the brim with books and a fresh pot of coffee on the brew, Bokakaffid is the ideal place for such conditions. Much preferable to the 10°C water which awaits the swimmers, who are all around us expounding the stoic sense of calm that follows the first shock of cold. My wife and I agree that it sounds more like the early onset of hypothermia and so we head into town to dive into some culture instead.

At Slaturhusid, Egilsstadir’s cultural centre located in the town’s former slaughterhouse, we find various visual art projects. They were created by an international group of artists led by Berlin-based Steinunn Gunnlaugsdottir, whose family hails from the area. The bare concrete walls and the many signs of the building’s previous role provide a visceral backdrop to the displays.

For a palate cleanser, we drive 10 minutes out of town to Vallanes, from where the Modir Jord products – which are at the forefront of Iceland’s organic food culture – originate. We sample fermented treats and lummur (a type of Icelandic pancake) at their restaurant, The Aspen House. It’s the first house in Iceland to be built solely from locally-grown wood, all from nearby Hallormsstadaskogur National Forest, Iceland’s largest. “We try to use as much as we can from the local environment,” head chef Gudjon Runar Thorgrimsson at Icelandair Hotel Herad tells us that evening. During hunting season, Gudjon himself takes to the hills to provide meat for the restaurant’s much coveted reindeer steaks. The East is the only region where reindeer live in the wild and the restaurant is one of few in Iceland to have reindeer on the menu year-round. Gudjon also helps supplying other food – he’s only able to talk to us because the mushroom picking trip he had planned with his dishwashers was cancelled due to weather.

On the plane back to Reykjavík we doze off, lulled into sleep by the drone of the engines. All around us the swimmers are basking in each other’s glow, seeming every bit as rejuvenated as they had promised.

DID YOU KNOW...

It takes you more than 7 hours longer to drive from Reykjavik to Egilsstadir in East Iceland than fly there. By air the trip takes 60 minutes.