Travel writing prompt

Iceland at a 45 Degree Angle

That time a bus full of writers tipped sideways into a river

Let’s face it — the idyllic moments full of wonder are rarely the most exciting travel stories to tell. Though they fill us with awe and take our breath away, they aren’t necessarily fun or even easy to explain to someone who wasn’t there.

For all that, we want to impart the magic of standing atop a mountain after a hike or the strange sense of smallness as you gaze out over a melting glacier in the distance. These experiences have to be felt more than anything.

Travel mishaps and misadventures, though? The excitement, adrenaline, and humor come ready-made with a stronger sense of narrative inherent in them.

This is why one of my all-time favorite travel stories is the time our bus tipped over while crossing a stream in Iceland.

My graduate classmates and I arrived in Iceland for our travel writing course, immediately descended upon the airport coffee shop, then made our way to meet our tour guide, Viga, and designated bus driver, Olaf.

After our first stop at the coastline, where we gazed thoughtfully at the waves as they crashed against the craggy shore, we spent the next several days driving between small coastal towns that housed hostels of varying sizes.

My travel journal was filled with scrawled attempts at capturing something worth spinning into the two essays I had to produce at the end of our trip. I dutifully recorded the names of each town and landmark at which we stopped, all horribly misspelled, I’m sure.

Our tour guide, Viga, had vibrant energy and kept up a steady stream of stories, legends, and information about where we were going. Even so, I think we were all a bit bored by this point in the trip. Our luggage full of hiking boots and all-weather gear led us to expect more, well… adventure.

Our destination that day was a valley off the beaten path, with no paved roads to lead us there, road signs with various warnings poking seemingly out of rocky nothingness.

Olaf deftly navigated various small streams simply by driving through them. “Roads?” he seemed to say, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” The bus, Viga explained, was designed for this kind of terrain.

We arrived at the valley, and in the distance, an anachronous yellow bulldozer distributed rocks from one side of a stream to the other. It didn’t feel like it should be allowed, this rumble of construction and human intervention here in this remote landscape with its wild, stoic beauty.

“They’re preparing for the tourist season,” Viga explained. “Making the road more passable, building it up.”

May in Iceland is not quite tourist season, as the weather is traditionally rainy and cold this time of year. All of us had layers of waterproof gear purchased in anticipation, but instead, Iceland greeted us with warmer-than-average temperatures and unprecedented sunshine.

Nevertheless, we had the valley entirely to ourselves. Viga led our group away from the road and towards the space where the mountains parted. There, we quickly understood why they were hard at work trying to make this area passable. There was no easy way to reach the other side of the stream, where she wanted to take us.

For a few quiet moments, we all stared at the impressively fast-moving stream, the grating sound of rocks bulldozed from one place underscoring our consideration.

“We will cross,” she said. “Link arms, and go quickly.”

At last, our adventure had arrived!

We linked arms with Viga in groups of three and stepped into the water, forcing our way across through its steady rush. At last, the waterproof pants and boots we’d broken our grad student budgets to buy found their purpose. Somewhere there is a photo of our human chain, writers attempting to capture the wonders of nature by pitting ourselves against it.

The stream — and the man driving the bulldozer — would have the last laugh.

We wandered into the valley, where Icelandic moss coated the grey-blue rocks as they climbed towards the blue, open sky. My brain couldn’t fully comprehend this wildness, so different from any I had experienced previously.

Searching for an analog, my brain landed upon Middle Earth, and I fancied myself a character in The Lord of the Rings. It looked exactly the sort of place where one might attempt to simply walk into Mordor, except with far fewer orcs.

Back across the water, we went, and then we sat and ate the lunches we’d purchased at a gas station on our way out here.

My little unit of four had acquired a habit by now of going in on a loaf of bread, salami, and cheese to comprise most of our picnic lunches. We also had a fondness for these crispy chip-adjacent snacks called Papriku Stjörnur, which we gathered to mean “paprika stars” as their shape and flavor would imply.

These delicacies consumed, we loaded back onto the bus, still full of the adrenaline imparted by our brief shot of adventure.

None of us expected anything more eventful that day.

And so, it was quite a shock when a sudden “thump” came shortly followed by the sensation of slowly sinking. One side of the bus — the side on which I was sitting — leaned uncannily towards the water. I watched out the large window as it came closer, as if in slow motion, and then, miraculously, stopped.

There we sat, at a 45-degree angle, all of us save the driver and Viga, afraid to move. He rammed his foot into the gas and wrenched the steering wheel side to side, attempting to free us from the stuck position. A grinding sound ensued, and the bus tipped forward a bit but rocked back into place.

My heart thumped in terror, though a good portion of my concern was for our luggage stowed under the bus. I don’t think my brain could comprehend the more pressing concerns that we were out here in the middle of nowhere, stuck in a stream, with no clear exit strategy in place.

And then, in the distance, we saw it — the man driving his bulldozer lazily towards us, a smile on his handsome face.

As he came more clearly into view, we realized he was laughing at our predicament. Silly American tourists, he must have been thinking, though, in all fairness, it was really Olaf’s driving that hand landed us in this situation.

The bulldozer man shouted something at Olaf, who nodded. We all watched out the windows as this impossibly attractive Icelandic bulldozer driver began moving rocks around, shifting them as he had in the valley. He was trying to alter the shape of the “road” to gain purchase and get free.

It worked. A few shovelfuls in and several firm revs of the engine later, the bus jolted forward, then righted itself. All four tires on the semi-solid ground once again.

We breathed a collective sigh of relief and collapsed into giggles as we waved goodbye to our handsome knight in shining construction attire. The number of appearances this man must have made in our resulting writings, I can only imagine.

As most harrowing travel moments do, it quickly became a funny story, our heart-clenching fear of tipping over into the water forgotten in lieu of the rush of arriving unscathed to the other side.

Years later, if the subject of Iceland comes up, it isn’t seeing my first geyser, or the impossibly tiny pine trees, or the glaciers or the mournful landscapes that come to me first. Inevitably, I open my mouth and say, “Have I told you about the time our bus tipped over in Iceland?”

Thank you to World Traveler’s Blog for the #unplannedadventures prompt that inspired this story!

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