Thursday, 7 June 2012
Even though I had years of living in the UK, spending the previous two years filling in Health and Safety forms, adventurous was still in my game. I was driving on the “wild” side in Iceland. Most of the time, I was driving on the right side, which fortunately was also the right side. I was a little bit confused in car parks, when there were no road markings. Good thing there were not many cars for me to crash into. (My record of not crashing into other cars still intact)
Two great things about driving in Iceland are the lack of roads, made it really easy to navigate and the lack of barriers on the side road, reinforced the benefits of staying on the road. “Right is right, left is not right” was how I drove. With hindsight, the whole driving experience was pretty calm. I only had two moments when I almost shat myself. First one was that I genuinely really needed the loo, unfortunately public toilets were rare, the other time my front wheels was stuck in a little ditch. Just as despair began to set in, I remembered that I had a MEng in Automotive Engineering, which was possibly irrelevant in this situation but keeping the wheel spin at a minimum was the key to drive on surfaces with a low coefficient of friction.
Hitchhiking was the ideal way to navigate around Iceland because of the lack of roads. A lot of people were hitchhiking really well. I guess it would help being 24hr day light. Unfortunately or fortunately time was not on my side so I decided to stick to my plan. Next time, I think I will hitchhike. If I hitchhiked I would not have been able to pick up hitchhikers so I guess someone had to do the driving. Hopefully next time, it won’t me.
Adventures of Delboy 