Tough choices

Two Icelandic fjords have competed in my mind vividly about the number one seat as the most beautiful Icelandic fjord. There are other prices, such as the best “photographic model”, the most popular fjord, and the most forgotten fjord – which is an important category too.

The judgement is of course based on sentimental values, that is if I am born there or not and so on, but what also counts is the “historical presence”, if the fjord is good for the eye and perhaps if it doesn’t take too long to drive it and if the shops there are good.

The best “photographic model” is without doubt Breiðarfjörður for its endless varieties and modest beauty.

The most popular fjord is also the one I usually put in the first place, that is Önundarfjörður. Most popular because that’s where I was born, and where I’d like to spend my holiday and so on. But I leave it for now to argue that case in many details, but Önundarfjörður is not too big, easy to cross and easy to drive around, great variety of mountains both in terms of good looks and for walking, the sand shore at Holt is exceptional, good for surfing, and the farms scattered around the fjord form the ultimate image of an Icelandic country side at the end of the world. No kidding.

The other fjord and which is hard to exclude from the number one seat is Bjarnafjörður (á Ströndum). Its value lies in the unassuming setting, and its humble aura combined with peace I can only describe as graceful. This is the fjord one can allow himself to be romantic about, perhaps because it does not have the rough prettiness of conventional Icelandic landscape, it has the ordinary beauty which is easy to miss, it has ordinary fields, ordinary farms, ordinary river running through it, ordinary roads and an ordinary bridge. When you come to this fjord from south you can feel that you are leaving the world behind you and about to enter a new land with an amazing down to earth atmosphere. Bjarnafjörður has the same splendour as an ordinary day if you can appreciate it. Bjarnafjörður is not a Christmas day, not a holiday, not a Friday afternoon, but just an ordinary day.

Further up north is the “most forgotten award”, that is Furufjörður. Like most of the fjords in this part of the country, no one has lived in Furufjörður since 1950, very few between 1944 and 1950, but prior to the 1940´s there was a major community there of farmers and fishermen. It belongs to what is called The North Coastline (Norðurstrandir). Like Bjarnafjörður there was quite some traffic there through out the latest centuries due to vast amount of drift wood coming from Russia, in addition to the proximity to a generous sea. And Furufjörður was a busy place, settled by working people who became part of the nation’s generations that build the land and who kept it going until it became somewhat the Singapore of the North, as it feels like today. And somehow at this time of the year when wealth and poverty becomes an “issue in the air” due to the festive season, these places in Iceland where poor and hard working hands once created a real wealth, such as culture, saga, identity and confidence of a small nation, these abandoned fjords become the coolest places on earth.