Surf and Turf

I’m always attracted to the ‘surf+turf’ option on any restaurant menu. It’s partly the idea of a 241 bargain but there’s also something audacious about trying to pull off a dish of rhyming opposites – a bit like the ice and fire of a baked Alaska. So when we decided to try a highly recommended, award-winning Reykjavik restaurant, I quickly opted to give it a go.

Like many restaurant menus this one offered few real clues as to the ingredients in its boldly named signature dish. In any case the explanation in italics was exclusively in Icelandic, a tongue that I have grappled with and entirely failed to master. The waiter was a model of politely correct helpfulness. Yes she would ask the chef what the day’s catch was and what he had decided to twin it with on this occasion. We mulled pleasantly over a choice of wines to accompany this forthcoming feat of culinary fusion.

The answer came back promptly from the spotless ice cavern of the kitchen. Braised minke whale and Icelandic horse carpaccio.

Ah, we’re in Sarah Palin country here with two endangered species on the same plate and however free range and humanely dispatched they may have been, it’s perhaps a little much for one meal - let’s see what else there is.

We all make our own rules, choices and taboos for what we do and don’t eat and that makes a lot of sense in a world of multiple, sometimes conflicted cultures. Iceland offers a superb table of hard won fresh seafood, family farmed dairy products, hand-reared lamb and all the herbal essences of an Alpine meadow. Viking sagas of survival through ice-bound winters on whale oil and seal blubber are part of the island’s cultural DNA. Menus are never culturally neutral.

The issue of commercial whaling continues to divide Icelandic opinion roughly 70/30 between the majority who see it as a national birthright and a sensible use of a properly managed natural resource in a harsh environment and the minority who have moral concerns, fear for further international opprobrium (after cash and ash issues) or who rely on tourist whale-watching dollars.

The other half of our chef’s proposed duet, the carpaccio, is equally problematic. The sturdy Icelandic horse is a national symbol of rugged independence and pure bred ancestry. A tourist visit is incomplete without a ride in its friendly, faithful saddle. It is also an intensely practical tool in a country where the first ring road around the island was completed in 1973, where the interior desert winterscapes are only accessible through skilful 4x4 driving and where there is no need or desire for a rail network. The horse is also farmed in places for its meat.

Hence my reservations. Luckily the chef was both adventurous and diplomatic. In the twinkling of a carving knife he came up with an alternative surf and turf offering – reindeer burger with a skewer of Atlantic prawns – delicious.

Snorri's pool - a mini-saga

I once conducted a leadership seminar in a swimming pool. It started as a fairly riotous affair with much hearty splashing providing relief from the 40 degree heat of a South African January. It was also remarkable for the degree of freedom people felt in providing feedback on how their management team was working. It was almost as if the cooling water offered a safe, egalitarian medium and a licence to speak out in an unusual setting.

So I was fascinated to visit Snorri’s Pool in the tiny hamlet of Reykholt, Iceland. First of all I had never heard of Snorri Sturluson as a result of my barren ignorance of medieval Icelandic history. Writing 100 years before Chaucer, Snorri more or less created the Icelandic saga canon single-handedly. As an historian, poet and legislator, he is revered in the annals of Scandinavian men of letters. His specialist subject on Mastermind would have been the deeds and lineage of Norwegian kings and his carefully crafted myth-making on behalf of the Norse gods must surely have reserved him a prime spot in the halls of Valhalla. Snorri is and was the stuff of legends.

Legend would have it that he spent many hours contemplating life in his specially constructed, geothermally heated outdoor pool. His very own hot tub. One of the many stories that he captured once he had had a quick rub down with his sealskin wrap and a shot or two of cod liver oil, tells of the building of Asgard, mythical home of the Norse gods.

Very roughly translated the story goes something like this: Odin, top god and CEO of Valhalla Inc, commissioned a new set of protective stone walls from behind which to survey his enterprises. To build this legacy structure, he contracted with the best known construction company of the saga age, run by one Bjarnsson, known to all and sundry as Blast the Builder.

After a tough round of honey and potato vodka fuelled negotiations, the contract was finally drawn up. It specified the height of the new walls of Asgard which had to be completed inside six months or else various penalty clauses kicked in involving the Chief Operating God, Thor, and one of his nasty thunderbolts. When it came to negotiating the memorandum of agreement on payments, Blast drove a hard bargain. In the event of on time completion he wanted the hand in marriage of Odin’s indescribably beautiful daughter and Goddess of Fertility, Freyja. Like all builders, Blast looked forward to the prospect of Friday. Not satisfied with the prize of simply dating the boss’s daughter, Blast threw in two more items of payment, the sun and the moon. As performance incentives go, those two celestial bodies take some beating.

Work on the great outer walls of Asgard began immediately and proceeded rapidly in the first couple of weeks. Blast’s secret weapon on site was his remarkable horse, Svad, who could carry pretty much any load effortlessly, dig tirelessly, plaster at high speed and do fixings in a trice. Sven was the sort of master artisan horse that every small builder craves – show him the plans and he’s away whistling while he works. The walls flew up.

In fact such was the speed and quality of construction that Odin convened a crisis meeting of the project steering committee. There was Aesir, God of the Sea and acting CFO, Thor glowering away, Loki God of Mischief and all other corporate functions and the lovely Freyja herself who was seriously upset for having been included in the contract in the first place and particularly now that it seemed she was destined to become a trophy wife to Blast the Builder. What to do?

It was Loki inevitably, who had been spying on building operations, who conceived the fiendish plan to lure away Svad the horse thus delaying progress just sufficiently beyond the six month deadline. Like many corporate solutions proposed in a crisis, this was greeted with acclaim providing that somebody from corporate got on and implemented it. No problem, Loki was out there performing his mischief in a twinkling and of course, without Svad, the whole building operation ground to a sticky halt leaving Blast scratching his head and sucking his teeth in between chewing his pencil.

And that’s pretty much where Snorri leaves that particular story, with the walls of Asgard incomplete and the only access to the mythical home of the gods and goddesses across a rainbow bridge. Snorri himself probably went back to his medieval jacuzzi to contemplate his next block-buster saga.

Now if he’d been South African and used to holding his seminars in a pool, he’d have invented the creepy-crawlie pool cleaner instead.

Volcano man

Villi Knudsen chases volcanoes. He can't remember a time when his life was not determined by where and when one of Iceland's permanently grumbling volcanoes was most likely to go off pop. Villi's father took him on countless missions across the pitiless interior of this land of fire and ice to capture footage of hot magma spewing through raw fissures. Today his old cine film equipment stands on stage in Villi's converted garage cinema, its leather casing lightly dusted in ash.

On screen the occasionally jumpy footage reveals a unique record of volcanic activity in Iceland since 1947. The schoolboy Villi manfully portering a tripod on horseback through glacial streams morphs into the young documentary journalist swooping over an exploding Mount Hekla in a helicopter. Unfortunately our intrepid film maker has developed the habit of switching off the helicopter engine to reduce the noise levels on his soundtrack. We never hear more than a muffled curse from the helicopter pilot.

A thickening, balding Villi continues to peer into craters plopping away like marmalade pans and take measurements in the sulphurous fumes of Grímsvötn Lake. He produces the footage that captured the world's imagination in November 1963 as the brand new island of Surtsey emerged hissing and steaming off the south coast of Iceland and ten years later he's off again to document the evacuation of neighbouring Heimaey Island, overwhelmed by a lava spill. If the earth rumbles and spits, he will find it and film it.

At the beginning and end of the show, the bespectacled Villi in carpet slippers and comfy knitted jumper shares a lifetime's work in a series of practised one liners delivered with the laconic timing of a stand-up comic. He warns us that today it's more dangerous to go into an Icelandic bank than to fly over the latest firework display at Eyja-fjalla-jökull or 'island-mountain-glacier' as it simply translates in Icelandic.

Emerging from the 1970's time capsule that is the Red Rock cinema, my head is full of hubbling, bubbling, molten images. Cone shaped mountains blow their crusts, muddy torrents of meltwater pick up and flick like marbles boulders the size of a house. The world is revealed as an angry, boiling porridge.

Villi thanks each of us personally for attending his show and as he ushers us out into the gentle summer night's light there's a deep sadness behind the rimless spectacles - a grizzled polar bear watching his world disappear.