Where our hero gets a thrilling ride he didn’t expect, but finally gets a bit of revenge:
It’s the hippyish family of three from Norfolk that I feel sorry for. There they were at the Old Harbour in Reykjavik, their multicoloured fleeces zipped up to the chin to protect them from a light but Arctic breeze, talking gaily about going to ‘meet the whales’. I’m sure one of them had even used the word ‘commune’, as a verb, it being fashionable now to believe that humans can make a spiritual, spine-tingling connection with whales and dolphins.
Yet little did this excitable unit know that within the hour they’d be clinging to any bit of the boat’s infrastructure they could find, as we got tossed around by a pissed-off Poseidon, minke whales mocking us with their mighty tails for daring to enter into their cruel and alien world.
Admittedly it was our own fault. The woman at the whale-watching office at the harbour had warned us that the weather was unpredictable. ‘We might not go out today,’ she said, in that wonderfully weird accent that Icelandic people speak English in: part-Viking, part-Scouse. ‘It’s looking a bit patchy,’ she explained.
Now, in a country famous for its angry climate, for its spewing geysers, for having the word ‘Ice’ in its name, where tourists can buy T-shirts that say ‘Lost in Iceland’ on the front and ‘Is anybody out there?’ on the back, and where they have actually made a horror film called Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, you might think that we would have taken more seriously this native harbour woman’s warning of ‘patchiness’ at sea. But no. So determined were we to see the whales that, in a mish-mash of European accents, we all said: ‘Let’s go! We don’t mind if it’s a little rough.’ They would make for brilliant famous last words.
