Siglufjörður & Aukreyri

On Sunday, we had the first of three day trips from BAER. We were driven by Simon, the horse and facilities manager, in a red van (the local school bus) along the coast and through the modern tunnels to Siglufjörður. Sunna, who also takes care of the place and is great company, translated for Simon who speaks zero English.

In Siglufjörður we visited the Herring Museum: a tribute to the fishing industry from the '40s through the '50s, when the fisheries were largely depleted. A traffic tunnel was first introduced in 1967 to revive the area with tourism. Prior to this, the only road to the town was a mountain track passable on horse or foot. We drove through a single lane tunnel that was built in 2010. The longest segment (one of three to Aukreyri) is 7km.

The Herring Museum is housed in the Herring salt and packaging facility which includes the original female worker's quarters on the upper levels. The owner's office and vault are on the first floor of the building - from where he was perched with his calculator watching the women pack herring on the docks just below his window. With each barrel that was packed and carried off the worker would get a coin in her boot. At the end of the day the coins were counted and payment was doled out.

The place is filled with cool objects and Scandinavian graphics from this period. There are two adjacent buildings, one is new and filled with ships and fishing gear and the other with original machinery for processing byproducts like oil and dried fish flake for animal feed - a temple of machine parts. On the museum grounds there is a reenactment with real Herring every Sunday at two o'clock.

After our visit, we had a lunch of Goulash and smoked lamb on flatbread (fried with the consistency of a doughnut and covered in butter). We then headed further south to Aukreyri where nothing was really happening except an eccentric/snoozy private collection of outsider and Icelandic folk art and a windswept botanical garden. The highlights were Brennivin at a bar and a great fish hash dinner with brown malt bread.

Map of area (Sauðárkrókur, to the south west of BAER, is the town we visit for provisions on Fridays, see earlier post. The red line is the primary highway around Iceland.)