Sleeping Around (22 page)

Smári then did his very best to turn me off my food by describing these delectable-sounding treats.
Hrutspungar,
or sour ram's testicles, is exactly that. The ram's testicles are pickled then pressed either into a kind of pâté or turned into a jam (perfect for your toast in the morning).
Lundabaggar,
or sour lamb, is made from lamb's colons, which are rolled up, boiled, pickled then sliced into tasty bite-sized pieces. My favourite, as in the most disgusting, is
hakarl
, or rancid shark, which is traditionally prepared by digging a hole, placing the shark in the hole, pissing on it, then burying it for about six months until it rots. It's then served cold ala sashimi style. ‘They don't piss on the sharks anymore,' Smári said. Oh, then if that's the case, give me two serves.

For entrée I had the very plain, in comparison, smoked puffin. The dark brown meat was cut into long strips and came with a mustard dipping sauce. The texture of the meat was something akin to snot and it tasted nothing like chicken and more like snot.

Puffins are very easy to catch. Smári had gone puffin hunting for the first time the previous summer on an uninhabited island just off the Westman Islands. Well, when I say ‘easy', the actual catching sounded easy: The island is less than a square kilometre and there are more than 2 million puffins on it. But the getting-to-the-island part sounded like an absolute nightmare. ‘The only way on to the island is to get dropped off at the bottom of an eighty-metre high cliff in rough seas,' Smári explained. ‘We had to leap from the boat onto slippery rocks, then scramble up a steep slope using a chain of puffin holes as a ladder.' Joining Smári on the puffin-hunting expedition were two of his friends, including Örn who—Smári was fairly confident in claiming—was ‘the only one-armed puffin hunter in the world'. They camped for two nights in the island's one and only log cabin.

Smári went into detail about how to catch a puffin, but it's all rather simple. You lie on the grass with something that resembles a large butterfly net and when a puffin flies past, you take a swing at it and drag it in. I don't think I could do the next part, though. ‘You have to snap its neck,' Smári said, ‘before it starts asking uncomfortable questions.'

‘I didn't catch any on my first attempt,' Smári continued. ‘Apparently it was too windy for puffins. Örn caught two and that was it. The next day the wind really picked up and turned into a full-blown gale. A thick fog rolled in as well, so then we couldn't even get off the island. We ended up getting stuck there for four nights. On our last morning when the weather cleared, the other two caught forty puffins each, but all I managed to do was to knock a puffin out when I hit it with the pole instead of the net.'

‘Forty puffins! Is that a big catch?' I asked.

‘Not really,' Smári shrugged. ‘Most puffin hunters can catch up to three hundred birds a day.'

I was just about to eat something else that the Icelanders are fond of hunting, but get in trouble over killing twenty a year. And there goes my Greenpeace membership. For main course I had whale. Yes, I know, save the whale and all that. After tasting it, though, I'm almost tempted to say, ‘Catch Willy and chop him up into steaks'. The whale meat was wonderfully succulent, slightly salty and as utterly lean and tender as the best beef tenderloin. Incidentally, Keiko the movie-star killer whale who played Willy was lucky he wasn't turned into whale steaks. The Icelanders put their hands up to look after him when his film career finished and he was kept in a large pen just off the Westland Islands from 1998 to 2003.

‘After over twenty years Iceland began officially whaling again only four days ago,' Smári said, chewing away on his whale steak. ‘Most of the world doesn't want us to kill whales, but we will only kill around twenty minke whales a year, which is point-zero-zero-two per cent of the population.'

Smári had penned an article on a ‘greenie' blog site a few days before and had written ‘So what?'.

‘I've received tons of hate mail,' he shrugged.

Alli picked us up from the restaurant in a mini-bus. On the weekends he did volunteer work driving the Icelandic Women's Handball team around. Smart man. Alli hadn't eaten dinner and when I told him what I'd just eaten he said, ‘I'll take you somewhere special'.

He took us to the cafeteria at the bus terminal.

‘Now you must try burned sheep's head,' he said, returning from the self-serve counter with half a sheep's face staring up at me from the plate. If you'd like to prepare this at home, it's very easy. Get a sheep's head, burn it to remove the wool, cut it in two in order to remove the brain, boil it, then serve with mashed turnip.

‘I love it,' Alli said with a mouthful of sheep's lip. ‘And this place makes the best sheep's head in town.'

Alli very kindly, or I should say very cruelly, gave me half a tongue, a bit of an ear and an eyeball to eat.

‘You should see your face,' Alli said as I ate the eyeball.

‘That's because I'm eating
a
face,' I winced.

After our progressive (and progressively worse) dinner, we dropped into Johann's place for a drink. I didn't notice Alli leaving (which is quite difficult because he's a big man) and when he returned fifteen minutes later he said that he had a surprise for me. ‘Brian has tried nearly all our local specialties tonight,' Alli said to Johann. ‘He's had puffin, whale and sheep's head. He just needs to have ram's testicles and . . . um . . . um . . .'

‘Rancid shark meat!' I cried, squirming in my seat.

‘Here you go then,' Alli said, as he threw me a small ball of something wrapped tightly in plastic wrap.

It was rancid shark's meat.

‘Where did you get it?' I asked.

‘From my fridge at home.'

It was true. Alli kept some in his fridge to have as a snack with a beer.

Even though it was tightly wrapped, I could smell the distinct aroma of rancidness.

‘This hasn't been pissed on, has it?' I asked with a shudder.

‘Why do you think I've been so long,' Alli smirked.

I put it aside, but a few minutes later Alli announced, ‘It's time to go outside'.

‘What for?' I asked.

‘The shark feeding!'

Apparently the smell is so bad that you have to eat it outside or it stinks out the entire house.

‘Block your nose,' Alli said as he unwrapped the shark. ‘Don't smell it, just eat it.'

I picked out a small cube of meat and tentatively popped it into my mouth. It tasted like a combination of sushi that's a bit past its use-by date and strong French cheese with a hint of urine. As I was chewing it, Alli said that I shouldn't eat too much because it gives you diarrhoea.

‘Now smell it,' he said musingly.

‘Oh, Jesus!' I spat.

The smell was so vile that for a minute I thought I was going to bring up the sheep's eyeballs and my Willy steak.

I scrubbed my hands with soap six times, but I still couldn't get the smell off my fingers. ‘You'll have trouble picking up a girl tonight,' Alli said. ‘Your breath smells like rancid shark, too.'

It was nearly midnight when Smári and I left to do some more rúnturing. It was a bit quieter this time round. Not the rest of the rúnturers, mind, but me and Smári. We were both a little tired and I had to get up early to catch a plane.

Over a beer at the Celtic Club we talked about living in Iceland. ‘The weather sucks and the politics sucks,' Smári said. ‘I love this country, but I'd leave in a moment if I could.'

It's interesting in comparison to what Bob from Chicago had said about America: ‘I hate this country a lot of the time, but I'm an American and I'm proud to be an American, so this will always be my home.'

We left at 1.30 (an early night for Smári) and, being sober, I not only noticed how drunk everyone else was, but all the broken glass and vomit on the ground. We took a shortcut down a side street and there she was. My perfect angelic Icelandic girl. She had snow-white hair, snow-white skin and a snow-white bottom that was up in the air as she squatted to do a wee in the middle of the road.

BELGIUM & LUXEMBOURG

11

‘Give a Belgian a beer and he's happy.'

Joris Willem, 29, Antwerp, Belgium

CouchSurfing.com

I've been to Belgium nineteen times, but I haven't seen any of it. Well, I've seen lots of motorways and chip shops down at the docks, and made one flying visit to Bruges, but that's about it. When I worked as a tour leader in Europe, we would either drive straight through Belgium on our way to Holland or end a trip at Oostende with just enough time to grab some frites before we jumped on the ferry back to England. The one and only time that I went to Bruges was a disaster. As well as getting myself (and my passengers) hopelessly lost, I re-christened the town's most famous buildings—I muddled up all their names and histories during my befuddled and very flustered walking tour.

So I had decided that I would finally see more of Belgium than a chip shop. But where in Belgium should I go? Brussels, Ghent, Liège? I knew where. A city, which I had been on my way to but never reached on my first trip to Europe. I was on my way to Antwerp when I got picked up hitchhiking in Holland and ended up going all the way to the driver's place in Versailles instead. Almost twenty years later, I would finally make it there.

I contemplated sending a request to Indra, whose interests included travel dimensions, natural time, positive vibes and trance dancing; or to Jurriaan, who lived in a squat with 50 other people; or Tom, who was the lead singer of an ‘alternative Goth Industrial band' called Foetal Void. But then I stumbled upon the profile of someone I actually knew. You may recall from my previous book
Where's Wallis?
(which I'm sure you've all read), a Belgian fellow I met in Togo called Joris. He had got up one morning in Antwerp, hopped on his bicycle and ridden 6000 kilometres down through France, Spain, Morocco, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Ghana to Togo. The last time I'd heard from him, he'd been lying low in Ghana after narrowly avoiding a civil war in Togo. I wasn't even sure whether he was still in Africa, but when I sent him an email asking where he was, he emailed me straight back:

Hi Brian.

Nice to hear from you.

After my mysterious disappearance from the Togolese civil war I found myself on a slave ship full of chained white people with black seamen going to the port of Antwerp to fill the local slave market. An old friend bought me for a ridiculously small price (what an insult) and after I helped him build his house for over a year, fed with Belgian fries and cheap beer, he liberated me (he was a friend after all). So now, yes I'm back recovering from my adventure, and enjoying my liberation.

Joris was now an unemployed slave living in Hove, a suburb of Antwerp. Getting there was easy—a direct train from Brussels and a fifteen-minute walk from the station—as long as I didn't have to stop and ask someone for directions to his street. I didn't stand a chance of pronouncing Wolschaerderveldenstraat correctly. Antwerp is in the part of Belgium where most people speak Flemish, which sounds a bit like someone speaking with a mouthful of frites and a serious case of whooping cough.

Hove was very posh indeed, with grand houses and large gardens dominated by towering ancient trees. Unemployment benefits must be good in Belgium. Joris's street was just as swanky with a long row of tall red-brick houses.

Joris greeted me at the front door with a huge hug. Although we had only spent a couple of days together in Togo, it was like seeing a dear friend. The last time I had seen Joris he looked like John Lennon—albeit an incredibly tall and gangly version—with his little round glasses and long unkempt hair and goatee. His hair and goatee were now a little shorter and a little less unkempt and his clothes were not quite as dusty.

Joris lived on the top floor of his father's four-storey house, which had been converted into a little self-contained flat. There was a little kitchenette, a little bathroom and a little lounge room-cum-bedroom-cum-office. Joris was a full-time couch surfer. His bed was one half of a built-in L-shaped lounge. My bed would be the other half.

Joris had been living in the house since his parents divorced when he was two (although he didn't have his own flat then). He had been with his dad most of his life except for three years he spent with his mum in his teens. Before pedalling across the Sahara, Joris had studied philosophy at university then worked as a teacher. He received 800 Euros a month in unemployment benefits, but he wasn't sitting on his bottom doing nothing. Joris wanted to get into radio journalism, so he was doing unpaid work at a local independent radio station preparing and presenting interviews for various programs. He'd recently sold a five-hour special to Radio France, which he'd compiled from recordings he made throughout his trip to Africa (he took recording equipment with him to Africa, and recorded interviews and commentary in Flemish, French and English!). Now Joris was trying to organise a radio station to sponsor him, so he could complete the second leg of his African cycling expedition (Togo to South Africa).