Green grass grows all around


This is the utopia part


The man who talks to horses


photos from left: Traditional turf house in Dakkagerdi, the last town before the end of the trip. // Hot tub in Skagastrond, the North Coast: “While you’re sitting in the hot tub someone would come up and say, ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ I’d say ‘sure.’” // Icelandic horses: “Have you ever smelled a horse between its two nasal passages right in the middle of its nose? It’s one of the best smells. Kind of like alfalfa flowers.”


Iceland Expedition by Numbers 1,700 Iceland’s circumference in nautical miles (3,000 km).


400 approximate number of Iceland Expedition 2003 T- shirts sold to cover trip expenses.


81 days on trip. 59 days paddling. 25 length of a typical paddling day, in nautical miles (45 km).


120 longest stretch between coastal towns, in nautical miles (from Hofn to Vik on the South Coast).


6–8 number of days’ food supply typically carried.


20 number of days spent paddling the South Coast, with no stops between campsites.


8 usual number of hours spent on the water each day.


11 number of equipment sponsors. 5 total number of months away from home.


400 number of Snickers bars consumed. 14 number of pounds lost by each expedition member.


270,000 population of Iceland.


60 percentage of Icelanders who live in greater Reykjavik.


1996 the last year a polar bear drifted to Iceland from Greenland on floating ice.


15,000 number of miles Chris Duff has travelled by sea kayak since 1983.


2 approximate distance in miles to the Arctic Circle from Iceland’s northernmost point.


34 Early Summer 2004


have loved to be able to drop a skeg but, well, we were fine without it. There’s strokes you can use— and holding your boat on edge—that help counter those conditions.


Black is a pretty unusual colour for a kayak! People usually think about getting brightly coloured boats for safety. Why did you choose black boats?


Mainly just because all-black boats are a really cool-looking boat. Shawna and I both decided by the end of the trip that black boats in that environment were too depressing and it would have been nice to have brighter-coloured boats. This is a report that I’ve heard from the U.K.: The coast guard looked at different boat colours and tried to determine which ones were most visible. And I believe that robin’s egg blue—which is the colour of the U.N. peacekeeping helmets— was one of the the most visible, and yellow was the second most visible and black-on-black was the third most visible.


You were several months away from home on a self-supported kayak expedition in a foreign country. What was the most difficult part of this expedition to plan?


Arranging to have the gear from the sponsors and writing them letters. The rest of it’s all fun! I think all three of us have decided that if we do another big trip, we probably won’t seek so much sponsorship. Expeditions should really be planned on the back of a napkin, sitting in a bar.


Paddling eight or more hours per day, almost every day, what did you eat to stoke the furnace?


Essentially our breakast every morning was oatmeal with cut-up apples and raisins and sugar and butter. And every evening it was some sort of pasta. [For lunch,] peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and boiled eggs and big chunks of cheese. We threw butter in the pasta as well. Butter went into everything, for the calories. All of us lost I think 14 pounds pretty much by the time we got to Reykjavik…. We ate 400 Snickers bars so we were just constantly cramming food in our face.


You had a pretty grueling schedule to get around Iceland during the summer weather window. Didn’t you get tired of paddling all day every day?


At the end of that trip it was sad to think that


we weren’t going to be able to just keep doing that. It’s not only just being on the water and paddling. On a trip like this you just set out in the morning knowing you’re going to see something you’ve never seen before. And Iceland is incredible so I think on every single day of that trip at some point I’d just stop and look around me and out loud go, “Wow, this is Incredible!”


On a long trip you have a lot of time to meditate. What’s the life lesson of a trip like this?


Being exposed to how beautiful the natural world is and giving you a greater appreciation for that and hopefully making your life so that you live a life that helps support the beauty of the natural world and survival. You realize you don’t need very much “stuff” to survive. You need a pot to


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