Day 5
24 February 2017

Having read most of the Lonely Planet guide to Iceland, map beside me on the table, I'm slowly working my way through the rival Rough Guide, which I prefer. I do this while eating my breakfast. Before Christmas I contacted "Fulglavernd" or Birdlife Iceland, and they suggested concentrating on the north coast, which also has the best coverage of information about birds. There are a series of scarcely populated penisulas and some bird islands. One of these, Drangey, is the scene of a vivid passage from Grettir's Saga.

Outlawed Grettir, lving off sheep on the little island, loses his fire. He spots some glowing embers on the mainland and decideds to swim across the 7.5 km despite the fact that the water temperature seldom goes above 9 degrees. Here I quote the guide:

". . . two young women, finding Grettir lying naked on the ground, numb after his swim . . declare 'He's certainly big enough in the chest but it seems odd how small he is further down."

Which reminds me of the old joke about some grossly well-hung Afro-American stepping out of the cold sea, being gawped at: "What you laughing at? Yours ud be shrivelled up if you'd been in that cold water." Good to know that the last 1000 years haven't changed human character much.

It's been a week of hard labour, and the difficult job of insulating the van. I decided to use rigid foam sheets - celotex - for most of it and expanding foam to fill any gaps. I use the pro type canisters with a replaceable gun, which is a fairly expensive item, but can be left attached to the canister when not in use. However, following my usual practice of reading the instruction after I've found out how it works, I discovered that it's not supposed to be left on for months on end. Carefully unscrewing the can, I found the gun blocked with solid foam. At this point any sensible person would throw it away, grit their teeth and buy a new one. I spent hours taking it apart, soaking it in cellulose thinners and cleaning out all the gunk. I did in the end get it working, but being made of cast alluminium, the threads are fragile and the adjustment knob has got threaded. It's still working, just.

Panel vans are made strong by being built around a skeleton of hollow struts - see picture.

Most people seem either leave them or stick thin foil inuslation over them. I decided to try to fill them, using a combination of rigid foam offcuts and spray foam. Needless to say this takes a long time, and I probably won't notice any difference, but my house building experience taught me to leave no gaps when insulating. I hope it will help with sound insulation.

Today the plywood for the lining will arrive and I will need some good templates to cut the shapes accurately. Fortunately the gale force winds of yesterday have died down and today will be fine though colder.
This is the van this morning:

Back to the shell

Day two.

The back of the van is all stripped out and nearly clean.

It feels good now because I can visualise how all the problems of insulation and lining can be solved. It's no longer a huge strange hill to be climbed but a path marked out by the many self-builders who have already been there. I joined the "Self Build Motor Caravan Club: http://sbmcc.co.uk/ and they have been most helpful.
Originally I was going to leave the old plywood floor as a sub-floor and build an insulated floor on top of it. However, I spotted some wet patches so decided to take it up and make sure the metal floor was sound and clean. There was all kinds of mess under it acting as a sponge for any moisture. It turns out there was quite a big leak pooling behind the driver's seat. I got Thelma to play the hose over the van with me inside and I soon found where it was getting in - an easy problem to solve.
Now it's off to the wonderful Ratcliffe's Hardware in Llandovery to get some insulation materials.

This is it - my latest and greatest project - apart from building the house of course, oh and setting up the Small Nations Festival. Anyway this feels like the greatest because I am working against a deadline and in areas I am still unfamiliar with.

The project is to do a complete conversion to a high spec camper in ten weeks. I then need to spend some time in it to check for omissions or things which don't work before departing on my great Bucket List Trip to Iceland in late May.

The route by which I got to this place is ridiculously complicated, and highlights an obsessive aspect to my character which I am not proud of. It's something which seems to get worse with age, but no doubt my family will tell me I've always been like it! I'll start with this entry in a diary which has been sadly neglected over the past year:

The Great Demountable Catastrophe

Back story:

Having decided it was time to change the Movano camper we had owned for the last 4 years, I made what I thought was a low offer on a demountable. The attraction was that it was set up to do difficult overland trips in wild places. The offer was, of course, accepted but as soon as I got it out onto the road I knew I'd made a mistake. It bounced me up and down like a rag doll. Determined to make the best of it I spent several months on making it more me-friendly. The ride was much improved, a toilet installed, and the bed layout was changed. I had almost decided it was good for Iceland despite an average mpg of 22 and a ride which was still very firm.

18/19 December 2016

The idea was to take the camper up to Mynydd Mallaen, our mountain, to see how I got on doing a tricky 4x4 trek. I got part way up the track from Cwmfran but got stuck so had to reverse all the way back. It was far too wet for all this weight.

Failure.

Now what?   

So as not to waste all the packing work I drove up to the top of Llyn Brianne but it still feels like failure. Do I really want to spend the night here? This was supposed to be fun but it doesn't feel like it.

6:30 Monday 19 Dec

I drove home: arrived around 5pm and found the safety catch on the front door. Good. Thelma looked a bit worried and I asked her to sit at the table and talk things through with me. Wine or coffee? Instant coffee won - it was Sunday after all and we had earlier had a large lunch with wine.

It was a humiliating experience but a big part of me still wants to turn this minor failure into a bigger success: to make the camper feel like my temporary home, a comfortable refuge, and a way of exploring places I could not otherwise get to. This is plan A, and I will overcome all the obstacles - get  used to the bumpy ride and the lack of power, remake the interior to my satisfaction, enjoy the drive to Denmark and explore those '4x4 only' roads in Iceland. The camper will be my bird hide. The culmination of plan A will be to sell the camper and truck at the end of my trip for a substantial profit and fly home. My initial research suggests that 4x4 vehicles fetch up to twice their price here, but there are so many unknowns, and nobody in Iceland seems keen to reply to emails at present. I checked the temperature at Akureyri in northern Iceland today: 3 deg to -1 cloudy; sunrise 11.38, sunset 14.42. Perhaps they are all on holiday somewhere light and warm.

Another cause for gloom last week was one of my, now regular, treks across Mallaen carrying a 10kilo pack. This is part of plan B and a subsidiary of Plan A: to be able to get to somewhere special which involved a long hike. To understand this we have to backtrack somewhat:

Since my late teens I have had an intermittent pain in my right shoulder which has prevented me from doing something I had started in my teens - what we now call 'backpacking.' Through my adult years I tried all sorts of remedies for this, including acupuncture and the Alexander Technique. Nothing worked - until this year, and the realisation that something had changed came over me very gradually. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that I was sure: the pain had gone. Looking back now I can't remember the last time I felt it. I used to have to massage the area to relieve it and that caused eczema-like spots, and those have been absent for at least a year, perhaps two. There is only one explanation for this: the mobility exercises I have been doing for the last 4 years or so. One of them involves a forced twist to the upper body and this must have relieved whatever was causing the pain.

So, to my amazement now, in my seventies, I can carry a pack again. I wonder how different my life would have been if this had happened in my thirties? Knowing my liking for risk I would probably have fallen off a mountain and died. Be grateful - this is a magical turning back of the body clock and I must make the most of it.

But the body is still old, and last week my strenuous 4 hour hike made worse a stiff neck that has nagged at me for months. Are these two disappointments coming together telling me something? I've frequently been disappointed in my life, and almost always because I had ambitions beyond my abilities. It's not that I can't do all these things - run a profitable furniture business, lead a jazz group, run a successful music agency - but that my self-confidence is intermittent.

Talking to Thelma last night I realise yet again that the demountable camper - that butch-looking all-terrain battleship-grey power-monster with its snorkel, its air-bag suspension, it's craggy tyres and its solar power - is not built for someone my age. That was part of the attraction of course - it linked me to the vibrant young man who had done all the work and who inspired my Iceland trip. He told me about the sea route from Denmark, and a light bulb lit in my mind: I could take a camper to Iceland and photograph the wonderful bird life there. It would be the great bucket-trip, and after much dithering but not enough close inspection I made what I thought was a low offer for the rig. I got in insured, signed the papers and handed over 10k in cash. Then I drove it on the road and it was horrible - bouncing up and down madly. Weeks later I found out that I had the air bag suspension too low, and I began to enjoy driving it even though it felt very underpowered, bumpy, and thirsty - averaging 21mpg. I decided I could live with these problems and now it became the big project. There was certainly a lot which needed doing to make it feel right and work properly. Unless I move to plan B, which has two elements.

Plan B would be to sell this camper and take a more conventional, less challenging one to Iceland. The Movano -  which I had spent many happy hours in over the 4 years since we bought it - is still here in storage up at Glangwenlais farm. I could take that, but it's 6 metres long and Thelma doesn't like driving it because of the length. There is also a £350 penalty on the ferry to Iceland for vehicles over 5 metres - which applies to the demountable too.

The two element to Plan B hinge on the concept of 4 wheel drive. It is possible to buy 4x4 campers: the Mazda Bongo range is mostly 4x4 as is a series of Japanese vehicles built in the nineties and now being imported. The Bongos are all too small and not designed for month-long trips. The earlier Japanese ones all have big engines so would be even heavier on fuel than the demountable. There are two larger vans which have 4x4: Ford Transit and Mercedes Sprinter. Neither are common, and they have 2.5 litre engines so similar in fuel consumption to the Movano.

If I go for a 2 wheel drive then I must accept that there will be places in Iceland I can't get to. This is where the walking comes in. If I can improve my fitness and get rid of the neck-ache then this should not be a problem.