At the end of April 2015, I went to Grímsey for the first time.
I arrived with a friend, a tent, a sleeping bag, some tea bags, some boiled eggs, and a bucket full of pasta.
We were going to stay for 2 days, but the island had other plans and it got us stranded for nearly a week.
This remote place, and what we experienced during these days would be making a lifetime impact on us.


We ended up camping in an abandoned fisherman’s house that a local kindly offered to lend us for free, when we learnt that the camping site was closed. The house was very cold inside, didn’t have any heating or warm water. The kitchen fell apart when we opened one of the cupboards, and there were dead flies everywhere. We spent there the first 3 days, until it became too cold, even inside our sleeping bags.


A big storm hit the island, and flights and ferries were cancelled, making it completely unreachable for several days.
By the end of the week we had already met most of the inhabitants, and everyone knew about us, since we were the only tourists (known there as the “foreign volunteers from Akureyri”).

Our main purpose in coming to this island was to see the puffins, but we ended up not seeing any, and being rescued by and coexisting with a group of hunters (that were here precisely hunting for puffins, as they would tell us later). We found ourselves playing card games and having very long and interesting conversations with them, while the storm was raging outside and wouldn’t let us go out. They cooked pudding for us and made us tea and jam toasts when we arrived at the guesthouse looking for help, starving and very cold.

Grímsey is adrift, sitting at the end of the world... isolated and at the mercy of the elements, resisting the onrushing waves behind its cliffs. Here, the cold feels colder, the wind is wilder, and the sun illuminates the sea and gets reflected back at the clouds.

It feels as if the island has a life of its own, emerging from the ocean and embracing the storms and the winds. At times, it becomes a vessel and seems to move at the rhythm of the waves. On the other side, just above the horizon line, the coast of Iceland appears and disappears, just like the birds that come to play at the shore.