Saturday, July 26, 2008

Farm #1: Skammidalur, Iceland

My first wwoof host was Dorothea, a very nice woman who lives in Reykjavik and owns a one-room hut/house in Skammidalur - a small strip of summer houses 20 minutes outside of the city. It proved to be a great arrangement, for she let me live with her and her housemate Tanja in their Reykjavik flat for several 2-day periods between my trips to work in her "farm:"


As you can see, it is more of a garden with a chicken coop than a farm, though I was warned in an email that this was the case. Regardless, there was plenty of work to do: weeding the two beds of carrots that are pictured above under the white acrylic covers, sawing and chopping wood, weeding the potato beds, filling in the strawberry beds with soil, and other miscellaneous work. To wwoof here one should be able to embrace independence and solitude; Dorothea works in Reykjavik during the week, so you'll be on your own for several days at a time. The major benefit of this is that the wwoofer is free to determine hir own schedule. I didn't have to wake at any particular time, could go for a morning run through the beautiful hills and afterwards ate freshly laid eggs for breakfast. It should be noted that Dorothea was great about taking me to the grocery store to stock up on food for my stay, and that the one-room house without heat, electricity, or running water was actually quite nice. For these reasons, I highly recommend wwoofing here if you're in East Iceland. Dorothea is, however, very strict about hosting only one wwoofer at a time as her apartment is very small so it's a waste of time to email her if you're not travelling alone. Additionally, I would try and contact her as far in advance as possible, for she doesn't accept many wwoofers, and likes to have the summer schedule planned out months in advance. I'll conclude with a few pictures:

The Summer House




Inside / The Llama Pendant



View of Skammidalur Area from Neighboring Hill




Church (20min Walk Away)



Preface/Purpose

My main aversion to personal blogs lies in their underlying message that the life of the person who is blogging is so interesting that others should postpone their lives to read about them. As I do not believe this to be the case concerning myself, I will address the matter briefly for those interested:

The primary purpose of this blog is not to tell you how wonderful and exciting I am or my life is (but really, I'm a quite wonderful and exciting person) but rather to inform those persons interested in wwoofing in the countries and farms that I will visit. There currently exists a great deficit of knowledge about wwoof hosts, and if it weren't for the blogs of other wwoofers, I would have most likely stayed in some undesirable farms and likewise missed out on great ones. I encourage other wwoofers to share their farming experiences on the internet as well until a more organized forum exists for feedback. Secondly, I hope this blog provides those friends and family members who are interested in learning about the farms I've been working in with an easy means of obtaining such information - I will try to concentrate more on the farms than myself, though the latter is inextricable from the former. And last but not least, I hope this blog to be a sufficient means of updating my many secret admirers scattered across the globe on my doings, if only to maintain their continued interest.