Read Online Motorworld by Jeremy Clarkson - Free Book Online

down a kilometre-deep crack, ‘That’s odd. This wasn’t here yesterday.’
    Plus, you need to be mindful of the weather. Not even in the uppermost reaches of Scotland’s taller bits will you find changeable conditions like this. You can besunbathing one minute and dead the next. We’re a few miles from the Arctic Circle here and they have blizzards which would give Michael Fish a heart attack. Sometimes, they’re even more powerful than his jackets.
    So why, then, do Icelanders bother to go up there? Well, first of all, they’re mad, and second, they go because there’s no reason not to.
    Why, for instance, go into the African bush when there’s a better-than-evens chance of not getting out with all your legs on? Why climb Everest and why, in British terms, have a barbecue when you have an oven?
    The first thing you do before hitting the ice is drop the tyre pressure down to just two pounds per square inch, so that the rubber makes a bigger footprint on the snow. And don’t worry about it coming off the wheel because you only need a Zippo and some lighter fluid to put it back on again. What you do is spray the butane into the tyre and light it. The resultant explosion pops the tyre back on the rim and gives just enough pressure to carry on. And carry on you must because journey’s end is a huge slash in the ice.
    And to give you an idea about how huge, you could play hide-and-seek in there with Canary Wharf and not find it.
    I don’t want to get all religious here but when you stand on the edge of this absurd crater you do start to wonder a little bit about the puniness of man. I mean, not even the most powerful nuclear bomb could do this. The power that created it is beyond the ken of even our most sophisticated computer. We really are pretty pathetic and I supposethat if I lived near it, and all Iceland’s other wonders, I might have a slightly lower opinion of myself.
    Perhaps this is why Icelanders, more than anyone else I’ve ever met, live so close to the edge.
    Either that or they have the fishing industry to thank. I mean, if a country relies for its huge wealth on fish, which can only be caught by ploughing the North Atlantic in small boats, playtime is going to be pretty special.
    I also think, though, that quite by chance we’d stumbled on a nation that simply likes cars. Certainly, it’s hard to see the internal combustion engine as a threat to mankind up there.
    When you stand in a normal city street, and the whole thing is clogged up with tail pipes, smoky buses and the interminable din from a million diesels, it’s easy to see why the environmental argument can get a toehold.
    But in Iceland, one exhaust pipe on a glacier the size of Yorkshire doesn’t seem so bad.
    Then we have the queues. It’s easy to see the appeal of public transport in Britain where every motorway is clogged, and every B-road alternative a washboard route directly to the osteopath.
    They have queues in Iceland too, but never so severely that you’d think about taking the bus instead. And anyway, you can always call the transport minister whose number – and that of the President herself – appears in the phonebook.
    ‘Oh people call me up all the time,’ he says. ‘If there’s the slightest problem, they’re straight on the phone to me. This is a small place and everyone knows everyone else.
    Just because you work in the transport ministry doesn’t mean you stop knowing people.’
    The transport ministry needs to be defined though. Put it like this. When he goes out for lunch, it’s closed.
    Sure, he has the planes, the buses and the cars to worry about but, thankfully, no trains. There are none.
    However, outside California, Iceland does have the highest car-ownership levels in the world and the roads have to keep pace with a demand that just won’t slow down.
    To cope, they have Road One, which circumnavigates Iceland and is paved for very nearly its entire length. The best stretch is in the south where