Gregory's Server
Day 1:
Boat dropped us off on the Peninsula, on the landing site of Heysteri, there was a nice little house with a pancake cafe in it. We did not visit it, but the other couples and "The Frenchman" visited it. The other people were there for a day hike, and The Frenchman was there for the same hike as us.
Started off nice, mushy swampland, to hillside, to hilltop. Eventually, the end of the hilltop presented the first minor challenge: The path was marked as "Unmarked trail" on the map, and truly it was, unmarked. The path suddenly ends with a 45 degree incline going downhill, a mixture of mud, gravel, and minor water streams. As it was wet and raining, this was a slippery slope downhill. Standing on top of the hill, I realized something:
"This is literally the first main level of Death Stranding"
this was a reccurring theme throughout this entire trip, me going "what the fuck this is LITERALLY DEATH STRANDING LEVEL"
honestly im fucking amazed that kojimbo created an entire peninsula just as a throwback to the game.
Got down the hill, past a church, ignored the church, and then after we were about 100m past the church, a man and a woman came out of the church. They got on an ATV with a trailer attachment, and drove towards us. They stop next to us:
"Where are you going?"
"Campsite, north"
"Ah, we can take your bags and bring them there, its a lot easier to walk then"
"no thanks, we are doing the big hike and we want to cheat as little as possible"
"Ah, i understand"
And the old man on the ATV smiled very warmly, and, for some reason, cried?
It was quite unexpected. I think we might have slightly offended them by NOT entering the church to have a free coffee, as they mentioned that we shouldve done that! sorry ;_; , i didnt think that to be a feature.
We walked to the campsite, and shortly after, The Frenchman arrived, i think about 2 hours later? We chatted, we discussed, i came to the conclusion that The Frenchman had REALLY COME VERY UNPREPARED for what i assumed would be a VERY difficult hike. He said, there's a former BRITISH military base on top of that hill (points at hill) and then he really wanted to see it, so the clock was only about 16:00 or so, so he decided to quickly do a less than 5km trip up and down the mountain. He left all his gear at the campsite, and went up. Unfortunately for him, his phone GPS was shit, and he had no compass, and the moment he got on the hill, the thickest cloud parked itself cozy on it. In the meanwhile, i cooked, i shat, i washed, i pissed in the ocean, and then got some sleep. I woke up at 23:00 roughly, to some sound. It was The Frenchman coming back.
"Did you just come back"
"Yeah"
"Took long, thought youd be back sooner"
"Yeah i got lost in ze clouds"
"Did you atleast find the base?"
"Yeah, but it waz not ze worth it at all, thought i'd never get out of there"
Man was walking in circles in a completely flat top mountain in 10m visibility fog for like 3 hours lmfao.
Saebol campsite, i believe it was called. Good day overall, lotsa rain, easy terrain. Anyone could do this day. The campsite had running water, which was a hose running to a mountain stream running into a faucet.
Boat dropped us off on the Peninsula, on the landing site of Heysteri, there was a nice little house with a pancake cafe in it. We did not visit it, but the other couples and "The Frenchman" visited it. The other people were there for a day hike, and The Frenchman was there for the same hike as us.
Started off nice, mushy swampland, to hillside, to hilltop. Eventually, the end of the hilltop presented the first minor challenge: The path was marked as "Unmarked trail" on the map, and truly it was, unmarked. The path suddenly ends with a 45 degree incline going downhill, a mixture of mud, gravel, and minor water streams. As it was wet and raining, this was a slippery slope downhill. Standing on top of the hill, I realized something:
"This is literally the first main level of Death Stranding"
this was a reccurring theme throughout this entire trip, me going "what the fuck this is LITERALLY DEATH STRANDING LEVEL"
honestly im fucking amazed that kojimbo created an entire peninsula just as a throwback to the game.
Got down the hill, past a church, ignored the church, and then after we were about 100m past the church, a man and a woman came out of the church. They got on an ATV with a trailer attachment, and drove towards us. They stop next to us:
"Where are you going?"
"Campsite, north"
"Ah, we can take your bags and bring them there, its a lot easier to walk then"
"no thanks, we are doing the big hike and we want to cheat as little as possible"
"Ah, i understand"
And the old man on the ATV smiled very warmly, and, for some reason, cried?
It was quite unexpected. I think we might have slightly offended them by NOT entering the church to have a free coffee, as they mentioned that we shouldve done that! sorry ;_; , i didnt think that to be a feature.
We walked to the campsite, and shortly after, The Frenchman arrived, i think about 2 hours later? We chatted, we discussed, i came to the conclusion that The Frenchman had REALLY COME VERY UNPREPARED for what i assumed would be a VERY difficult hike. He said, there's a former BRITISH military base on top of that hill (points at hill) and then he really wanted to see it, so the clock was only about 16:00 or so, so he decided to quickly do a less than 5km trip up and down the mountain. He left all his gear at the campsite, and went up. Unfortunately for him, his phone GPS was shit, and he had no compass, and the moment he got on the hill, the thickest cloud parked itself cozy on it. In the meanwhile, i cooked, i shat, i washed, i pissed in the ocean, and then got some sleep. I woke up at 23:00 roughly, to some sound. It was The Frenchman coming back.
"Did you just come back"
"Yeah"
"Took long, thought youd be back sooner"
"Yeah i got lost in ze clouds"
"Did you atleast find the base?"
"Yeah, but it waz not ze worth it at all, thought i'd never get out of there"
Man was walking in circles in a completely flat top mountain in 10m visibility fog for like 3 hours lmfao.
Saebol campsite, i believe it was called. Good day overall, lotsa rain, easy terrain. Anyone could do this day. The campsite had running water, which was a hose running to a mountain stream running into a faucet.
Walk from campsite, and we see Pic 1. We need to go around the mountain to the left, via coast, on the ocean, but the coast is innaccessible because it turns into a cliff+ocean combo part way. Fortunately, the innovative minds at Kojima Productions have thought of this, and had a Climbing Anchor right in a convenient spot. We go up the hill, then use the climbing anchor to drop down into a nice flat coast section. The Plan was simple. My friend, less experienced in climbing, will go first, with very little and light gear. Me, more experienced in climbing, will follow with all of the rest of the equipment in different bags in one climb-down. Unfortunately, one strap came loose while i was climbing down, and you can check what happened in the webm below.
We had full rubber suits with us, and so for the next part, we donned them, thinking the ocean waves might splash us. They did occassionally, but nothing crazy. No wind, so the waves were weak fortunately.
The rest of the walk that day was rather OK; 2 painful groin deep river crossings of near 0 degrees C, the ocean, sand sand sand, and mushy mosslands. And, I do love the US Army, they food is downright tongue swallowing de-liciouse as hell.
And funnily, like the brits who made the WW2 base, which was immediately abandoned because it was completely uninhabitable, the americans in their extreme bullheadedness, thought they could succeed where the brits failed. So they built the Straumnes Air Station on top of the mountain above this campsite. They built the base for 4 years, with expensive radar equipment and everything, in the 50-ies, and then; abandoned it because it was completely uninhabitable lmfao.
There's two images in this post's attachments: theres english translation inside the image below each icelandic text. One is of the americans attempting to build a base, the other is of life on this peninsula before my time. I wont rewrite the text from those images, if you feel like knowing these 2 funny stories, the images are mostly readable.
Latrar campsite was nice, had some people at the village who were there for the summer for the one month its habitable. Like 4 or 5 people. Those were their summer homes, / summer retreats. With the exception of the roughly 100 meter climb (down), this day was doable for anyone who can walk on difficult slippery terrain.
The Frenchman was nowhere to be seen, he said he would be going one more campsite further in the same day. This morning was the last we ever saw him.
There was a ruin of bricks and concrete, a garage for a rusted US army jeep i did not take pictures of. We tarped this over and made a drying house of it for our clothes.