It was 50% proof and 100% unwelcome. But this had become a battle for national pride, and I felt compelled to do my bit for the flagging reputation of Ireland. I swallowed a mouthful of warm vodka, retreated further into my sleeping bag and prayed that the sleep police would let me go back to oblivion. It was 7am.
The Westman Islands Festival has been officially named the Greatest Party in the World, according to a Rough Guides readers’ poll. I probably should have warmed up a bit lower down the Top 40, but I’d decided I was man enough to go straight to No 1. I was wrong.
Only two types of people go to the Westmans, a volcanic chain off the south coast of Iceland: bird-spotters, chasing the world’s finest collection of puffins; and hedonists, mostly chasing each other. For four days over the first weekend in August every year, these disparate groups collide on Heimaey, the largest and most beautiful island in the chain.
The fiesta’s unpronounceable name — Þjóðhátíð — means “The People’s Feast”, and officially it’s about celebrating the ratification of Iceland’s constitution. Unofficially, it’s about camping in the hollow of a volcano and going completely wild to live music: Glastonbury with ice and fire.
Heimaey itself would provide an interesting case study for a geography field trip. The walls of the volcano tower above most of the west of the island, though the last eruption — in 1973, I noted uneasily — blew one side of it away. What is left is a perfect volcanic cross section. Steep, grassy banks sweep down to the sea and provide a superb natural amphitheatre for the temporary stage erected in the hollow, facing back up the mountain.
Most students at the festival are more interested in biology than geography, though. Westman is billed as an endurance test of intoxication and, it must be said, copulation, which challenges the best of party and festival regulars. I had carefully selected a three-man All-Ireland team for a bold bid to become the first non-Viking descendants to emerge with credit from what is pretty much an exclusively Icelandic party.
A BUS leaves Reykjavik on Friday morning to take festivalgoers to the coast. It’s then a 2½-hour ferry ride to Heimaey, and as the boat cuts through the swell of the North Atlantic, leaving an already isolated Iceland on the horizon, the bracing wind forces moments of clarity. We were travelling to the most remote place we’d ever visited, for a festival we knew next to nothing about. Another fine mess...
There was a bit of a free-for-all at the unloading of the luggage containers in Heimaey’s small port, but once all bags were recovered, I brought the team down towards the volcano’s crater, where a burgeoning camp site was spreading over any available flat greenery. Entry cost £85 for three days’ camping and entertainment. That’s cheap for Iceland — in a bar in Reykjavik the night before, I’d paid £27 for three beers, while that afternoon a stamp to send a postcard to Australia had cost £9.
Just as at a “normal” festival, the first bands appear on the stage at about 3pm, although, out here, time begins to melt like a Dali clock. There are 21 hours of daylight every day in an Icelandic summer, and the 8,000 people in attendance appear to have no need of rest.
Indeed, teams of “sleep police” patrol 24 hours a day, armed with vodka, to make sure everyone is making the most of the madness, and the entertainment is laid on from dawn to dawn. The bands are mostly Icelandic and Danish, but the quality and range of music are remarkable, from Sigur Ros, who provided the theme music for David Attenborough’s Planet Earth series, to some excellent reggae bands and a few comedy acts, whose quality is evidenced by the masses of doubled-over locals enjoying monolingual hysterics.
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Other than those dancing directly in front of the stage, most people gather in groups on the grassy walls of the volcano for raucous picnics — fuelled, again, by vodka. In between bands, mass singsongs break out, echoing around the crater as groups link arms, sway and occasionally roll down the sides of the steep bank in a gloriously carefree drunken return to childhood. At midnight, the festival becomes the world’s biggest campfire song session, as an enormous bonfire is lit on a natural platform halfway up the hill, warming anyone still sober enough to feel the cold.
Of course, others find more natural ways to stay warm, and it is for this activity that the majority of young people come to the island. When dusk finally falls, writhing, conjoined shapes are silhouetted by torchlight against the canvas walls of most tents, and venturing too far up the steep slopes of the old volcano is like walking through the middle of the mountain-goat breeding season. Iceland’s womenfolk are famously beautiful (it has the highest proportion of Miss Worlds per capita) and notably uninhibited. Glastonbury with fire, ice... and Bond girls.
