Andy Richardson: A moose loose about this . . . road trip

The Icelandic car rental man didn’t think it was a dink. He thought the car had been hit by a wrecking ball. He imagined our humble not-a-VW-Golf-even-though-that’s-what-we-ordered-and-paid-for had been in collision with a giant Icelandic moose, if there is such a thing. There isn’t, of course. Moose, as we all know, are present in Norway, Sweden and Finland but haven’t been smart enough to swim across the Norwegian Sea to colonise their Nordic neighbours. Poor moose. Stupid moose. Iceland is beautiful. Save up and buy a raft. Plant your moose flags in its igneous rock surface and claim it as your own.

The car rental man didn’t care about Scandanavia’s non-migrating moose. He cared about the dink on the side of his car. His face wore such a moribund expression that I almost wanted to console him. Grief was etched across his bearded face. Perhaps moose weren’t responsible. Perhaps the car had been hit by an asteroid. He viewed me gravely, as though I’d asked his grandmother on a date.

“How did you do this?”

I thought back to a happy 48 hours in which we’d seen a glacier, looked at hot springs, watched one of Europe’s coolest waterfalls, caught cod and mackerel, observed puffins and eaten over-priced-but-delicious food in one of the world’s most expensive and most beautiful countries. There was nothing. No entanglements, no crashes, no near-misses, no risky manoeuvres: just a you-could-video-us-all-day-and-you-wouldn’t-see-anything-suspicious weekend in which we’d looked after the not-a-VW-Golf as though it were our own.

He looked at me seriously, like a consultant about to operate with a blunt and rusty blade.

“You’ll have to pay.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was speaking metaphorically or literally. Was he being sinister? Did ‘you’ll have to pay?’ mean he was going to take me round the back of the car rental shack and beat me into the pile of bald tyres while wearing leather gloves? Did he mean he was going to track me down to a sparsely populated county in England and steal all of my Ocean Colour Scene CDs before riding over them in his not-a-VW-Golf? Or did he just mean he wanted cash to fix the dink? A fiver would have done it – that’s the price of a bottle of T-Cut.

He called a colleague. Then another. Then another. Then another. The Dink Police assembled menacingly. Oh me, oh my. I’ve never been intimidated by Dink Police before. They bristled with intent.

“Somebody has banged your door. It’s common here.”

Thank you, Sherlock.

In the Philippines, they know a thing or two about dinks. The 6,693 miles between the two countries represents a gulf that cannot be bridged. While the Icelandic need four people to inspect a scuff/shadow on a passenger door, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has a different approach. He recently lined up US$7.3 million worth of Porsche, Lamborghini, Mercedes Benz and Harley Davidson vehicles and got one of his henchmen to drive over them with a digger. Rodrigo Duterte watched on from the side of a Manila scrapyard as the luxury vehicles were reduced to cubes of scrap metal. He didn’t like the people who owned them, apparently. Rinky-dink-dink. The car rental guy looked at me as though I were Duterte’s henchman. As though I was the one in the digger and his not-VW-Golfs were at risk.

He handed me a bill. It had the number 20,000 written on it. Twenty thousand is never a good look – particularly when you’re in one of the world’s most expensive countries. I wasn’t sure whether he was handing me a repair bill or selling me the car. Twenty thousand looks bad if you’re dealing in Iranian Rial, Vietnamese Dong, Indonesian Rupiah or Guinean Francs – let alone Icelandic something or other.

“You will pay. Sign this,” he said, thrusting paper towards me.

I gave him the death stare. It’s what we learn at school in Tipton. He looked as powerless as a donkey at the Grand National. There was a Mexican – or is that Philippino – stand-off.

Sign.

No.

Sign.

No.

My voice dropped three octaves and I started talking like Arnie in The Terminator, apparently.

“I have a plane to catch,” I told the car rental guy, fully expecting him to summon security and for Icelandic police to chain me to railings and force me to sign their goddamn piece of paper. Happily, there were no Icelandic Predator lookalikes waiting at the departure gate and we were allowed to leave.

A day later, a man/woman with an impossibly long name wrote an apology letter and said they’d be returning the 20,000 that they oughtn’t to have taken for the dink. So now we’re good to go back and everything is alright again. Or: “Er í lagi aftur,“ as they say in Iceland.