Encounters with a Ship

First Encounter

In August 2020, part of the team of researchers contributing to this book were on a fieldtrip in Westfjords, Iceland. On our way to Látrabjarg, the largest birdcliff in Iceland and one of the main attractions of the region, we drove through Skápadalur, a small valley at the end of the fjord of Patreksfjörður. There, at the side of the road that crosses the valley, rests a wrecked fishing vessel called Garðar. It has obviously been sailed onto the shore and placed there on purpose but seemingly left unattended. However, it attracts visitors. Tourists driving the road slow down and many stop by. It is a curious and photogenic spot. We also stopped and stepped out of our car to take a better look (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1
A photograph of tourists gazing out at the view, which includes many cars, a large rusted ship, water on both sides, and mountains in the background.

(Photo by Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson)

Members of the MoM team with other tourists at the site of Garðar in August 2020

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The presence of the ship at this site was odd, to say the least, it seemed out of place in the otherwise natural surroundings. Rust has damaged the ship’s steel coat and it is not safe to board it to explore it on the inside. Many however do so and Elva, who has been working on her PhD project in the areas (see Chapter 9), tells us that municipal authorities are concerned about the risk the wreck poses as well as the costs of its basic maintenance. A signpost at the site explains that this ship was the first steel boat in the Icelandic fishing fleet, and as such it marked a historic step in the modernisation of the fisheries, an industry that has long been central for the Icelandic economy. For me, at the time, it comes across as a sort of a monument of past times and a symbol of societal changes that have seen tourism becoming the largest provider of foreign currency instead of fisheries. It also makes me wonder about the people who worked on board this ship, what they did and how many today must have some kind of connection to it. I think I can see into one of the cabins but I’m not sure. If it could talk, it would definitely have many stories to tell and even as it lies there silently it still stirs our imagination (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2
A map at the top depicts four locations of Talknafjorour, Patreksfjorour, Skapadalur, and Latrabjarg. Bottom left, a globe highlights a region. A map at the bottom right shows the locations of Siglufjorour, Westman Islands, and Reykjavik, with a region to the north-west highlighted.

(Map by Michaël Virgil Bishop)

Map of the location of Garðar and the roads leading to it. Together with Patreksfjörður, it was operated from Siglufjörður, Reykjavík and Westman Islands after being bought to Iceland. Data: National Lands Survey of Iceland

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Second Encounter

When coming to Garðar again, one and half year later, the place affects me somewhat in different ways than the first time I encountered it. On this latter occasion, we were eight together, researchers in the MoM project driving through the region and acquainting us with it again. Some of us had not been there before. When stepping out of the car at the modest parking lot at the Garðar site, which is basically the sandbank on which it rests, we started to talk about the ship, the reasons for it being there, stuck on the shoreline and the various implications it had. As we walked around it, gazing at it and photographing it from different angles, we found ourselves collectively trying to grasp the value and meaning of Garðar. It immediately grabs one’s attention, a derelict wreck standing out, a giant metal carcass stuck in the otherwise vibrant natural landscape. At the time we were there, in mid-May, the shore was full of migratory birds, some coming to stay for the summer, others, like the red knot (Calidris canutus), only stopping by on their route further north. There were fewer tourists than last time we were there, as the high season had not started, but still a couple of rental cars stopped by and people stepped out to have a closer look. As for Garðar, we couldn’t pinpoint any one meaning of it as it rested there. “What is it?”, we asked ourselves. An artwork, a monument, a tourist attraction, a shelter for birds nesting, a health hazard, a piece of junk or all of that and more? (Fig. 5.3).

Fig. 5.3
A photograph of a large rusted ship on the land near water bodies, with a mountain and clear sky in the background.

(Photo by Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson)

Garðar at its place, May 2022

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In this chapter, these two accounts of encounters with Garðar serve as a starting point for thinking about how places emerge through different kinds of mobilities and encounters in time and space. The chapter is based on relational ontology that describes places as accomplished through multiple relations and practices by human and more-than-human actors. Much like ships, places move around heterogeneous networks (Hetherington 1997). But they are also stable, appearing like knots of intersecting lines of mobilities or events of “throwntogetherness” (Massey 2005). Mobilities “can be thought of as an entanglement of movement, representation, and practice” (Cresswell 2010, 17). It is thus possible to refer to spheres of activity such as tourism, transportation or fisheries as mobilities that affect and choreograph places (Franklin 2012; Lund and Jóhannesson 2016). In the case of tourism, the implication of this approach is that instead of thinking about tourism as a practice that happens within a pre-defined space or existing locations, tourism encounters produce and perform spaces and places (Bærenholdt et al. 2004). The latter thereby do not pre-exist their performance (Gregson and Rose 2000). In Franklin’s words, tourism appears as a “network that is dynamic: it constantly maps, translates, joins, connects, aestheticizes, exchanges, enrols, hosts, and courts” (2012, 46). Tourism then takes shape and shapes the world through relational encounters and entanglements with a wide array of heterogeneous objects such as roads, airports, menus, buildings, landscapes and ships (Jóhannesson et al. 2015). Hence, tourism mobilities have ontological repercussions; they are performative and enact realities. They affect places, both in a topographical sense, affecting flora and fauna of destinations, and in a topological sense, for instance, in altering the relation between perceived margins and centres, changing the notion of distance and shaping the image of places, peoples and natures as being remote and isolated and untouched or not (Huijbens and Jóhannesson 2019; Ren and Jóhannesson 2023).

As a matter of fact, the creative capacities of tourism are often framed in strategic or normative ways. Tourism, then, is conceived as a creator of jobs and as such promoted as a tool for developing, reviving or reordering struggling regional economies. Tourism in the southern part of the Westfjords has historically been modest, not least due to its remote location in relation to the capital region and the South of Iceland which most international travellers choose to visit during their stay in the country (Þórhallsdóttir and Ólafsson 2017). It takes approximately five hours to drive from Reykjavík, the capital, to the site of Garðar. Weak transport infrastructure both within and outside of the region of Westfjords have further limited tourism. This is one of the last regions in the country where a substantial part of the main roads are not paved and the mountainous topography is challenging during winters due to snow. Nevertheless, tourism has been promoted both by national and municipal authorities for years as a tool for economic diversification in the Westfjords (Vestfjarðastofa 2022). A recent effort consists in designing and marketing a tourist trail, the so-called Westfjord Way (Vestfjarðaleið in Icelandic), that is intended to draw travellers to the region, slow them down and have them stay longer. In this project the ship wreck of Garðar has been designated a role as an object of interest. The apparent role of Garðar in developing sustainable tourism in the region exemplifies the commonly haphazard planning of tourism in sparsely populated and remote areas. It also underscores how tourism mobilities entwine with multiple other mobilities and affect the becoming of a place, often in unintended ways.

In the following, I will trace some of the mobilities through which Garðar has become entangled with tourism in the southern part of the Westfjords region. The story of Garðar exemplifies how places emerge through different kinds of mobilities and encounters in time and space and how tourism mobilities contribute to place making through connections with a wide array of objects and performances.

An Object of Interest in the Making

As stated on the signpost beside Garðar, this is the oldest steel boat in Iceland, built in Oslo in 1912. The seemingly straightforward description defines it as a potential object of interest and one worth of conservation. But what is an object and how does it contribute to the making of a place? Anthropologist Tim Ingold, drawing on Heidegger’s distinction between object and thing, observes that the former “stands before us as a fait accompli, presenting its congealed, outer surfaces to our inspection”, whereas “[t]he thing, by contrast, is a ‘going on’, or better, a place where several goings on become entwined” (Ingold 2010, 4, italics added). While the object is sealed off for participation, the thing is inviting and open for engagement, or in his words:

Thus conceived, the thing has the character not of an externally bounded entity, set over and against the world, but of a knot whose constituent threads, far from being contained within it, trail beyond, only to become caught with other threads in other knots. Or in a word, things leak, forever discharging through the surfaces that form temporarily around them. (ibid., 4)

An object, then, unlike a thing, is an externally bounded entity. In the case of Garðar, seeing it as an object in this sense would mean that it is nothing more or less than a specimen of a particular type of fishing vessel from a certain historical era as explained on the signpost by its side. Its value and meaning is contained within that definition, vested in its slowly rusting steel coat. If we move, however, away from the brief description on the signpost and start to trace the history of this particular ship, the boundaries between thing and object start to blur.

Garðar was built as a state-of-the-art whaling vessel, specifically designed for sailing Antarctic waters, with a reinforced hull to cope with sea ice. Whaling had been banned in Norway in 1904 but in 1912 Norwegian companies had developed Antarctic whaling into a lucrative business (Isachsen 1929; Tønnessen 1970). In 1936, the ship was sold to the Áir whaling company in the Faroe Islands. There it was used more for transport than whale hunting until nine years later, in 1945, when it was sold to an Icelandic company in Northern Iceland. At that point, it was renovated and partly rebuilt. The original steam engine was replaced with a modern diesel engine, the pilothouse was replaced and the crew cabins renovated, and the ship was equipped with the latest technology, such as radio- and echo-sounding equipment (Morgunblaðið 2003). For the next seven years, the vessel was used for herring fishing and line trawling. In the 1950s and early 1960s the ship was operated from Reykjavík, the Westman islands in the South of Iceland and Siglufjörður in the North, by different companies in each period. During this time it was maintained and repaired on a regular basis. In 1963, it was given its present name, Garðar, when bought by a company located in the capital of Reykjavík. At that time, the ship was renovated thoroughly once again. A new and more powerful engine was installed with a new radar and a net winch, which was used to hoist the herring troll on board, a technology that revolutionised herring fisheries. However, herring fishing in Iceland collapsed in the late 1960s, partly due to overfishing, with devastating consequences for the national economy. This led to Garðar being used for catching cod by line trawling and even for lobster fishing for some time but in 1974 Garðar was sold to Jón Magnússon’s company, located in the village of Patreksfjörður in the southern part of the Westfords region. Jón was to be its last owner. He kept the name, had the pilot house rebuilt and upgraded the technical equipment. In the ensuing years, Garðar was among the most successful fishing boats in the region until it was declared unsafe in 1981 and deregistered (Morgunblaðið 2003).

As this brief history of the “life” of Garðar illustrates, it did not stay intact through the years. Several rounds of renovations and considerable rebuilding, re-equipping and upgrading in tandem with changed purpose and technological advancements even raise the question if Garðar was the same ship at the end of its active service at sea as the one that was launched in Oslo in 1912. In Ingold’s optics, Garðar appears much more as a thing that leaks than an object that stays intact. However, it is also evident that it does hold itself together as an object; as a ship. Law, in his discussion of methods of long distance control (1986), describes vessels as networked objects that hold their shape, while moving through space as long as all its parts fulfil their roles. In Law’s study, the ship was an example of a stable object, which provided the means to sail long distances more or less successfully, i.e. as long as the ship held together in one piece and did not leak. On the basis of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the ship was framed as an immutable mobile and as such it operated and enacted two versions of spatial relations, network space where it held together and regional space through which it moved (Law 2002).

This perspective provides a less dualistic version of the difference between objects and things, a version that sees this difference accomplished through (performative) relational ordering. Thus, sometimes the ship is performed as a network object and this is indeed the reason for its successful operation as a ship that sails the seas and thus enacts regional space. And this latter point is important as it allows us to perceive the ship as a relational actor rather than as a passive piece of wood or steel that is somehow propelled between destinations much like billiard balls that move by the force of the cue that hits them (Emirbayer 1997). The agency of the ship is “an effect of its relations with other entities” (Law 2002, 93). As an actor, it is “entangled, in terms of both its performance and its nature, in a variety of worlds” (de Laet and Mol 2000, 227). The vessels sailing the Portuguese route to India that Law described depended on networks of technology, astronomy and politics and their operation performed a particular version of the world. This means that the enactment of objects “has spatial implications […] and to enact objects is also to enact spatial conditions of im/possibility” (Law 2002, 92), which is to say that “spaces are made with objects” (ibid., 96). Furthermore, an object always enacts multiple relations. To build a ship and successfully sail it entails enacting it as a network object in the sense that its material integrity is contained within a network space, while it is able to sustain its mobility under conditions of Euclidian space.

For a long time Garðar performed as such an object, contributing to the growth-driven and resource-based economies of the Antarctic and the Arctic. In the latter region, the herring and cod fisheries were the backbone of the economy, a lever for modernisation and the basis for increasing urbanisation along the coastline. The towns and villages in the present-day peripheral region of the Westfjords are an example of this world of large scale modernised fisheries of the twentieth century. Garðar did hold together as a fishing vessel but that also demanded a lot of work and investment. The wear and tear of operating in harsh waters constantly posed risks to its stability as an object. The maintenance itself involved rounds of rebuilding but those were also driven by strategic decisions regarding what type of operation provided the best yield. The transition from whaling into herring and from there into line trawling reflected changes in the natural conditions of the stocks in question as well as the formation and implementation of regulatory frameworks such as the whaling ban in Norway and the ban on herring fishing in Iceland.

These forces may be described as various networks in which Garðar has been entangled as well as dependent on in its relational performance and as we have seen they also imposed material and technological changes to Garðar. Hence, sometimes Garðar was enacted as a thing, “a place of several goings on” in Ingold’s words (2010, 4) or a mutable mobile in ANT vocabulary (Latour 2005). Through the years, Garðar was repeatedly taken apart and reassembled to a varying extent. But still there was a continuity to it, it still worked as a ship, until it was sailed to the ground in Skápadalur. As such, it also enacts a spatial condition that is fluid in the sense that one of the reasons it holds together is that its shape does indeed change (de Laet and Mol 2000; Law and Mol 2001; Mol and Law 1994). The reason for its continuity as a ship and its continuous movement as such is that it is able to change. Based on this, it is possible to state that objects like ships depend on a relational ordering of regions, networks and fluids and perform these spatial conditions. This is to say that the operation of Garðar as a ship is meaningful under different spatial conditions; meaningful in the sense of holding together and affecting the becoming of the places it relates to during its operation.

Garðar’s movement and operation as a fishing boat was put to a halt when it was deemed not seaworthy and sailed to the ground in Skápadalur by its owner, Jón Magnússon. It should be noted that the shoreline of Skápadalur in fact was owned by Jón himself, being a part of his property in the valley. A little bit up on the mountainside overlooking the shoreline Jón also had built himself a summerhouse. Jón has now passed away but the land is still owned by his family. As Garðar rests on the shoreline it no more moves in the same way as before. It is immobile in regional space but as we will see that does not mean it stays put under other spatial conditions. Its continuity as a ship that sails has been broken. It has left most of the networks it depended on as a fishing vessel and seems to have been abandoned as an object that someone cares for or cares about. However, rather than marking an end to its voyage, the planting of it on the shore can be seen as a new beginning. It has entered another world, another current of mobilities, where it starts to play a different role in shaping the area of southern Westfjords, including the town of Patreksfjörður and its surroundings, now as a place of tourism. And of course it is still a ship in some sense at least, and an object worth seeing.

Mol and Law (2001) use the metaphor of fire to describe how an object can hold its integrity while being torn apart or ripped out of the relations that hitherto have sustained it. This is one more way of thinking about spatiality of relational encounters, of how mobilities of various sorts perform and shape space as they entangle with objects. It manifests continuity through rupture. According to Jón Magnússon, Garðar immediately started to attract visitors, partly as a monument of a historical era and a piece of cultural heritage (Morgunblaðið 1991). In some sense, its fate is symbolic of general changes with the growing significance of tourism and the decreasing role of demersal fishing in the region, as pointed out to me by Valgerður María Þorsteinsdóttir who works as a representative for tourism and culture for the municipality. Instead of whales, herring and cod, now it catches tourists in its nets that are made of the aura of past times, the history of fishing, its material presence and of the dynamic display of the forces of nature that are underway in decomposing an object of modern industry. Þórkatla Soffía Ólafsdóttir, a representative of the regional Destination Management Organisation (DMO), says many of the local people have fond memories of visiting the site of Garðar. In the old days, she says, they could go on board and explore the interior, the pilot house, still with all sorts of equipment and the crew cabins; “it was a world of adventure”. Once again, Garðar appears as an object that lends itself easily to fruitful connections as it encounters different actors that happen to visit it. Let us now explore the entanglement of Garðar into networks of tourism mobilities and its spatial repercussions in more detail.

An Attraction on the Way

As stated above, tourism development has been on the agenda in the region for some time. The southern part of the Westfjords region deals with many of the common challenges marginal areas face when it comes to tourism development. These include seasonality, long distances and at times difficult access, a limited local labour pool and limited options for marketing and promotion (Müller 2011). Between 2010 and 2019, tourism grew rapidly in Iceland and became a central pillar of the national economy. The rapid increase happened within a loose regulatory framework for management and planning and resulted in overcrowding at some of the most popular sites (Sæþórsdóttir et al. 2020a). To describe the whole country as suffering from overtourism, however, is a simplification (Jóhannesson and Lund 2019; Sæþórsdóttir et al. 2020b). There are vast regional differences in tourism with the capital area and the south coast being central destinations and the East fjords and the Westfjords still being marginal in the context of tourism growth (Huijbens and Jóhannesson 2020; Thórhallsdóttir et al. 2021). The challenges that the fast increase in tourism and the concomitant overcrowding entailed, such as environmental degradation and rising housing prices together with the experience from the COVID-19 pandemic, have made expectations of tourism’s value for regional growth and wellbeing more sober than before. In West Barðaströnd, municipal authorities and the regional DMO have sought to take a pro-active stance towards tourism development, abstaining from mass tourism and putting forth an agenda for sustainable tourism in the region (Vestfjarðastofa 2022). One of the key projects in realising that vision is the creation of a tourist trail, the Westfjord way, that passes by the site of Garðar and defines it as a site of interest for visitors. The Westfjord way is intended to draw tourists in to the area as well as carving a direction for the region towards tourism that is more in line with what the region has to offer and can accommodate, in terms of attractions, infrastructure and services.

While the preparation of the Westfjord way has been finished it has not been implemented yet. The basic idea is to re-frame the main road through the region as a tourist trail, creating a circle with designated stops on the way, including attractions like Garðar, Látrabjarg and Dynjandi waterfall as well as pointing out service companies catering to the needs of visitors. As mentioned above, Franklin describes tourism as an ordering as “a way of making the world different, a way of ordering the objects of the world in a new way – and not just human objects” (Franklin 2004, 279). Tourism as an ordering thus affects the shape, movement and direction of places. The Westfjord way is intended to create a stronger link between the region and the tourism mobilities currently taking place in Iceland. It charges the main road with a new meaning. Instead of (only) being a line of transportation, connecting points in Euclidian space, it now offers attractive experiences to tourists. Moreover, it orders the relation between key sites and objects of interests to tourism and thus expands and shapes the area as a tourist space in a topological sense. Garðar is one of those objects that anchor the emergent tourism mobilities that the Westfjord way seeks to channel. Let’s get back to the shoreline in Skápadalur.

To run a ship aground can happen due to accident, by serious mistake or on purpose. In the case of Garðar, it was done on purpose. The act almost seems like a performance or a statement of some sort. One version of the story behind this act is that Jón Magnússon did not want Garðar to be dismantled because he cared about the ship and its historic significance as the first steelboat in the fishing fleet of Iceland. He thus decided to prepare a resting site for it on his land. A shallow canal was dug into the sand and on high tide the ship was sailed aground and sand and gravel then was pushed to each of its sides to support it. Another version, well known among local people according to one of my interviewees, is that Jón simply did not want to pay for the dismantling of Garðar and saw a chance to save the money by sailing the ship aground. So if it was a matter of care, it was care for money otherwise spent on dismantling the ship. Some voices point to the fact that the cost of having Garðar dismantled did not disappear, it was only postponed into the future as “something has to be done so the wreck won’t pose a hazard to visitors” as stated by Þórkatla Soffía Ólafsdóttir, a representative of the DMO.

Visiting Garðar today, it is quite evident that the ship is in need of care. However, it is also clear that it has not been left entirely unattended. In that sense, it can be said that the vessel is “caught up somewhere between disposal and history” (Pétursdóttir 2012, 33). Initially, Jón painted the ship every year to protect it from rust and even lit it up during Christmas time as well as providing access to it, according to an interview taken with him in 1991 (Morgunblaðið 1991). At the time of the interview, Jón claimed that tens of thousands of people had visited the site and many must have boarded the vessel via the staircase he had installed. In later years, the condition of the ship has however deteriorated significantly as necessary maintenance has not been conducted. In a recent news article in the regional paper Bæjarins Besta, it is stated that Garðar was last painted in 2001 (Bæjarins Besta 2020). The staircase that once provided access to it is long gone and nature is slowly taking over, dissolving the once impressive steel coat. Now, the stern is beset by numerous fractures and holes, some of which are used by tourists climbing on board while the hull, especially strengthened for whaling in sea ice, remains sealed.

From the outset, it must have been clear to Jón that the maintenance he provided would never be enough to protect the ship from deteriorating and neither was it intended to get it on sea again. Care is, as de la Bellacasa states, “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (2011, 93). Efforts of caring in this sense are open-ended and ongoing (Heuts and Mol 2013) and aim at shaping the world through repeated acts of tinkering. Rather than ordering according to a plan, efforts of caring thus contribute to the improvisation of possible realities. To run Garðar aground was an act of fracturing the relations on which it depended for its operation as a ship but it also provided new opportunities for relating to the world. For Jón, it also provided means to secure some kind of continuity in his relation to the ship. It is tempting to describe the initial acts of maintenance by Jón as efforts to turn Garðar into an object of heritage. To count as such, the heritage needs to be managed and contained as well as offering a safe and purified space without the undisciplined mess of natural degradation and decomposition (Pétursdóttir 2012). The present state of Garðar attests to the failure of this attempt. Garðar appears to some as “irrelevant, dirty and disorderly […]. Thus it is matter out of place” (Edensor 2005, 315). While some of the tourists that stop by Garðar are likely to be of that opinion, the evident role it is to play in the Westfjord way underlines that as a site of ruination it still is meaningful matter for tourism. Its value then rests in its presence, in its silent but dynamic materiality. Here, “ruination […] is not seen as the incarnation of loss but as generative process that is part of its ‘messy biography’” (Pétursdóttir 2012, 42).

Valgerður María Þorsteinsdóttir, the municipal tourism representative, explains to me that the municipality has initiated planning of the site in collaboration with the landowners. It is deemed important to install proper car parking and waste facilities, including restrooms. According to her, there is no disagreement about the value of Garðar but the challenge is to finance the planning, the building and running of facilities. When asked about the significance of Garðar for tourism she says it is unquestioned and stresses the fact that the wreck is a popular motif of tourist photography. In her words:

The thing with sites of interest, it has changed so much with social media. It [Garðar] is so figurative, a very figurative icon. You need to be such a good photographer to get some good photos of Látrabjarg birdcliff or Rauðasandur. Garðar, at least, always looks the same and it is easy to take a good photo of it […] and this is what matters so much today. And I think Garðar is important in that way, it is great material for marketing.

While the municipality is planning to take responsibility for Garðar as a site of attraction it has no plans for its restoration or preservation. To let it be in a state of ruination should not be taken as an act of indifference or a lack of caring but rather as an acceptance of the life of things as they reveal themselves and entangle with human and more-than-human mobilities. Valgerður continues: “I wonder if this would not be a proper metaphor for the history of the fisheries – the memory moves further away as it slowly disappears”. Valgerður does not make a clear distinction between Garðar as an object of heritage and a ruin; it is becoming in a vibrant relationship with an array of actors and networks. And it is maybe not of any importance either for tourists visiting the site. But she points out that even as Garðar would gradually decompose and disappear into the surrounding nature a certain level of (tourism) ordering in the form of information and material facilities is important: something like a network that would sustain the life of Garðar even further in time; something that would explain that the waste and debris or whatever would be left of Garðar is not out of place but very much part of the place, and part of making the region a place of fisheries and tourism.

Moving on

As an attraction on the Westfjord way Garðar continues its travels: only instead of traversing the seas it moves along the lines of tourism mobilities. Tourists perform it in different ways. It is a subject of the tourist gaze as manifested in countless photographs available on social media and the internet, people climb on board, it is being touched and at the same time it touches those visiting, sometimes involuntarily as some will get cuts and bruises. It stirs up the imagination and affects visitors. Tourism mobilities are reordering the region. The southern part of the Westfjords region is partly becoming a tourist region and tourism takes place by mingling with and entwining with objects that also have relational agency. Garðar can be seen to draw in tourism mobilities. It is, in fact, a matter of survival for it as an actor. It was cut from its life-sustaining networks when sailed aground and efforts of preservations failed. Tourism offers a lifeline; it now has another way to move around and contribute to the movement of the area as a place of tourism into the future. It is hard to say whether Jón Magnússon thought about Garðar as a possible object of interest for tourists when he decided to run Garðar aground but clearly he soon saw that possibility emerging.

The story of Garðar highlights how mobilities enact space in diverse ways through multiple encounters with human and more-than-human objects. It also underlines that tourism takes place often through unplanned, unintended and improvised configurations of mobility; movement, representation, practice and materiality. The value and meaning of tourism is also accomplished in these encounters and the on-going efforts to order them. The Westfjord way tourist trail is an effort to order tourism mobilities based on values of responsibility and care towards the community and nature in the region: care in the sense of maintaining and continuing the world as well as possible. A place is like a ship and in order to sustain itself it both needs to hold together and change. In order to sail the seas of tourism successfully, the story of Garðar reminds us, it is necessary to tend to and value objects in their multiplicity.