October 2012

The nicest thing I can say about most of the architecture is that it’s pragmatic. But it generally lacks grace, decoration, fun, etc. Many of the historic buildings are clad in corrugated sheetmetal (sometimes painted a fun color, usually not). I’ve been surprised by how little stone is used as a building material, either structural or cladding. Because one thing Iceland has in abundance is rocks. We did see some interesting residential architecture in the high-rent neighborhood on the coast, but that’s it.

Regular gas is 95 octane. Premium is 98. Not sure why so high. It’s also about 3x as expensive as in the USA, which is no surprise.

Motorists are unfailingly polite to pedestrians, which causes me no end of confusion. For that matter, they’re very polite with other motorists—cars honking at each other are very rare.

Reykjavik has some excellent used book stores. One pretty big, rambling place, with books piled everywhere, including the floor. I suspect many of the books there have been in that shop for more timed than they haven’t. We found another, smaller and somewhat more orderly, where Gwen bought some interesting-looking old books.

There’s a massive swimming complex a few blocks away. Indoor olympic-sized pool, and outdoor, and a series of hot tubs in temperatures stepping from 38°–42°C, plus a saltwater hot tub. All of these were in heavy use when we went last night—we worked our way up and then down the temperature gradient, and Gwen put in a few laps.

The sun never gets very high in the sky, at least not at his time of year. So at 11:00 AM, something in my brain is telling me that it will be sunset soon.

Tourism is a big deal here. In a country of 320,000 people, they get 600,000 visitors a year. And apparently most of them come during the high season of May–September. A lot of stuff just shuts down the rest of the year. Which leads us to wonder what all the people with seasonal employment do the rest of the year.

Reykjavik apparently has a notorious late-night party scene. We noticed one place had happy hour from 8:00 to midnight, after which things start heating up. We went out to check out the crazy on Saturday night, but by 1:30 AM, things just weren’t that crazy yet, and we decided we didn’t need to stay out any later to watch it happen.

I knew that the level of English ability here is very high, but it’s been interesting to experience it. I’ve only spoken with one person with halting English. Everyone else has spoken it comfortably, and a lot of people speak it as if they’d been raised in an English-speaking country—there’s something about the speech cadences and situationally appropriate word choices that moves them into a different category of fluency.

Day 3: Monday

This day was all about Jökulsárlón. A glacier lake at the foot of the glacier Breiðamerkurjökull, it is filled with ice floes calved off the glacier, and is otherworldly. Just shortly before we got to the main entrance, there were a couple of small pullouts along the road. Gwen saw something through a low spot in an embankment and told me to pull over. So I did. We climbed to the top of the embankment and it was a “holy shit!” moment. We walked around on top for a while, climbed down, and walked along the water’s edge. Then we drove the rest of the way to the main entrance and walked along the water there too. We wandered quite a way along the shore, until we were out of earshot of everything, and sat down to listen to the sound of ice melting.

The lake is one of the most extraordinary visual experiences of my life. Any description would be inadequate.

We eventually made our way back, and saw a Duck tour putting into the water, and a couple of tour operators with inflatable boats taking them out without passengers. Back at the snacks-n-trinkets shop, we had surprisingly good cappuccinos. Then we drove down to the point where the lake opens into the ocean and walked along the beach.

We headed back to the hotel, and stopped at Dveghamrar, the “Dwarf Cliffs.” These are columnar basalt formations that have some kind of dwarf-related folk tale to go along with them.

Day 4: Tuesday

This day was mostly about our trip to Vatnajökull National Park, where we did a fair amount of hiking. We saw numerous waterfalls, including the famous Svartifoss, which is ringed by another columnar basalt formation. There were extraordinary views of mountains, glaciers, the plains below. After we did some hiking at altitude, we decided to see if we could work our way around to a glacier tongue at ground level. That wasn’t in the cards (it might have been possible, but would have taken a long hike), and the weather started turning from sunny to blustery, do we headed back. We did get to see some ptarmigans, which were surprisingly indifferent to our presence. Apparently they are capable of flight, but the one that wanted to get away from us just ran straight ahead. Not the smartest bird.

So far, the only wildlife we’ve seen has been avian. No mammals, hardly any insects, even. We might have seen scat from some kind of mammal while hiking, but that’s it.

Day 5: Wednesday

This day, when I am writing this installment, has mostly been a travel day—we’re going to a different hotel about halfway back to Reykjavik.

Our first stop was at Dyrhólaey, a high rocky outcropping on the ocean that in warmer weather is an important nesting ground for birds. And there were plenty of seabirds wheeling around the there today. Mostly we looked at the rocky islands offshore, and the crashing waves.

We stopped next what is apparently the country’s best museum of handicrafts, in the town of Skógar. It has been a good day for indoor activity, because it’s been the first really rainy and cold day of our trip—we’ve been lucky enough to have pretty agreeable weather. We spent a goof while there, marveled at the hard lives of people who lived here not that long ago, and congratulated ourselves for having central heating and modern building materials. The museum had a cluster of old dwellings surrounding it, including several turf-covered homes, and the one thing that stood out is that none of these had any kind of heat source—no fireplace, no Franklin stove (in most of them, no stove period).

Our third stop was at Skógafoss, a big, thundering waterfall. We were able to approach close to where the water hits ground level, creating a spray that rises about three stories, and then we climbed to the top on a staircase provided for that purpose. Between the rainfall and the waterfall spray, I got pretty wet (Gwen wisely wore her rainpants). We were not far from our destination for the day, the town of Hvolsvöllur. Which is where I am writing these words.

Aside

I am continually intrigued by the idea of a country whose total population is less than that of St. Louis’, making it barely equivalent to the 60th-largest city in the USA. But despite that, it maintains all the mechanisms of a modern nation-state: it has its own currency, national government, diplomatic corps, road network (despite having one of the lowest population densities in the world), etc. And despite the obvious influence of American popular culture, the country has its own language, literature, music scene, movie industry, etc.

Of course, things are different. There are national highways that are gravel roads. Highway 1, the ring road that encircles most of the country, is frequently interrupted by one-lane bridges that have no traffic-control measures other than the common sense of motorists. None of the national parks that we have visited charge any admission, or even have a way to keep people out if the government decides to start. Some sites are on privately held farms, and tourists are apparently welcome to let themselves in–we climbed over a stile into a sheep pasture to get access to a waterfall.

Day 0: Friday

Our flight was uneventful, and only noteworthy for being on a
737—I don’t think I’ve ever seen one used for international travel before, and this one had ass-hammer seats that were impossible to get comfortable in. Neither Gwen nor I could sleep. I wound up getting about 1/6th of the way through Reamde.

Day 1: Saturday

We landed in Keflavik at about 6:00 AM, well before sunup. The passport check was instant and perfunctory. The customs check in the “nothing to declare” line was literally non-existent. We just found ourselves out in a different part of the airport. We went into the shopping part of the airport, thinking we might be able to buy SIM cards there—no luck. So we exited, and were met by someone from the car-rental agency who told us where to get on the bus to pick up our car. Got the car, a mini-SUV not sold in the USA. Also got a GPS unit, which has turned out to be very helpful (in the absence of data connections on our phones). Drove into the town of Keflavik right as the sun was coming up. Parked the car and walked along the shoreline for a while. Had breakfast at a hotel, where there were also a bunch of guys in the U.S. military eating. Gwen ventured to have herring for breakfast; I stuck with a more familiar meal of bacon, eggs, and toast.

The weather was drizzling when we headed out. We stopped at a 1011, a store that’s got more stuff than a 7-11, but doesn’t quite qualify as a grocery store. Picked up fruit, cheese, snacks, water.

Then we proceeded to our first sightseeing stop of the day, the lighthouse at Garðskagi. There was not a lot to see there, aside from the ocean, some seabirds (gannets, I later learned—giant seagulls), and of course the lighthouse. This was on the tip of a peninsula, so there was a lot of ocean to see. The rocky shoreline was covered in some kind of rotting seaweed. It was also notable that we saw no one on the road, but shortly after arriving at this deserted headlands a customs van pulled up and circled around. Gwen thinks this was not a coincidence.

We drove around the edge of the Reykjanes peninsula, which is like no place I’ve been. The only thing growing there is grass and moss. Not a single tree. Nothing to break up the landscape. This seemed to be echoed in the villages by the way that structures seemed to be placed haphazardly, with nothing to delineate or suggest property lines. We drove through villages where fishing is probably the main industry, past a few pastures with sturdy ponies or sheep under massive layers of their own wool. Stopped and looked at a village graveyard. Stopped at the Bridge Between Two Continents, which is literally a footbridge connecting the European and American continental plates. Kind of a gimmick, but we were really killing time until our next stop of the day opened. Which, around then, it did.

That stop was the Blue Lagoon, which is a hot-spring bath that is in all the guidebooks and an obvious tourist destination, but no less worthwhile in spite of that.

The fun starts before you even get to the door, as they’ve got an unused pool for show in front. The water is nearly opaque, milky blue, and white silica deposits accumulate on the black volcanic rocks surrounding it. Completely unreal.

Inside, they’ve got a very efficient, high-tech system where you get an RFID-tagged wristband that gets you in, lets you lock and unlock a locker, and even lets you put drinks on a tab, which you can get while soaking in the waters.

The pool itself is enormous, and could probably accommodate 1,000 people. There was maybe a tenth that number when we were there, so plenty of room. There are various attractions around its edges, including saunas, a waterfall/shower, buckets of silica that you can rub on your face (apparently it’s good for the skin), and the aforementioned bar. Gwen and I worked our way around, found the hottest part of the pool, and stayed there as long as we could stand it. We worked our way around some more and lamented that there was no good place we could take a nap in the pool, since at this point we had gone about 30 hours without sleep.

Eventually we decided that we had had about much relaxation as we could tolerate, so we got dressed and pushed on to Seltún. There’s not much human activity around there, but there is a lot of geological activity. Superheated water is boiling through the surface, creating puddles of bubbling mud and streams of hissing water that leaves unnaturally colored deposits on the surrounding rocks. There are walkways that let you get dangerously close to the fun stuff, and we walked all around before moving on.

The next leg of our drive was on a gravel road over very rugged terrain, with steeply pitched hills and sharp switchbacks, following along the edge of Kleifarvatn, a lake formed by volcanic activity, with sheer cliffs on the far side. Gwen was driving and had to give up at this point due to the utter lack of guard rails, which tapped in to a well-known fear of gravity failing.

As we moved on toward our hotel in the town of Selfoss, we crossed through some mountains and found ourselves in a different terrain yet again, one where at least a few trees can grow.

When we got to the hotel, we checked in, dropped our stuff off, got cleaned up, and headed out immediately for dinner. Partly because we were hungry, but mostly because we knew that if we stopped moving, we’d be down for the count.

Our dinner was a highly recommended place in the next village over, Við Fjöruborðið, but it might as well be called “that lobster place,” because that is their specialty, that’s what people know it for. The lobster was great. The wine was not.

Pleasantly full, we managed to make it back to our hotel room before we fell asleep. Just. We were in bed by 8:00 and slept till 9:00 the next morning.

Day 2: Sunday

Sunday, at the end of which I am writing these words, was less eventful. Breakfast in the hotel restaurant, where several ten-top were filled with middle-aged Icelandic women, with only a few couples to balance them out. Gwen had fish again. There was a decent-sized grocery store very near by, so we checked that out, because grocery stores in other countries are always interesting, and because we might want some food for the road. The rest of the day would be heavy on driving. This grocery store was not that different from a small grocery in the USA, except for the selection of dried fish, the minuscule beer assortment, and the availability of blood in 1- and 3-liter jugs. Vampires would do well to book a vacation here, especially in the winter, when there’s almost no daylight. Of course, that blood probably isn’t human.

We got on Highway 1, the ring road that encircles most of the country, and headed east along the southern coast. There was sporadic sleet, and a very steep climb with hairpin turns (again, no guard rails). Passed through some landscape that was otherworldly, some that was merely dramatic. In the otherworldly column were miles of plains deeply covered in treacherous volcanic rock, which was in turn deeply covered in moss. The effect was of frozen green clouds.

In the merely dramatic column, we drove for a long while with mountains sticking vertically out of the ground to our left, and flat plains or rolling hills to our right. Glacial meltwater formed frequent waterfalls down these mountains, and every so often, we’d see a farmhouse tucked in at the foot of a mountain, sometimes downstream from waterfall. More sheep and ponies.

We passed just south of Eyjafjallajökull, the unpronounceable volcano whose eruption grounded planes across Europe a few years back; we stopped at the information center for it just to stretch our legs.

We made it to our hotel for the next few days, which is just outside the tiny village with the long name of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. We checked in, dropped our stuff off, and went into the village, which has its own waterfall, with a trail leading to the top. We climbed that trail. Being at the top was extraordinary. There’s a lake feeding the waterfall, and a footbridge crossing the top of the waterfall. This mountain, like all the others, is of the thrusting-directly-up-from-the-ground variety, so the top was surrounded by gut-turning dropoffs, but the panorama of the country below is worth it.

We wandered around the mountaintop for a while, exclaiming over the view, and turned to go back down. The descent was much scarier than the ascent, because you have to look down.

Back at the hotel, we just had dinner at the hotel’s restaurant. The food was good, and we got a laugh out of the fact that the music playing was Icelandic covers of soft-rock hits of the 80s. Gwen had fish again.

At 11:00 PM we went outside. Everything was quiet. The northern lights were active.