I started reading the Viking sagas in high school, after being infected with the Dungeons & Dragons virus. Or, was it the reverse? Can’t remember. I read Old Norse (The Saga of Hrafnkel the Priest of Frey) and Old English (Beowulf) in college, and perhaps only a fun collision with point-set topology ended me up as a Math major instead of a medieval studies major. 40-odd years later, I’m going to Iceland, the land of Fire and Ice and Viking sagas and the Black Death (the drink, not the plague). Thanks to wife, daughter and son for finally getting me to do it, and for their significant others for coming along!
After a short red-eye to Reykjavik, we huddle in the rental car line outside, in the dark and 30 degree weather, for the better part of half an hour waiting for the rental car shuttle. 30 minutes doesn’t seem that long til you are freezing. We’re later to discover that the rental cars are a short 5 minute walk away, but in the dark in a foreign country on the wrong side of the airport, these things escape you….finally it comes, and we get our car. Kristen has booked a car/SUV for 7 people. And indeed it will hold seven people. Just not 7 people plus their bags. We ponder a bit, then decide to make do. People hold their suitcases on their laps, and away we go, in the dark.
Our first destination is the Blue Lagoon. We’d been thinking to do it at the end of our trip, but, then we re-organize, thinking to do museums in Reykjavik the last day (which is when we fly out), to make better use of time. We’ll later learn that the National Museum is closed on Monday, when we try to get in…sigh. The Blue Lagoon has generated high expectations, and well, it outperforms them. After a quick shower (you must do so without your swimsuit on, but there’s shower stalls for privacy), we take the indoor wading exit out into what is essentially the world’s large geothermally-heated hot tub, and, wow. Wow does that water feel good after a long plane ride. The sun hasn’t come up yet (it’s almost December so the comes up around 10:30AM). But the sun is coming, and the color gradient of the sky is simply indescribable. Pictures don’t do it justice. There’s not a cloud in the sky and the gradient is so pure it’s like it’s drawn in Photoshop. The water varies from warm to scorching depending on where in the 100m lake/pool we’re in. There’s a swim up bar — we get a free drink — but it’s 9 in the morning so I opt for a smoothie instead of the beer I see others drinking. We all get our faces pasted up with the mud bath they offer, and we look pretty funny. But none of us has a camera. A man and two young women are speaking English near us, so I ask “Would it be weird to ask you to take our picture and email us?”. They are happy to help. We chat, and find they are from Massachusetts, about an hour from where we used to live. Father & daughters on a trip, presumably from the same flight we just got off. (the above is the picture they took).
After an hour or so in the water (seriously, none of us wants to leave), we hit the road, for our next destination: Thingvellir on the Golden Circle. I’ve downloaded Google maps for Iceland, and we’re using GPS. We exit the lagoon and trundle off into the dark, toward Reykjavik and then on to Thingvellir. I hang a right out of the airport, and … in about 10 minutes I am feeling twitchy. Google maps is chattering away instructions like it knows where we’re going, but the thing is, as I like to say about GPS, “you’re never lost but you never know where you are either”. I’m twitchy. We come over a rise and I see the ocean. That doesn’t feel right. We’re supposed to be going inland. Folks in the car convince me I’m up in the night, and we keep going. Then we get directions that take us down a small residential street in an industrial looking smaller town, and now I’m pretty sure something’s gone wrong. We keep going, but eventually pull over to look at the map. Yep, we’ve gone wrong. Shoot. But it looks like there’s a way back that doesn’t involve retracing the last 20 minutes. OK off we go. Up into some hilly terrain, and crap, now it’s snowing and I’m slipping around….I come over a rise and skid slightly. My heart jumps. Nobody else notices anything….and then one more turn and laying at our feet is blue sky and the most beautiful lake. Sometimes the wrong turns are the best.
After pictures we head off for Thingvellir, a couple hours drive. We look for food, getting hungry. Of all the things in a foreign country, finding food on the road might be the most unsettling. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and people want food. And there’s six of us, which means there are about 8 different ideas for food. Eventually we see an IKEA beside the freeway, and think, well THEY have food, Swedish meatballs and such (as all of them do in US). Right??? So we wander in. I expect we are the only tourists to have been here in some time. We eventually find the food area. They have….let’s see. Semi-congealed pizza. Hot Dogs (hot dogs seem the ubiquitous road food in Iceland :)). A bakery with bread and such. We make do, then back on the road.
It’s snowing on and off again and the road to Thingvellir is beautiful one moment and treacherous the next. The light here is just indescribable. Photographers talk about the “golden hour” when the sun is low, just after sunrise and before sunset. The sun rises at 10:30 here this time of year and sets around 4. And never gets high. It’s always the golden hour unless it’s dark. Thingvellir is the site of the world’s first parliament (930 AD) and figures prominently in many of the Icelandic Sagas (and it’s the scene of the Bloody Gate in Game of Thrones). It’s also home to many of the legal actions in medieval Iceland. In preparation for the trip I’ve re-read a number of the sagas, including Njal’s Saga, scenes of which often occur at Thingvellir, and which features many facets of the byzantine medieval Icelandic legal framework (for example, a lawsuit is dismissed because the plaintiff only called 5 witnesses, instead of the required 9 (see my reading list for Iceland). And, it is where the tectonic plates meet — you can snorkel here, believe it or not. But not this time of year. Damn it’s cold and windy. There’s a huge lake next to it, and, here’s the golden hour on full display. Straight from the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, I say.
We’d hoped to do more of the Golden circle today, but it’s getting dark, we’re tired, and it’s still snowing on and off, so back to Reykjavik we go, to our downtown AirBnb. The road is still snowy and treacherous, but we arrive ‘home’ without incident. At this point, by the way, we have memorized the Google Maps mantra, “take the second exit from the roundabout and continue straight” — we must have gone through 20 roundabouts both to and from Thingvellir, it seems the Icelanders prefer roundabouts to stoplights. After a 20 minute struggle in the apartment to find the location of both the garage door opener and the garage, we’ve found it, unloaded everything, and gotten into the place. It’s awesome. Classic Nordic white decor, with a picture of (apparently) Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones lighting a cigarette for our AirBnB host, who appears to be a canonical Icelander, with a huge grin, big flowing hair and a beard. There’s six of us so I dub the doorway the Icelandic Boot Invasion, with all our boots. Our balcony has a stunning view of Hallgrímskirkja. We find a rather boutique-y food court (Hlemmur Mathöll, which contains a neat restaurant, SKÁL!), across the street from us. Everyone gets what they want (arctic char and a cold Icelandic beer for me), with a minimum of fuss. Beginning to realize everyone speaks English here. We hit the supermarket for some breakfast food, then back to the AirBnB, and I crash, hard. Driving in a foreign country is exhausting, you’re constantly on guard for something unexpected.
And that is the end of Day One. My daughter, our lead scheduler, has the schedule pacing of a Greyhound.
Today our plan is to circle the Snæfellsnes peninsula, which I have dubbed Snuffleupagus for lack of clearer pronunciation. Up north and pretty much an all-day drive. But first, breakfast. Kristen leads the charge on cooking pancakes, but it takes 10 minutes or so to figure out the stove. It’s an induction stove, which means you need the right pan to conduct the heat and we can’t figure out how it works. Eventually we get it, and proceed to burn the crap out of the first set of pancakes and the pan. I figure we’re going to have to buy a new pan, but miraculously afterwards all of it comes clean. And boy did the pancakes taste good, good job Kristen! (We rented our house in Hawaii for a while, and the pans always got destroyed — I always assumed it was from incompetent cookers, but we’re pretty competent, and it happened to us — I guess it’s just the unfamiliarity. And then off to the races again.
The first interesting thing we run into is perhaps the longest tunnel I’ve ever been in. The Hvalfjörður tunnel is about 6km long, and it goes deep, over 500 feet down. Down and down and down, then up and out. We stop for gas and coffee in Borganes, the gateway to Snæfellsnes — we’ll return here on a loop later in the evening. The first gas machine doesn’t take a credit card. Eventually figure it out, then it wants a pin for my credit card, which doesn’t have one. My debit card works, eventually. Sheesh. and it’s cold out here! Inside we all wander around getting coffee. I glance up to hear Erik give a yelp and literally start sprinting away from something…what the hell? Turns out he’s dropped his coffee onto his (porous) shoes and scorched his foot. He later says, “I stopped running when I realized I couldn’t run away from the pain in my foot” :). By now we are all laughing hysterically and trying to clean up the mess and drawing bemused glances from all the Icelanders hanging out in the convenience store section of the gas station. Damn Americans. The view from outside the gas station over an enormous lake or inlet is breathtaking. Erik: “I’m kind of pissed off the views from their gas stations are so amazing”.
Our first destination today is the Basalt cliffs of Gerðuberg. Michelle and I each independently remark how much the terrain here reminds us of Utah. It’s desolate and beautiful, even though we’re not far from sea level it looks like high desert plains. The Basalt cliffs are super cool, tall columns of entirely square, tall chunks. We’ll see similar again later, elsewhere. Off we go, through mountainous sea level terrain (the contradiction is entirely meant here), with the astounding light shining on everything. We make an unplanned stop at Bersekerseyrara (“Berserker’s Ears”), a small inlet with a black sand beach, on our way to Kirkjufell, a small town with a cool waterfall and an eponymous small offshore mountain, which apparently can be climbed if you are intrepid (we are not, yet).
Kirkjufell peak bears a striking resemblance to Chinaman’s Hat on Oahu where we live. Kirkjufell is also home to another gas station/convenience store and a distinct fish smell — we suspect it’s a fishing village, mostly. There’s a semi-truculent semi-goth teenager running the counter, when we ask for the restroom keys. But he’s wearing a Nike shirt, and actually he’s probably not truculent, he’s probably just a teenager. Hot dogs are the food of choice here, apparently. Seems to be what other travelers are getting, but we pass. The combination of the Nike shirt, the hot dogs, and ubiquity of English finally hits me here and I realize Iceland seems far more Americanized than any other European country I’ve been to. As the trip goes on I’ll observe what a large percentage of everyone (Icelanders and tourists alike) are wearing jeans. We hang at the waterfall for a bit — it’s crowded, with a busload of Chinese tourists slipping on the ice — truly surprising to me how far they have come, Iceland is far enough but we’re in a pretty remote part of Iceland by now.
Game of Thrones enthusiasts, you may recall in Season 7 that Jon Snow and his band are hunting for a mountain that the Hound says is shaped like an arrowhead. That would be Kirkjufell.
A few pictures and off we go.
Our next stop is a cool lighthouse at the end of a long, very small road which spurs off the very long, small road we were already on. It’s snowing again, and sleeting. I realize I’m driving on black ice when the SUV starts slipping. I pass one car (a small sedan) that stops on the way back — the driver, perhaps Japanese, perhaps American of Japanese descent, says in flawless English, “The road is pretty slippery up there” — no kidding — then drives off. Not sure what to make of that, we decide to keep going since we’re in an SUV. We slip/slide our way over a few more rises on the way down to the shore, when over the last rise, over the black ice, we come face to face, in the middle of nowhere, with a tow truck trying to extricate a car from the ditch. The tow truck driver wanders over (he’s Icelandic, of course), and explains in blond and smiling and 100% flawless English that we should probably turn around, unless we want him to tow us out as well. OK, message received. We turn around.
On to the next stop — another lighthouse, the Gestatofa. The lighthouse is done in cement Brutalist architecture. It’s just a tall slab of concrete — no romance at all, not like an Outer Banks or Maine lighthouse. We see a few more along the way, and after the upcoming churches I name Iceland the land of Fire and Ice and Beautiful Churches and Ugly Lighthouses. This road is also bad, but we make it back up to the main road without incident.
From there we hit the famous Black Church of Buðir. Built in 1848 (after two previous churches were destroyed). It’s strikingly isolated — there is really nothing else around it — but it’s build on a slight rise going down to the sea, so the view feels infinite.
Not far from the Black Church is a cool waterfall which we climb, Bjarnarfoss — you can see the Black Church from the top. The climb was steep and cold and a bit wet and a good bit of rock scramble, but nobody gets hurt and the view is astounding.
Off we go, back to Borganes. We want to stop at the grocery store for some food, and at the state liquor store where you must buy your alcohol (see, I told you this was like Utah!). But first we must trek for an hour or so on a small, dark, two-lane road in the snow and dark. It’s quite nerve-wracking, having cars coming at you on a two lane road in the dark in a foreign country with the crappy windshield wipers smearing the windshield, and the oncoming cars flashing you. Everybody’s flashing their high beams at me. Can’t figure out why. I don’t have my high beams on, and I don’t have my running lights on. I can’t figure it out (and never did) — are they being polite? telling me to turn my lights down? telling me my fly is unzipped? Never figure it out.
Finally we get back to Borganes. Good lord alcohol is expensive here. The beers are all $4–5 each (not per six package, although they are sold in six-packs the price is misleadingly listed by the bottle, and it’s apparently kosher to just pull one out). A bottle of Icelandic aquavit (the Black Death), is probably ~$60, American gin and whiskey at least $50 a bottle it seems. Borganes is also home to the Settlement Center museum and restaurant. We pull up to the museum, it’s snowing and icy (you’re perhaps sensing a pattern here). We open the car door and IMMEDIATELY a cat jumps into the car. We flush the cat out, and head in. We decide to have dinner at the restaurant first. I’m driving and there’s 0 tolerance for drinking and driving here, so I have Egil’s MaltExtrakt, which basically like some kind of local malt root beer they’ve been making here for a hundred years. Sweet. Tastes like root beer. I have a delicious lamb tenderloin, others have a mix of “meat stew” (lamb stew), or soups. The bread and butter are astounding. Icelandic butter is just….different. Of course we haven’t eaten a solid meal since morning… The museum has two exhibits, one about the history of the settlement of this part of Iceland, including it’s most famous resident, Egil Skallagrímsson, the “hero” (I use the term advisedly, as Egil was an asshole, as well as a famous poet and warrior) of Egil’s saga. The other exhibit is about Egil’s saga, and Egil’s “exploits”. Yeah. Asshole with anger management issues and a gift for skaldic poetry. Off again, once more through the long tunnel, back to the house, a beer and about 10 pages of Silence of the Grave, a mystery by Arnaldur Indriðason, one of Iceland’s most famous authors, which I am re-reading as part of my ‘Reading my way to Iceland’ campaign. 10 pages and out like a light.
And that was the end of Day Two. Whew. You’re probably sensing the pattern.
Day 3 is the Southern route. The main activity is Ice Climbing on Sólheimajökull glacier, but we’re going to hit some of the top spots along the way. We’re up early and driving in the dark, again. And it’s snowing again. Much of this route is divided highway, so the snow and smeared windshield is slightly less nerve-racking. BTW. If you ever go to Iceland, rent a 4 wheel drive vehicle. Seriously. It’s worth the extra money. We’re hurtling down the freeway in the dark at 9am in the morning, when out the side of the car we see a church lit up, and in the graveyard in front of it, all the headstones have Christmas lights on them! It’s a bit surreal — it’s hard to imagine that happening in the states. Do the Icelanders have a different relationship with their dead than we do?
Eventually we get to Seljalandsfoss, today’s Waterfall #1, just as the sun rises around 10:30. It’s — well — everything is beautiful here. I’m starting to feel a bit repetitive. But this one, after an icy climb on an iced-over metal stairway, you can take a rock path to walk behind it. Then up and down another completely iced over metal stairway. I avoid crashing. All the way to the bottom of the last stair, and when I take my first step off the stairs, I slip and fall. Dammit! I thought I’d made it. 🙂 But no harm done. Back in the car to Waterfall #2, Skogafoss. Which is — you guessed it — beautiful, although perhaps slightly less impressive than Seljalandsfoss. We’re starting to get close to time to go Ice Climbing, but we’re pretty sure we can squeeze in a visit to the Black Sand beach, which is really the thing I wanted to see more than the waterfalls. So we make a run for it, me hurtling down the freeway at probably 30–40% over the speed limit (Icelandic speed limits feel quite low, especially for Americans).
Offshore we can see the Westman Islands, which we learned at the Egil’s Saga museum was the location where some Irishmen (Westmen) were chased and killed as part of some feud or other. And where in the 1970s much of the town was buried by lava flow. And where there’s a super-cool looking foodie restaurant with amazing cocktails called Slippurinn which we did not make it to…Maybe Westman Islands on the next trip…. Anyway the black sand beach is amazing, and the beach is so wide and deep and the horizon so vast it’s breathtaking. And more Basalt columns. And it’s also the filming location of Eastwatch-by-the-Sea in Season 7 of Game of Thrones.
Back in the car. No time to lose. we’re late for the Glacier. I lead-foot it to the Glacier, we arrive pretty much to the minute when we needed to.
Now we’ve got our crampons and climbing gear on, and we’re hiking up the glacier, in a group of about 15 people. We’re on Sólheimajökull (“Sun’s home glacier” — ironic as this is one of the darker places in Iceland according to our guide). Now damn this is cool!! Hiking on a glacier. The ice pack has an eerie blue color, with black lines throughout, and with piles of black dirt lying all over the place. At first I think they’ve put it on the trail we’re on for our footing. Then (facepalm), our tour guide explains this is volcanic ash, deposited periodically by volcanoes. It’s layered all throughout the ice, and can be used for dating. The glacier is receding, as you may have heard — a few hundred yards in the last few decades. We’re up and down, then finally rappelling down into a flat area, while one of our guides starts setting lines at the top. This is where we’re going to climb. And it’s starting to rain/sleet/snow, and getting colder and darker.
Ice climbing turns out to be surprisingly hard. The crampons on your shoes have two teeth that stick straight forward, and you kick to seat them in the ice. Then you have two ice hammers you slam into the ice above your head, and pull yourself up. Then step up, kick into the ice to set your feet, and do it again. I’m not quite sure why, but for some reason this clicks for me, and (on belay and with a fair bit of lifting from one of the guides, I make it up ~40′ of ice to scramble over the ledge and on top. My back and arms will be sore for three days afterwards. Eventually we all make it to the top, some getting pulled up by a group of us on a rope. We trudge down in the cold sleet and the dark, and eventually leave the parking lot in the dark. More driving in the dark. Eventually we find a brewery that has wood-fired pizza. We each order a large, and almost every single large got eaten in it’s entirety in about 15 minutes :). The pizzas are pretty unique — Brian’s pizza has bananas on it, mine blue cheese, dates and bacon. Unfortunately, I’m driving again, so no beer for me but Kristen and Bryan get a sampler and the beer tastes good! More nerve-wracking driving on two lane roads in the dark and snow, 10 pages of Silence of the Grave (which I would eventually finish on the plane ride home), and then passed out again.
Day Three. The Whirlwind is winding down.
We had left one day mostly unplanned, thinking we might not be able to get everything in on the days we’d planned, since we abandoned the Golden Circle on our first day after Thingvellir, we went back for it. The main attractions being Geysir, a volcanic (duh) geyser, and Gullfoss, a truly amazing waterfall. More driving! (As you can tell, we didn’t spend too much time in Reykjavik). Geysir is pretty fun, although it’s a long drive to get there. It has a large tourist shop, which we spent awhile milling around in, and had lunch there. Mostly soups (I had Icelandic salmon on a bagel — quite tasty). And some very good cakes and pastries. Then up an icy path to watch the Geysir go off, once every 10 minutes or so.
Gullfoss is a short 10 minute drive away. It’s not really a waterfall — really more like a family of 20 or so waterfalls..really quite amazing. But it’s cold and overcast — in the summer I bet it is even more amazing….
We head back, stopping along the way for some pictures with Icelandic horses in a field. They’re a bit differently shaped to what we’re used to here — much shorter legs, shaggier and more muscular and stocky than their American counterparts. And, apparently, quite friendly with random American tourists who approach their fence in the middle of nowhere without any food to give them.
We’re back to Reykjavik early enough to tromp around town. We wander past the penis museum (ahem, excuse me the Icelandic Phallological Museum. Seriously.), but keep going. We’re headed for Hallgrímskirkja, a modern church built near the center of the old town. The architecture is amazing. We take the elevator ride to the top, and get wide-ranging views over Reykjavik. Then we’re off to wander the shopping district. Icelandic wool sweaters are the thing, but they are not cheap — the store I went in, they ranged from $200–500. Ouch. We wander off to Kaffibarinn, where Michelle gets hot chocolate and Kristin and I get Úlfur IPAs which are local and delicious. Then into a bookstore. Good lord it’s worse than the alcohol. Paperbacks run 32 KR (~$26), hardbacks even worse. I see a copy of Smile of the Wolf which looks like a tasty modern version of an Icelandic saga, but decide I can wait to get home and get it for 1/3 the price…I could never live here. Beer & books are too expensive!). We wander more, eventually ending up at a craft beer place. We have a look at the menu, and — I am not making this up — they are selling Treehouse Beer from Charlton, MA, not far from where we lived in Massachusetts, and which is pretty much impossible to obtain the US unless you drive to their facility in Charlton and get it. We defer on the Treehouse — I get Humar (Malbygg brewery) which is a lovely double IPA from Iceland. Home to our AirBnB, where we watch Seth Myer’s comedy special on our hosts Apple TV — so funny. And yay for the internet!!! Then to bed.
Up on the last day, the sprint is almost over!
Today’s museum day — we rejiggered the schedule to use time better, and today’s National Museum of Iceland day. Sitting in the car, waiting for everyone to bring the bags down, I check their hours. Shit. They’re closed today. Oh well. More for the next trip. We go for the Settlement Exhibition (confusingly named similarly to the one in Borganes but with different content). It’s fun — they’ve excavated a Viking long house from the settlement era and built a museum over it. Lots of video displays and exhibits, but not much in the way of actual artifacts except the long house foundations. But very interesting. Then around the corner for lunch at a restaurant one of Erik’s friends recommended. It’s either lasagna or soup — I go for the soup. It’s actually quite amazing. A lentil soup, but with the flavor of butternut or mushroom soup. And the sourdough bread and Icelandic butter are heavenly.
It’s raining hard now — we sprint for the car, and hightail it out to the airport. Advice: It’s much faster to walk from the rental car return than it is to wait for the shuttle bus. We hang out in the duty free area, shopping and eating and just loafing around. BTW — if you are buying anything alcoholic to bring into Iceland, or take out of Iceland, get it in duty free ( they have it coming and going ) — and it’s infinitely cheaper than outside, either way. And they have pretty much everything I saw in Iceland, in the duty free).
We suddenly realize time has gotten on ….we need to get to our gates. We hustle. Shit. We still have to go through passport control. Starting to feel pressed for time. Then Michelle gets pulled for extra security, which costs her about 20 more minutes. Eventually we all make it, but next time, I would relax on the other side of passport control…..
And back to Boston, where, ironically, it is even snowier and colder than in Iceland.
Iceland is a fascinating and beautiful place, especially if you are interested in either Viking history or the outdoors. The light in the winter is simply amazing, and hard to put into words. The people were uniformly friendly in our experience, and literally every single person we interacted with spoke fantastic English. I found Iceland to be much more Americanized than most European countries. I wonder if that is the legacy of the country being occupied by the British in WWII (which I did not know until I read it in one of Indriðason’s books), and then by a significant US military presence after the war. Our main regrets were that we were unable to see the Northern Lights (never really happened while we were there, you are at the mercy of the weather), and missing the National Museum, and not spending a bit more time wander Reykjavik. But those are just great reasons to go again some day!
And, a little Icelandic music to read by….
