Iceland Day 3 - 5

Day 3

It rained a bit last night, although it wasn’t much to write about. The morning weather was crisp beneath a few lingering dull clouds, but the sun stayed out almost continuously. Once Steve had woken up and gotten himself ready (by ready I mean he ate a cake) we went to explore Reykjavik.

The open boulevard-style streets of the city were open and exposed to the brisk wind, which never really died down and bit into any uncovered skin. Every time we walked up to the side of a road to cross it, any cars driving along it would stop and wave us across. Coming from the cut-throat roads of England, this was bizarre at best, and dangerous at worst as we hesitated every time and managed to nearly get run over.

We reached the seafront with its arty longboat monument, and looked out over the bay to the mountains on the other side. According to the last taxi driver, we would be lucky to see these mountains clearly from the city, so we made the most of it and took at least one picture of the scenery.

Following a guidebook map, we entered the centre of the city to find the Travel Market. The map had it on the wrong side of the road, but as I’d seen a picture of it in another (more reliable) guidebook, I recognised it just as we went past so we went in – and quickly started arguing about who was going to go and talk to the people behind the desks. Eventually Steve booked a 4x4 tour and a snowmobile tour for later in the week – so at least we wouldn’t spend the entire 10 days in one place.

Next we walked down the main shopping street of Reykjavik, Laugavegur, and made a token attempt at being interested. Cars drove slowly down its narrow one way street, and people walked around at a relaxed pace (the ones who didn’t were clearly tourists (like us - Steve was nearly running)). I bought a woollen fleece like base layer top with a 10% discount token from a guidebook and made sure I had my tax free receipt to claim back another 15% at the airport. If you do this, remember that if the shop fills in the receipt incorrectly, you won’t get your money back at the airport.

As we existed the shopping district, and with Steve looking as bored as if he’d just sat through a Girls Aloud concert, we headed for the BSI bus terminal so we could sort out a 2 day trip to Akureyri – Iceland’s second city. Second town really, what with a population of 15,000. The walk was only 10 minutes, but Mr. Lawton wasn’t liking it. Luckily we got there before he punched me and made a break for a taxi rank. It was my turn to be less than happy when we found out the road to Akureyri was still closed – this was only a few days from July – because of snow. Yet again our transport plans lay in ruins. Steve suggested thinking about alternatives over lunch, which was a good idea, but he rejected all of my ideas and decided to just go back to the campsite. We did end up doing one of them anyway, but not after Steve had gone outside and straight into a waiting taxi. I tried to argue that it was only a short walk away, but I found myself talking to the cloud of dust that was all that was left of him.

We got back and Steve went inside his tent. I didn’t see him again until late that evening when he went to go on the internet in the hostel building. The wind suddenly picked up and started to howl through the campsite, causing the tents to flap around – and our tarp to throw away its pegs. That was down to my rubbish pegging. Not really wanting to be outside in that wind, I wrote this.

When things died down, I went to watch Germany beat Austria 1-0 in Euro 2008 courtesy of a thundering Michael Ballack free kick. After that I went to the local shop and bought a couple of tubs of skyr (Icelandic yoghurt, a bit like fromage frais), some traditional dried fish and some fresh salmon. The salmon I fried lightly with butter, and was the juiciest, flavoursome fish I’d ever tasted. It cost about £3 for 150 grams. One thing to remember about some shops is that you’re likely to be charged for plastic bags. The Keflavik duty free plastic bags are quite thick and are good to use as shopping bags.

Just before midnight, and with the sun nearly dipping below some trees, I went for a walk to try to use up some energy. The light was fading gently, but it was good enough to take pictures in even with my fairly cheap camera. The parkland behind the campsite used to be a hot spring where washer woman would go, and boards are up telling their story. Beyond this is Reykjavik’s botanical garden. There was no one around so I let myself in. No plants were in bloom and all the ducks were asleep, and basically it was boring. Until I walked straight into a security guard anyway, but that’s another story.

Day 4

I woke up cold. The sunlight on my tent at about 1am had made it a warm night to begin with, but that had changed. During the night, the sun had crept behind some trees and cast a lingering shadow of ice over me. Saying that, it was 11 degrees that night, so I’m probably just a soft wimp. Anyway, however much of a wuss I am, I still woke up cold. And this meant I woke up with a cold. Sniff. Sneeze. Sniff. 2 lessons:
1. Bring cold medicine
2. Don’t assume the warm nights turn into warm mornings.

Steve crawled out of his tent just after I’d had my lunch, complaining that he hadn’t slept at all and that his back hurt. So he went back to bed.

As he didn’t answer me when I tried to talk to him, I realised we weren’t going anywhere today and decided to move my whole tent 3m away to where the arctic shadows couldn’t reach it.

There isn’t more than one wisp of white fluffy cloud in the sky this afternoon, and in the shade today’s 15 degrees feels like 25. To remind me that I was actually within 5 hours drive of the Arctic Circle, the wind started to blow a 30 mile an hour windstorm. Not willing to spend a whole day in my tent, I rigged my tarp up as a lean-to windbreak and started to sunbathe. Sunbathing in Iceland. And having to use a lot of sun cream.

Anyway, Italy v France soon, so while I’m in the hostel building I’ll go and book 2 more day trips so we actually do something this holiday.

Day 5

Last night wasn’t cold, so my tent move was a success. I also used my tarp to extend my tent porch about 5 five feet, which makes a large area to leave things and be out of the wind – which today is again fairly strong. I did book 2 trips yesterday, and the first starts at 12:30 today, with a coach picking us up at 12:00.

Trip: Gullfoss and Geysir Direct, Golden Circle Tour (Reykjavik Excursions)
Price per person: 5800 Kr (£42)
Duration: 12:30 – 18:00

The coach turned up at the Youth Hostel at about 12:05, and ferried us to the BSI terminal where half a dozen other small coaches were doing the same thing. Everybody gets off here and then jumps onto whichever coach has your tour name in the window. We got the same coach we’d arrived in, and were only joined by an elderly English couple and a nice French girl.

We zipped off through the city at break neck speed, passing a tipped over rubbish lorry, and having to listen to our female tour guide singing a song in Old Norse. I don’t think those two events were related but you never know.

Finally we got into the countryside and mountains immediately loomed up from the horizon under the clear blue sky. Between them and us were endless lava fields of rocks covered in the beige moss that seems to be Iceland’s idea of grass. There were fluorescent jacketed youngsters picking up litter everywhere, just as there’d been in Reykjavik – it looks like everyone has to do some kind of community service. Either that, or the younger generation is full of criminals. They didn’t really look like they were enjoying themselves, one girl was sitting down grumpily on a roundabout stabbing the grass with her trowel.

The rocky ground opened up to greener areas as we drove east, eventually leading to a massive valley that was the seabed during the last ice age (we’re actually in the back end of one now if you didn’t know). We reached the Selfoss area, where a 6.3 Richter earthquake had struck a week earlier. Me and Steve both wished we hadn’t missed it. No one had died and only 25 people had needed to go to hospital. We drove through the quake zone and reached the coast. The coastal plain was grazing ground for thousands of the famous Iceland horses, and there seemed to be a couple in every field, regardless of what other animals shared it.

The only raised land you can see when looking right from the main ring road are the Westmann islands, lumps of lava that are home to plenty of people.

We turned inland to get to our first destination, but not before we’d driven past some elf houses – either little doors painted on rocks, or full sized wooden lodges with huge deer antlers hanging ominously over the front doors. You could also see the fresh earth on the tall cliff faces churned up by loosened boulders after the earthquake, and the aforementioned boulders sitting in the middle of otherwise empty fields.

We stopped briefly at the Kerið (Kerith) crater, a beautiful fissure in the ground that contains a small lake. I would have tried to climb around it, but seeing as we were on a crappy tourist tour, we only had ten minutes before we were off again.

We saw the spray from the waterfall of Gullfoss (Golden Fall) before we got to the car park. By the time we stopped, the spray was showering onto the bus windows – time for the waterproof coat. Gullfoss is a powerful and overwhelming example of nature at its most destructive. It’s carved out the very ground to form a two stage waterfall of huge impact. With snow topped mountains and even a glacier in the background, the scenery is spectacular, and there were more cameras than people. You can get close enough to touch the water if you want to, and it’s not hard to climb over the rope and stand next to the torrent of the first stage of the fall.

A short trip later and we reached the second destination in the tourists ‘Golden Circle’ – the ultra-famous geysir that gave its name to all others. The Geysir (pronounced GAYZER) no longer fires after decades of people dropping things down it to speed it up, so it had to be Strokkur that we had to watch erupt every 3-5 minutes. An ever rotating group of about twenty people permanently aimed cameras in silence at the square of rock jutting out of the pool, waiting. And waiting. Then boom, the water bulges up in a bright blue bubble before spraying up a good 30 feet – coming down on anyone daft enough to stand in the wrong place. Then the curses of those who missed their shot. Then the waiting begins again. This sequence repeats all day, with the occasional accidental photo taken when the pool gurgled a bit, and the spatter of laughter that follows. The brooding, smoky pools are very nice, but you have to wonder how many of the people here are just there for the photo and to say they’ve been.

Probably because we were such a small group, we had time for an extra stop (or we were told it was extra) to see what is missed off the full tour to make the Direct tour we were on. Þingvellir (Thingvellear) is two sights in one. Firstly, it is where two tectonic plates meet and rip the ground apart, and secondly, the sight of the world’s first parliamentary democracy, the Althing. You can look down into the tear in the ground the plates has caused, and you can see the stone ruins of where the Althing’s booths were built. The booths were basically just stone walls – the attendees brought their own roofs. On top of all this, you can look out over a colossal valley/plain that is shared between sweeping flatland and a lake larger than Reykjavik. Words, and probably most pictures, can’t do the view justice, even if the wind was now so sharp that we were pretty much blown back to the bus for the journey home.