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Icelandic Honeymoon

May 15, 2006 on 10:39 pm | In Uncategorized |

My wife Max and I just got back from our week-long honeymoon in Iceland. It was quite a trip, both literally and figuratively. I highly recommend it as a destination! It was a bit cold in May, and too soon for some of the tourist facilities and accommodations, but the compensation was that there were no crowds and we could take our time enjoying the spectacles.

You can also check out the photos of the trip on Flickr. I’ve linked to some of the photos, but there are many other pix in the set.

Day 1: Spring Fever

We arrived in Reykjavik on Tuesday morning, after a mere 4-1/2 hour flight from Boston. It was in the upper 60s, sunny, hazy and almost windless. (At the same time, New England was receiving the start of a multi-day pounding of rain leading to this week’s severe flooding.) Everybody was out in T-shirts and shorts, and we soon picked up on the fact that this was a heat wave, Icelandic style. “This never happens in May!” the hotel receptionist told us. “It’s bizarre!” In fact, there was plenty of evidence that spring had not yet properly sprung: brown grass, leafless shrubs, and lots of snow and ice visible on the hills that ring the city. It had been cold and rainy until a few days before we arrived: in other words, the weather had been normal.

We wandered around, dazed from the time change, looking at stuff. We strolled along the harbor, which is an enormous fjord ringed by snow-capped three-thousand-foot peaks. The name Reykjavik literally translates as “Smoky Bay”, because it is geothermally active and has numerous hot springs and steam vents, which provide all the heat and hot water in town (and have done so since the 1940s, surprisingly). You’d think it might have been chosen as a place to settle for such a logical reason. Well, in 874 AD, a Viking named Ingolfur Arnarsson who was sailing nearby threw his ceremonial high seat pillars overboard, vowing to settle whereever they washed up, and they washed up in the place he named Reykjavik. That’s one of the techniques they used to decide important questions back then.

At the supermarket, we bought some skyr as a snack, along with a few other sundries. Skyr, the local equivalent of yogurt, is really quite tasty and not at all like yogurt. It is thicker, both sweeter and more acidic at the same time, and is made from skimmed milk so there is no such thing as “low-fat” skyr. You can also buy yogurt at the store, but judging from shelf space it’s way less popular. Skyr has an interesting texture that is slightly rougher than yogurt — hard to describe. We both think it would be a hit in the States if someone figured out how to market it. Later in the trip we were riffing about what the ideal ad campaign would be. Max thought the concept should be something like “The Icelandic Way To Health”. I was advocating some kind of confused approach involving busty Icelandic women.

That evening, throngs of people hung out late into the night in the Austurvollur, the central Reykjavik square on which our hotel stood, hanging out, playing outdoor games, smoking cigarettes, and generally enjoying the “hot weather”. We were close to the Arctic Circle — even in early May, the sun didn’t set until 10:30 pm, and the sky never really became dark. It’s obviously conducive to staying up late, which seems to be what Icelanders do (urban Icelanders, anyway). Conversely, the city doesn’t seem to get going until about 11 am in the morning. At 9 am on a weekday morning, central Reykjavik is quite dead. There is hardly anyone on the street at that hour, and nowhere to buy a cup of coffee.

Day 2: The Blue Lagoon

Since we were still a bit jet-lagged and not ready for any major expeditions, we decided to spend much of the day at the Blue Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon is a geothermal spa located on the Reykjanes Peninsula, a bleak and otherworldly landscape of contorted and buckled lava fields that otherwise contains only a few small towns and the airport serving Reykjavik. The Lagoon consists of a series of pools hollowed directly out of a lava field, containing hot seawater that has been pumped out of boreholes at a nearby geothermal power plant (the water leaks from the nearby ocean into underground chambers heated by volcanic magma). The sulphurous water has a startling pearlescent blue-white color, and there is a soft, slightly gritty white mud on the bottom that is pleasant to walk on. Steam rises in the cool air, and it’s a very relaxing experience to lounge around in the warm water for hours. The landscape is bleak lava hills; from some places you can see the power complex with its smokestacks and stainless steel pipes. There is a modern bathhouse next to the pools. It all feels very, well, futuristic. “This is how people will bathe in the year 2200 A.D. after all the petroleum is gone,” the caption might read below an artist’s conception.

A fascinating thing about the Blue Lagoon, which is not explained when you visit, is that the whole thing is just a lucky accident. The power plant was built in the 70s purely for energy extraction, and the power authority dumped its byproduct — magma-heated seawater cooled by the power plant — into the nearby lava fields, expecting it to soak into the porous pumice. It didn’t, because the water had dissolved so much silica from the hot bedrock that the deposits plugged up the holes in the pumice, preventing drainage and leading to the creation of a series of lagoons. This hot water was colonized by several species of exotic bacteria that rely partly on the dissolved minerals; these bacteria effectively leave no room in the ecosystem for coliform bacteria and so on, so the water doesn’t need any chlorination or other artificial treatment. In the early 80s people discovered that the water was great for bathing, and seemed to be of special value for psoriasis sufferers. In 1999, they got on board with the modern bathhouse, the conference center, the tourist board promotions… and now we have The Blue Lagoon. I have to wonder if some Brooke Shields stalker was involved in naming the place.

Afterwards, we roamed around central Reykjavik some more, taking in its quirky architectural blend. Corrugated metal sheeting is to Reykjavik what, say, wooden siding is to New England. There are all kinds of cute old heirloom houses with beautiful carved woodwork trim, and most of them are sided with corrugated tin that apparently has to be painted in one of about four colors.

Looking for food, we realized that the United States of America is a cheap place to live, after all. A falafel sandwich in the U.S. only costs $3, rather than $10. A gallon of gas costs only $3, rather than $8. A hot dog might run you $2, but rarely would it cost $5. A run-of-the-mill restaurant meal might cost $20 per person, not $100 per person. Yes, the U.S. is a rather cheap place to live, once you start comparison shopping in Iceland. We decided that we’d splurge on a few good meals, but buy the rest of our food at the supermarket and eat in our hotel room.

We did eat a great meal that night, at a tiny little seafood restaurant called Við Tjörnina, crammed with pre-war knickknacks such as one might find in an Icelandic grandparent’s house.

Day 3: To Snæfellsnes

Thursday morning we awoke to a cold, damp, rainy day. We planned to rent a car and drive to Snæfellsnes, a 100 km-long peninsula in Northwestern Iceland whose name roughly translates as “Snow Hills Cape”. Arriving at the rental agency, we picked up our little 3-door Toyota Yaris. I was somewhat nervous about taking this tiny button of a car to a remote area, but the rental people insisted that we’d have no trouble negotating the roads so long as we didn’t drive up the 4WD track to the glacier. I felt they were underestimating both my derring-do and (perhaps more to the point) my stupidity, but given the high cost of renting a 4WD I readily acquiesced.

We headed out of town. Leaving the old town on the main road east, we passed through an area that we had both been sure must exist somewhere in Iceland: a series of strip malls, car dealerships, and ugly office buildings. It wasn’t especially blighted or sad-looking, it was just everyday and utilitarian.

The city ended abruptly and we were driving on the main ring road that encircles the island, highway 1, hugging the huge cliffs that we had earlier seen from across the harbor. Despite its status as the main transportation artery of the entire country — there being no trains in Iceland — the road only has one lane in each direction, had light traffic, and was extremely scenic. There are virtually no trees in the country and wherever you go, you can see as far as the topography and the atmosphere will allow.

That atmosphere, by the way, is glorious. The air you breathe even in central Reykjavik seems like pure North Atlantic ocean air.

Half an hour north out of town, there was a decision to make: take a tunnel ($15 toll) or go around a fjord (30 extra kilometers). At this place, there was a large electronic sign giving the current temperature and wind speed/direction for both routes. Although the weather was not severe that day, we suspected that the sign was there because it could save lives under more iffy conditions. Later in the trip, when we saw a sudden freak snowstorm hit an area just to one side of the highway, we began to see that the weather in Iceland is a force to be respected. Today, however, the rain stopped and the sky began to clear. The temperature dropped into the 40s, and the weather (except for that sudden snowstorm) remained mostly clear, sunny and cold for the whole remainder of our trip.

We took the tunnel. It was immediately apparent that this was a very odd tunnel, by North American standards. After entering, the tunnel kept going down, down, down, without leveling out; it also kept curving around in a disorienting fashion. The lighting was minimal and the walls were unfinished, uneven black rock. “I feel like we’re going down into Gimli’s Hall of Dwarves,” said Max as we swooped deeper into the earth. Then the tunnel turned an abrupt corner, and began to climb very steeply. Our side of the tunnel acquired a climbing lane, something I’d never seen in a tunnel before. Suddenly we popped out into daylight and kept climbing right up the far side of the fjord we’d just crossed. At this point, some memories of elementary school geography kicked in and we realized that the bottom of a fjord is V-shaped, not flat, so a tunnel under a fjord has to go a long way down to get under the water. Fair enough.

An hour later, we were on the Snæfellsnes peninsula. By this time, only a couple of hours out of Reykjavik, the roads were virtually empty, as if we were on some secondary desert highway in a remote part of, say, Utah. We climbed up and over the snowy highland spine that runs along the peninsula, and descended into the harbor town of Stykkishólmur where we climbed up for a view of the area. On the way out of town, we stopped and climbed the “sacred mountain” of Helgafell, a holy site of pre-Christian Iceland. This hill was the site of a famous armed struggle in saga times, due to a dispute over the defilement of the site by “toilet ablutions”. Fortunately for peace-loving Icelanders, a public toilet has been constructed on the site in modern times. We did, however, find with some regret that the facility was locked.

We trundled along the peninsula to its western limit, with the massive icecap of Snæfellsjökull looming above us, stopping at a minuscule, perfect golden sand beach for lunch, visiting the ruins of some fiskbyrgi (ancient stone fish-drying sheds built from pumice boulders) and hiking to the summit of a 100-foot-wide explosion crater in the middle of a rugged lava field. The crater looked as if someone had detonated a huge bomb in a large puddle of partly-melted rock, and then frozen the landscape in place just after the explosion. You could see the tremendous force that had deformed and then blown a huge hole in the lava crust over the area. The area was also riddled with many smaller holes in the ground, some of which were scary black tunnels and crevices dropping straight down into the earth with no apparent bottom. In Iceland, as elsewhere in Europe, one sees few attempts at restraining would-be Darwin Award contestants, apart from the occasional piece of rope or makeshift railing. We mused on how different this was from what one would see in the litigious United States; if this had been a National Park, it’s a fair guess no one would even have been allowed near these dangers.

The road lost its pavement and the area became even more remote. We undertook a final hike to a beach called Djupalonsandur where we understood we would find some “lifting stones” traditionally used by fishermen to test each other’s strength. We stopped at the first sign we saw for it, marked as a hiking trail, and set off. The trail quickly became a rough, crazy roller-coaster winding up and down the crests of successive ridges of a weathered lava field that seemed to go on forever with no sense of where we were in relation to the coastline. At the top of a ridge, we could never see further than the next couple of ridges, and progress was impossible to gauge. The landscape was full of frozen, twisted lava boulders in bizarre, almost humanoid shapes. The trail went on and on and on; finally, we hit a high point where we thought we could see the beach. It was fatiguing but we pressed on. Suddenly we were at the coast, in a remote cove where surf pounded wildly on a black-sand beach, surrounded by black lava cliffs eroded into stacks and weird, deformed shapes. An incongruous bright-red ranger’s hut stood nearby, locked and empty. The collapsed partial remains of a centuries-old fishermen’s hut made of black lava boulders lay further down the beach. We pursued the path further, up and over a headland to cliffs overlooking a similar adjacent cove, the view this time from above rather than from beach level. The sound from the surf pounding the black volcanic pebbles was an intense crashing rattle, totally unlike the usual sound of waves on sand. Finally, one beach over, we reached Djupalonsandur with its lifting stones. It turned out that the beach was directly accessible from a spur off the main road; we could have driven practically all the way there. But if we had, we would have been satisfied with reaching our intended destination, and would not have hiked along the trail in the reverse direction and seen the other sights that were there to be seen. Exhausted and satisfied, we trudged up the road back to our car, a 30 minute walk. It had taken us 90 minutes to reach the same spot via the trail through lava field.

We reached the Hotel Búðir a short while later. This is one of the most remote hotels I’ve ever stayed in, but I have to say it is also possibly the nicest hotel I have ever stayed in, and beautifully decorated as well as beautifully situated. Our spacious room had an old clawfoot bathtub in it; lying in the bath, late in the evening, soaking the pain out of my feet, I could watch the sun set on the Snæfellsjökull icecap through our window.

Day 4: The Golden Circle

This day, we drove from Snaefellsnes down to see the “Golden Circle”. The Golden Circle (which I must say sounds like it was invented by the Icelandic Tour Board) refers to a set of popular sights in southwestern Iceland: Thingvellir National Park (site of the historical Althing, the earliest European parliament in the 10th century), Geysir (the original eponymous geyser to which all other geysers owe their name), and Gullfoss (an enormous waterfall fed by a violent, rushing river of glacial meltwater).

We spent most of the day at Thingvellir, an inland area ringed by mountains and a large lake. It’s not only a historical park but a geological park; it overlies an active rift between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. This rift is not just visible, but is a major topographic feature; it forms a fault that runs for kilometers, along which the land abruptly drops 100 feet, exposing a fractured basalt cliff. Parallel to this cliff and below it lies a block of tilted, uplifted ground, at the crest of which is a rocky outcrop. This outcrop was selected by the original Norse settlers of Iceland as the site for their parliamentary meeting called the Althing, and it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic setting. The rock formation forms a kind of perfect natural auditorium, and the whole thing (oops, sorry!) dramatically overlooks the plain below. Between the outcrop and the cliff are the visible remains of the stone foundations of booths (búðir) of representatives and vendors who gathered for the Althing. A particular rock, the Logberg, was the spot where the Logsogum or Lawspeaker stood, pronouncing on legal matters.

(Digression: the seal on the police car doors in Iceland reads, “Með lögum skal land byggja”. I wondered what it meant; later I found out that it is part of a saying from the ancient Icelandic epic Njal’s Saga: “Með lögum skal land byggja, en með ólögumeyða”. In English, this means something like, “By law shall our land be built, and without it it shall decline”. The Althing was a big deal back in the 900s or whenever, representing a real departure from the norm of the times where whatever a king happened to say at a particular moment was what counted. A lot of folks settled in Iceland to get away from arbitrary authority, and they wanted a strong legal system that was collectively enforceable. There was virtually no police presence in Iceland, though, that I could see.)

After taking in the cliff, we hiked across the rift area to a deserted farmstead. The lava in this area was very different from elsewhere; it was smoother, more cohesive and ropy-looking, rather than rough, sharp and air-filled as with most of what we saw. The habitat was different, too: there were many trees, both dwarf birch (native to Iceland) and pine (introduced in the 1800s). An Icelandic woman working in the visitor center told us afterwards that the area was now a listed UNESCO world heritage site, and that UNESCO had raised some sort of fuss over the inauthenticity of the pine trees. She had grown up in the area, and thought of the pine trees as being part of the area’s authentic history, albeit of a somewhat more recent vintage than the Althing.

From Thingvellir, we took a somewhat sketchy dirt road through an upland area to Geysir. At this juncture, I have to mention that I was really very surprised and pleased by the Toyota Yaris. A tiny little hatchback about the size of the early-80s Honda CVCC Accord, it had good handling, acceleration and visibility, and dealt very well with unpaved surfaces. And unlike the old Honda CVCC, I did not feel like I was driving a little Matchbox model next to the “real” cars on the road with me. Except for the ultra-compact instrument display with its weird focusing lens (perhaps to eliminate the need to refocus one’s eyes from looking at the road?), I found it well engineered and comfortable. It also got around 50 mpg. I’m really surprised this car isn’t available in the US.

Anyway, after a slightly scary descent down a slippery dirt road section that was under construction, we were back on pavement and made it to Geysir in short order. I must say, Geysir does not disappoint: it’s a really worthwhile spectacle. First, a note: the name Geysir refers to both the geothermal area of Geysir (itself a cluster of related fumaroles and geysers) and a single, particular geyser within that cluster that is named Geysir. The latter used to be the most significant and regular geyser in the cluster; however, it has ceased to perform for the most part. Fortunately, another geyser in the same cluster, named Strokkur, is just as regular as Geysir used to be, and only slightly less dramatic. Strokkur has sort of a tease act as it gets warmed up; it has a visible pool whose level, at first quiescent, starts to become visibly unstable, rising and falling unpredictably as water sloshes out and then back in. Small bubbles rise to the surface. It surges, then retreats. Suddenly, a massive surge occurs and a brilliant blue dome of water rears up with a steam bubble inside; as the bubble bursts, a 50-foot jet of water and steam shoots up into the air. The enormous blue bubble is the most surprising and amazing part, we both agreed!

Elsewhere at Geysir there are various other smoking or steaming waterholes doing neat things. One has an enormous crystal-encrusted hole visible inside, like an underwater geode. Another one is colored a brilliant, fluorescent blue. Another constantly bubbles and boils, apparently more even-tempered than Strokkur. Yes, there’s hydrothermal activity for everyone! I reached across the rope and touched one of the pools to test the temperature and slightly burned myself, earning a Darwin Junior Achievement Award in the process.

Finally, on to Gullfoss, the waterfall. It’s hard to describe a waterfall, but this one was certainly a beauty. It is quite compact, yet both wide and deep, and occurs within the confines of a fairly narrow channel carved in bedrock by the glacial river that feeds the falls. On a natural ledge that runs along the channel about halfway down, you can get very close indeed to the falls, in this wonderfully non-litigious country.

Driving back to Reykjavik, it clouded up. As we climbed over a headland on Highway 1, quickly gaining a couple of thousand feet, suddenly the landscape to our left was obscured by a freak snowstorm. The day had been well above freezing so far, and the change in the weather was so sudden that we had trouble identifying what was going on. The snow had just hit the area we were driving through; although the road was snow-free thanks to the traffic, the ground was snow-covered. Heading back down to sea level in the city, it rapidly cleared up again and the clouds vanished. This is definitely a place to be wary of the weather.

Evening 4 and Day 5: Back In The City

Returning to Reykjavik that Friday evening, we were just in time for the “runtur”, a drunken all-night bacchanal that seems to consume central Reykjavik every weekend evening. Dog-tired as we were, we just plugged in the ear plugs and hit the sack. We were dimly aware of shouting and yelling and breaking glass in the square below, that continued at some level or other all night long.

In the morning, the cleaning crews started up at 8 am (which in Reykjavik might as well be the crack of dawn, since no one is out yet). Big vacuum-cleaner trucks came out and sucked up all the debris on the park lawn, streets and sidewalks that people left from the night before. It struck me as peculiarly un-Scandinavian, or at least very unlike the Germanic obsession with orderliness that I’ve observed in other countries like Austria (or, by reputation, Singapore). There’s also a big graffiti problem — many if not most walls in Reykjavik sport ugly, artless “tags”. I watched bored teenagers scrawling some new ones on a side street near the Hallgrimskirkja. I get the impression that Icelanders are OK with a certain level of chaos and would rather just apply better cleaning technology, rather than cane or imprison kids for doing it, or trying to change whatever it is that’s going on in their society. Maybe this is the smart thing to do; perhaps people just really need to let off steam in such an isolated place and it’s better to let it happen. But the fact that they do let it happen in the center of the capital (and on every single weekend) seems like a clue that there are some different values operating here from most European countries.

In saga times, Iceland was a place where people who didn’t fit in anywhere else could go and make a new beginning. I’d be surprised if this hasn’t colored the way Icelanders think about themselves today. I’d like to find out more about that.

We spent our final whole day in the city shopping and wandering around, especially enjoying the giant flea market Kolaportið which sells lots of junky stuff like all other flea markets. It also has some superb food stalls offering Icelandic specialties of harðfiskur (dried fish), hakarl (fermented shark meat), flatbread, pastries, and more. We tried some pieces dried salt cod harðfiskur and, surprised at how good it was, we bought a few packages to take home.

It was sunny again. I strolled around back streets. Cats were wandering around, looking superior and lounging in the rays. Families were sitting in their postage-stamp yards, lying on deck chairs under blankets and clearly relishing the sunlight.

Later that night, earplugs were again useful, as the square beneath our window turned into an acoustic free-fire zone. There was a bunch of break-dancers with a hugely distorted boom box, the club across the street had outdoor speakers, somewhere some football fans were chanting “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, and girls would periodically shriek something unintelligible at the top of their lungs.

Day 6: Laugadalur and Home

The last day was a partial one. We checked out, and then walked across town, out of the center and through more of an ordinary residential neighborhood, to the Laugadalur park. The landscape became bleaker and more charmless until we reached the Laugadalur Botanical Garden, a pleasing area of native plantings where many Icelanders seemed to be taking their Sunday morning constitutionals. We walked past the tiny old bathhouse and hot spring, where an informational display told us some sort of geothermal bath facility had been available since the 1800s, and found our way to the new public baths, also (of course) geothermally powered. We bought tickets and rented towels and checked it out.

It was a sunny Sunday, and although the temperature was only in the upper 40s, the outdoor pool was very crowded. Not a soul was in the indoor pool. After trying the shallow outdoor pool and finding it simply not hot enough, we jammed ourselves into the small, hotter spa pool, which was even more crowded. Despite the human density, it was comfortable and relaxing. Everyone around us was happily nattering, mostly in Icelandic except for a couple of women next to us who chattered in Tagalog, only breaking into English when reporting something amusing that they had heard someone else say. It was nice to be out of the tourist circuit, just checking out the local scene. I wish we had had more time to do more of that.

We walked home via the harbor again. Unlike our first day, there was no haze in the air and we could see every detail of the surrounding snow-capped mountains across the fjord. We paused for a final photo of Max in front of Sun Voyager, a dazzling modern steel sculpture of a Viking boat. One of the pleasures of Iceland is the wealth of sculpture and public art in general. Even out in the sticks, there are surprising buildings and sculptural pieces all over the country, not tucked away but in central places where everyone can see them.

Six days wasn’t nearly long enough. I hope we get a chance to go back for longer someday, to see much more of the country and get to know the people better.