Iceland days 7-10 - last couple of days in this amazing country

16 -> 19 Dec
Iceland days 7-10

After checking out of the hotel I went and checked into my hostel which was pretty nice.  Right in the centre of town with a comfortable bed and plenty of room.  Bit of a shock to be back in a hostel after the 4/5 star hotels I've been staying in but it's only a couple of nights.

Went for walk around town, saw a children's orchestra giving a free concert at the local arts centre and then went to check out the Icelandic Phallological Museum!  That's the Penis Museum.

The guy who started it basically got a few whale penises as gag gifts from fisherman friends of his and decided to start a museum.  I saw a documentary called "The Final Member" about this museum a few years ago because I thought it might be amusing but it was actually quite interesting.  It was about his quest to get the first human penis in his museum and the 2 guys he was negotiating with to get it.  I'd recommend the doco for something a bit different.

However the museum was located in the north of Iceland at the time so I didn't think I would be able to see it.  But!  When I arrived I found out they relocated it to Reykjavic a few years ago which meant I could go visit!

It's a pretty small museum (size doesn't matter remember?) but it was interesting enough for half an hour or so.  It's mostly for a giggle.  The collection is a bunch of penises from the animals that live in Iceland or its surrounding waters and they are either in jars of formaldehyde or taxidermied.  Some of them are fairly impressive, some of them are a bit odd and others just look like a penis.  There's also a section on penis mythology, some poetry and short stories and various artworks.  One of the most amusing ones was a series of casts of penises from the Icelandic handball team which are displayed together.

The highlight though was probably the gift shop.  There is all sorts of cock-related merchandise for purchase.  I was going to get a shirt but didn't like any of the designs so I ended up getting a plush toy of their mascot ... Phallossus.

Checked out the cathedral at the top of the hill next which was nice and had a really beautiful pipe organ.  Outside the museum I slipped on some ice in the most spectacular way.  Both feet went forward and I was up in the air and landed square on my back.  I ended up landing with the right side of my lower back right on my water bottle which felt better at the time but gave me a hell of a sore back for the next few days.  Apparently my fall was very amusing because a couple of teenagers saw it happen and burst out laughing while a few other tourists came rushing over to check if I was OK.  Not my finest moment.

After that I was all wet from the ice and snow on the ground and damned sore so I took off back to the hostel and chilled out for the afternoon.  I went out that night and met up with some local Ingress players for a few drinks which was nice.  We ended up out til about 1am.  Reykjavic has quite a night life.  Coming back at 2am and heaps of people were only just starting to come into the city.  Clubs are open til 6am here so they preload at home then come out late.  If you're into nightlife this is a good place for you.

Got back to the hostel about the same time as another girl and we were the only 2 people in the room ... Everyone else was still out!  I thought getting back in at 1.30am I'd be one of the last back in not one of the first!  I guess in this town there are a bunch of northern lights tours that go quite late so it's probably not that surprising.

I put my shoe out in the hall and went to sleep.

Iceland has some interesting Christmas traditions.  Possibly the most famous one these days is their tradition of giving a book on Christmas Eve and everyone gathering to read their books together.  I like that one.

One of their other is the 13 Santa Clauses they call the Yule Lads.  Each night leading up to Christmas a different Yule Lad comes out to play.  They do naughty things like slamming doors or licking spoons or peeping through windows.  They can be categorised apparently into the lickers, the sniffers and the perverts.  And the last one is a witch that apparently boils naughty children in her cauldron and eats them. Children aren't threatened with a lack of presents here ... they are threatened with being boiled and eaten.  My kind of place.

The hostel also does a thing where if you leave your shoe outside you get a surprise in the morning.  Now if this was Australia I'd be afraid that Julian Oneill would come by and poo in the shoe but in Iceland they put a chocolate and a nice little note there instead.  Another nice tradition.

The following day I had booked my last tour type activity in Iceland.  I was going to go through a lava cave and snorkel in the Silfra fissure!

Turns out the girl from my dorm room was on the same tour which was cool.  So we headed down to the stop and waited for our pickup which took quite a long time.  On our way and it was me with 7 girls.  What can I say ... I've got game.

First up was the lava cave which was interesting.  Quite different to the ice caves I've done so far in the trip.  Just lots of black volcanic rock, dripping water and icicles.  We climbed through the cave and in a couple of places I had to crawl or roll to get through but it was a fun experience.  I was definitely the most unfit of the group!  When we did the lights out thing it was different here than the ice caves.  In here you could only hear water dripping while in the ice cave you could hear the ice crackling.  Still total darkness in both though.  Got a few photos but given how dark it was and the fact we were using headlamps they didn't come out great.

After that we headed off to the Thingvellir national park for our snorkelling expedition.  Snorkelling in Iceland in winter ... what kind of dickhead does that?!  It was actually pretty cool.  The water was about 2-3 degrees Celsius but you don't even feel it with the equipment they have you use.  You wear your thermal underwear then a sort of thermal onesie over the top followed by a drysuit over the top of that which stops the water getting in.  Any water that does get in is absorbed by the thermal onesie.  So you're really quite warm.  The only bits exposed to the water are your hands and your cheeks and mouth.

Anyway - the Silfra fissure is one of the points opened up by the ongoing separation of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates.  So by swimming in here you're swimming in glacier melt between two tectonic plates which is pretty awesome.  If I'd had my diving license I could go down to a point where I can have one hand on each plate.  Next time!

This is also one of the best diving and snorkelling spots in the world when it comes to underwater visibility.  On a clear day you can have visibility up to about 120 metres apparently which would be amazing.  Unfortunately the day was a bit cloudy so I couldn't see quite that far but it the visibility was still great.  The view was basically just rocks and fissures which was interesting in itself but there was some algae and other various floaties in there as well.  I bought the photo pack from the guy running the tour and I think there are a few decent ones in there.

Went out for dinner that night with an Australian guy I met in the hostel.  We went to a nice tapas place that did an Icelandic traditional food menu.  I had puffin (served as a tartar - not my favourite dish), whale, a couple of types of fish, horse and lamb.  Really tasty meal and I thought it was well worth the price tag.

The next day was my last day in Iceland.

I booked a session at the blue lagoon on the way to the airport.  Stupidly I missed the bus by a couple of minutes (it's a 30 minute pickup window ... I didn't read the fine print) so I had to wait for the next one meaning I only ended up with about 30 minutes in the water.  Annoying but my own damn fault.  Nice facility but really overpriced and not something I'd recommend if you aren't into the whole spa thing.  The water wasn't even hot.  More like luke-warm.  There are better ones you can go to for a far better price in Reykjavic that give you a much more authentic local experience.

So today I fly off to the USA for Christmas with Luke and Mel in Seattle before heading home sometime around new year.

Iceland has been absolutely spectacular and I'll definitely be coming back but in the summer next time.  It's not a cheap place to visit but the scenery is amazing, the people are friendly and it's so easy to visit with everyone speaking English everywhere.

And they have tentacle porn at the airport.

Iceland days 4-7 - finishing up the tour

13 -> 16 Dec
Iceland days 4-7

Started today with a drive through and quick photo stop at some lava fields.  This would turn out to be one of my favourite parts of the country.  It's not as big and spectacular as some of the waterfalls but just driving through the landscape of these snow covered lava formations was just awesome to me.  The scale of the fields and the colours really appealed.

A brief stop at a segment of a bridge that had been washed away in some glacier melt and turned into a rest stop and then we headed off for a nice easy hike to the Svartivoss waterfall.

This waterfall was pretty cool in that much of it was frozen.  There was still water running but it was running through some frozen chutes into a big frozen cone and under the ice.  Very cool and a very nice walk in the snowy landscape.

Next we drove up to the Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon.  This place was awesome.  Bit of the glacier break off and gather in the lagoon until it's their turn to wash out to sea.  The glaciers are a variety of colours but there are some really brilliant pale blue ones which look pretty spectacular.

Apparently last year a group of 50 tourists were standing on the edge of the lagoon or one of the glacier fragments and it broke off and floated towards the middle of the lake.  The boat operators had to rescue them.  Dickheads.  I'm sure it was amusing for the other tourists there.

Once the glacier fragments wash out some of them end up on a black sand beach either side of the inlet.  They call it the Diamond Beach because the glacier fragments look like diamond or glass after they've been through the ocean and been melted down a little.

Our guide got some headlamps and put them under the glacier fragments to give some pretty cool photo ops.

We stayed at a pretty awesome hotel for the next two nights.  Fosshotel Glacier Lagoon is a really nice new 4 star hotel with a very nice restaurant and pretty cool lobby bar.  I spent far too much on dinner and drinks but it was delicious.  I had langoustine (lobster) soup for entree but can't remember my mains.

That night I finally saw a noticeable showing of the northern lights!  One of our group had noticed a few people outside staring at the sky so woke everyone up to go check out the lights.  It was a little windy out but not too bad.

So the lights we actually saw with our eyes are nothing like the photo below.  What I saw was a very pale grey in the sky that could have been mistaken for either light pollution over the horizon or very wispy clouds if you only glanced at it.  But after staring at it for a while I could see it start to expand and contract which is the "dancing" they speak about when viewing the lights.  It would have been awesome if I could have actually seen the lights in colour but seen them I have.  I will have to come back again to see if I can get a better showing but I'm satisfied that I've seen them even if they weren't terribly exciting.  It was better than the previous night though so I can't complain.

This photo was taken by Melissa in our group.  I think she was the only one with a camera capable of taking a photo of the lights because my phone damn sure wasn't doing it.  If anyone is going lights hunting this was taken with a GoPro.  This would be the last time I'd see the lights this trip.

Today's main activity was a glacier hike and visit to an ice cave in the Skaftafell National Park.  Started in the same spot we did the hike yesterday so we drove over, got knitted up and onto a bus with maybe 50 other people doing the same thing.  Amusingly I was the only one who got to wear my own shoes.  The glacier people made everyone else use the hire shoes because they weren't appropriate for the glacier and crampons.  Strange because most of them seemed fine to me but whatever.

And of course - our guide happened to be an Australian chick.  Complete opposite side of the world and I'm running into Australians everywhere.  Hottie too!

So we strap on our crampons and walk up the glacier to the ice cave where we fuck about for a little while.  They gave us some pretty useless pick axes which theoretically are supposed to be for smashing into ice but in reality were photo props.  So I took advantage.

The ice cave was really quite small and nowhere near as impressive as the one on Svalbard but it was good fun nonetheless.  This one had a lot more air bubbles trapped in the ice which looked pretty cool.  It was like an aero bar.

After the hike we headed back to the iceberg lagoon and diamond beach to try to get a look in some different light.  Slightly different but not enough to be exciting.  However there were some pretty spectacular skies on the way there which made the drive totally worthwhile.

Afterwards we went to the totally boring Thorbergur Cultural Centre museum about some Icelandic author then had a pretty average meal at the attached Thorbergssetur Restaurant.  The restaurant is supposed to be pretty good and known for serving good traditional Icelandic food but I would not recommend either to anyone unless you have a particular interest in the author.  We had tomato soup, lamb and chocolate cake.  The lamb was tasty but over cooked and the rest was average.

Stopped back at the lagoon on the way back to see if we could see any northern lights but there was nothing happening so we went back to the hotel and had a few drinks.

The next morning we started heading back to Reykjavic for our last day of the tour.  Technically tomorrow is the last day but I hardly consider breakfast at the hotel to be a part of the tour.

We made a couple of brief stops on the way back to Reykjavic to break up the drive a little.

First was a small church which is one of only 6 of this particular type of church left in Iceland.  The most unique thing about this place is that the graves in the church are all small burial mounds rather than holes dug into the earth.  No doubt that's because the ground was frozen so it was too much bloody effort to dig a hole large enough to bury someone.

Then a quick stop at some basalt columns below a rest stop for a couple of nice photos and some ice for Melissa and Jonas to slide around on.  Those 2 might as well be penguins!

And the last stop of the day was at the Hellisheiði Geothermal Power Plant.  It wasn't a long stop as you really can't see very much but it was really fascinating.  I don't remember half of what they said but it's such an efficient system that really utilises the resources of Iceland very well.  Because of its efficiency power is extremely cheap in Iceland.  The water from the plant is used to heat everyone's homes and even pumped under the main footpaths in town to stop them from icing up.  Fascinating place and well worth reading up on if you're interested.

Back to the hotel and then out for a farewell dinner and drinks with the group.  The place we went to was basically an American pub because they had a variety of food to please everyone.  Lost half the group after dinner as we branched off to a couple of bars.  At one of the bars we tried the Fermented Black Shark which is supposed to be one of Iceland's traditional foods.  I'd heard it was an extremely strong taste and big ammonia smell but it wasn't bad at all.  The smell was almost non-existent and it was almost a smoky taste.  I quite enjoyed it.  People are soft.

Finished up about 1.30am then headed off to the hotel to get some sleep.

Breakfast the next morning then everyone went their separate ways.  A nice group of people but I don't think I've formed any lasting friendships.

Overall the tour was good but I'm still disappointed I didn't drive myself.  I think I could have done it without any issues but we did have pretty great weather most of the time.  I think there was only really one day that had really icy roads and a bit of wind which is what I was mostly afraid of though I saw plenty of shitty tourist drivers out there doing their thing.  That said it could very well have been disastrous so in the end it was probably worth spending the money on the tour.