Iceland days 1-3
Head down to the train station and off to the airport for my flight to Iceland. I see Marian at the train station so we sit together then do breakfast at the airport while waiting for flights. He's off to Hamburg.
The Oslo airport is very nice. Easy to get around, aesthetically pleasing and it's nice to see the staff riding around on kick scooters. Can't imagine anyone in Australia being allowed to do that for fear of injuring staff or customers.
The flight is not very full at all so I get an emergency exit row to myself which is awesome. The weather is great and coming across Iceland I get some pretty spectacular scenery. It's a greyscale country at this time of year (black, while, grey) but it's really stark and beautiful. I acted like a total tourist moving from side to side on the plane as the views changed. Nice to see I wasn't the only one though ... I think it was the first time one of the flight attendants had been to Iceland because she was doing the same thing.
Jumped on a bus into the city and had 40 minutes of glorious Icelandic scenery to observe. It really is another world up here. And this scenery was not that good compared to what was to come.
BAM! Sulphur! As soon as I exit the bus in the city you're slammed with the smell of sulphur. I knew it was volcanic and hot-springy here but I didn't think it would be that pervasive throughout the city. Got used to it within a couple of minutes though and barely notice it.
I arrived at my hotel and it was very nice!
At the last minute I decided to book a tour for most of my time in Iceland. I had originally intended to self drive and do my own thing but at the point where I was about to hit confirm on the rental car booking I just thought about all the threads I had read saying driving in Iceland in winter can be very unpredictable and dangerous. So after about 20 minutes of sitting there staring at the computer I swallowed my pride and spent a stupid amount of money on a "7 day" tour. I put "7 day" in quotations because they count the arrival and departure days as a day on these types of tours which is total BS. And it turns out the tour is considered a "comfort" tour which is why the price tag was so high so I've got some nice hotels coming up.
Anyway - I check into my room and there's this lovely king sized bed that I'm very much looking forward to occupying for a night.
So I dump my stuff and go for a walk through the city while I wait for the meeting time of the tour group.
Reykjavik is not a picturesque city. It's surrounded by beautiful scenery (the mountains over the harbour for instance), the main street is lovely and there are a bunch of nice / funky looking bars / restaurants but the rest of it is just not particularly pleasant. Maybe it will look different in summer with some greenery around but it's mostly grey and utilitarian. But let's be honest - I'm not in Iceland for Reykjavik so it's not really a problem.
Get back to the hotel and go back to the room where I meet my roommate. Given the king bed I was kind of expecting the room to myself but it seems I'll be sharing it with Will - a nice Canadian guy. Here's hoping neither of us get clingy because the bed won't separate into singles.
Head downstairs for a beer then hook up with the tour group. There are 10 people in the group including the guide so it's a nice small number. An American, 3 Canadians and 5 Australians! Why did it have to be Australians?! Anyway - everyone is nice so hopefully it'll go well. Apparently we're quite a young group for this particular tour. Jonas (tour guide) was saying that normally it's people in their 70s/80s that do this because it's very comfortable and easy.
So we head to a local burger joint (... I want to eat Icelandic!) to get to know each other a bit and talk about the tour. It was a little bit awkward as there don't seem to be any really big personalities in the group but that could just be new people jitters.
Day 1 (technically day 2 but I'm calling it day 1 since it's the first day we do something) we pile onto the minibus and head out to the golden circle which is the main tourist attraction of Iceland. It's a balmy -12 degrees Celsius outside but it doesn't actually feel that cold. That said my fingers did start to sting a bit after a while outside.
Started at the Thingvellir National Park. This is where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are pulling apart at a staggering rate of 2cm per year. The sunrise lasts so long here and the light is perfect for some amazing photos. The scenery here is just beautiful. What an auspicious beginning! The water in the lakes and rivers is just so clear it's amazing. Even here in Iceland you get dickheads polluting the environment by throwing coins into rivers thinking it will give them good luck. It's not a fountain in a shopping centre you dickheads! Respect the environment.
Next up we're off to the Froheimar Farm which among other things (I presume) trains Icelandic horses and grows tomatoes in their geothermal powered greenhouse. We got to play with the horses for a while (the beautiful redhead tried to eat my phone) then we got a demo of the running styles of the horses. Apparently normal horses only have 3 running styles while the Icelandic horse has 5. I forget what they are but the extra styles seem to be more comfortable for the rider and sound better for long distance riding.
After the horses we went down and checked out the greenhouses which were pretty cool. The vines looked in great condition and they went through their processes for us and how they artificially manage the light to give the best growing conditions. The tomatoes we tasted were delicious and we stopped there for lunch. It was basically unlimited house-made tomato soup and bread and it was delicious. I had a Bloody Mary as well made using juice from their tomatoes which wasn't as good as the soup.
Our hotel that night was in the middle of nowhere so I had hopes for northern lights but it was raining and cloudy all night so it didn't happen. The hotels here have norther lights alerts you can sign up for which is great but at no point did I actually get an alert from the hotel. It was either Jonas or one of the group who would alert us before the hotels would even notice. I guess they get a bit blasé about the lights.
We had a nice dinner at the hotel and a few of us had some nice Icelandic craft beers in the hotel bar (EXPENSIVE!) then I went out and lazed around in the hot tub for a while. There's something nice about sitting in a 38 degree hot tub wearing a fur hat (faux of course!) while it's raining and -2 degrees outside.
Interestingly one of the coolest things I saw today were greenhouses in the distance. The greenhouses use these really bright yellow lights and they stand out like dog's balls in the distance if there are no trees or mountains in the way. What they also do is light up the clouds in a really cool way. It's like a big beam of light shining straight up and layering the clouds in golden light. It's a pity my camera is so shit that I couldn't capture it effectively!
The next morning we get a really great breakfast in the hotel (this will be a theme throughout so I won't mention it again) then head off towards the Seljalandsfoss and Gljufrabui waterfalls. The Gljufrabui waterfall in particular is pretty cool because it's hidden in a bit of a cave. Thank goodness for waterproof boots. If the weather is right you can also walk behind the Seljalandsfoss waterfall but alas the path was frozen and unsafe so it was closed.
We then headed to the Skogarsafn Museum which was quite interesting. It was a cultural history museum I guess showing how Icelanders lived before western society took over. Can you believe that until the 1940s Icelanders were still living in turf houses without electricity? They really only joined modern society after WW2 thanks to peaceful British and American occupation of the island. It's amazing they have come so far in such a short time but being able to skip the whole industrial era thing probably helped.
Lunch near the museum then off to the Skogafoss waterfall where I'm the only one who climbed the 400 steps to the top. I walked down the trail at the top for a ways and was back a few minutes late for the meeting time but it wasn't too big a deal. This is one of the downsides of a tour. I would have preferred to follow the trail as far as I could but could really only go 15 minutes down the path before I had to head back.
Next up we headed off to the black sand beach at Reynisfjara. I didn't see any black sand beaches in Hawaii when I was there so this was pretty cool. The sand has a totally different texture to the beaches back home and it was awesome watching the white surf come up then roll back across the black sand. The surf was pretty violent too. Apparently people surf there sometimes but it doesn't seem like a good surf beach with the waves breaking so close to the shore.
On the way to the hotel we do a quick stop at a local church. It's a tradition in Iceland for families to decorate the grave markers of their family members with bright lights for Christmas which looks pretty cool. We drove past a couple of bigger churches later in the trip and they become very colourful.
Do a stop for snacks / souvenirs then off to our hotel in the town of Vik.
A few of us hit up what is supposed to be a traditional Icelandic buffet for dinner which was OK. They had some non-standard items on the menu which were good. Smoked beef tongue, smoked horse, roast horse, cured fish and a traditional yoghurt along with some herring which is similar to the Danish / Norwegian stuff.
After dinner we went for a short northern lights hunt to see if we could see anything but unfortunately there wasn't anything to see due to cloud cover so we headed back for some sleep. I ended up joining Jonas in the hot tub with a beer which was nice. It was snowing tonight! Snow, hot tub, fur hat and beer. Perfect!
Around 1am Jonas woke us all up as he'd checked outside to see the clouds had cleared up over the last couple of hours and he thought he had seen some very light northern lights activity. So we all got dressed and trudged out then waited around for an hour or so. Melissa (from Canada) had a camera that could pick up the lights so she confirmed there was some very light activity but it was really hard to see with the naked eye. It was a very pale dusting of grey over the stars which was slightly expanding and contracting.
It was certainly not what I wanted to see as my first lights activity but lights it was.
It seemed to be fading so most of us headed off to bed after that to get some sleep.
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