Tag Archives: Iceland

The first day – a step into the unknown

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Tuesday 29th June – Bloody hell, where to begin?  It’s been a day full of new sights and cultural experiences, which arrived in relentless stream; it’s difficult to know where to start. So let’s start with a stream – or, more accurately, a river.

Having met Dagur, our guide for the next fortnight, at out hotel, we left Reykjavik and headed away from the city. The stark nature of some of Iceland’s scenery soon began to make itself felt, and I tried a couple of quick grab shots from the car as we went along.

Dagur offered us the choice of sticking to the main road or taking the more scenic Road Less Travelled, so of course we opted for the latter, so soon  it was time for our first stop of the day

and time to take the first Proper Photos of the holiday with the Big Camera.  The scene was a stream, where a couple of people were fishing.

In the foreground are the famous (no, really) Icelandic Lupins.  These can be found in astonishing profusion all over the place, but started as an experiment to stop the black sand beaches from being washed and/or blown away.  Alaskan lupins are, it would seem, the only plant that can grow in black sand, so they were imported and planted on the sands, and have been successful in controlling the erosion.  The trouble is, they rather exceeded their brief and can now be found everywhere.  When we planned the trip, I had sort of imagined a dedicated excursion to see the Special Icelandic Lupins, but frankly it’s difficult to get away from them.  So I used them for an attempt at an arty shot.

and then turned my attention to the stream the folks were fishing in, which, it has to be said, was pretty scenic.

We then stopped at a viewpoint by the sound, looking back over an island

and at a very scenic spot where they used to gather sheep (you can still see the outlines of the walls). Please note that at this point the sun came out and the weather became extremely lovely.

After that, we stopped to gawp at a geothermal spring at Krauma, where the water comes out literally at boiling point and has to be cooled before it can be passed on to be used for heating.

En route to the next stop, I took the opportunity to take some shots of the lupins to give some idea of just how ubiquitous they are, taking over great areas of fields

and growing in roadside verges. They’re jolly pretty whilst in flower, but that’s only for one month of the year.

Our final port of call before lunch was to Reykholt, the historical home of one Snorri Sturluson, so-called “Homer of the North” and writer of many of Iceland’s medieval works of literature, including the sagas. The site has a modern church and museum (with associated gift shop, of course), to the left in the picture below, and, behind it, the old church.

There was more to the site, but there was still much to see, so we pressed on. The next stop was at a series of waterfalls called Hraunfossar and Barnafoss (“Child’s Waterfall).  I’m pretty sure that we’ll see loads more waterfalls before the fortnight’s out, but these were pretty spectacular.

Then it was time for lunch and, when we resumed, it became clear that the weather was closing in.

and when we got to the next stop, Ytri Tunga, the wind and drizzle were such that I declined to take my camera along as we trudged into the wind to see if we could see some seals.  With rain-lashed spectacles, I found it rather difficult, but Jane and Dagur could make out some dim shapes in the distance.

and it’s a great tribute to modern phone camera technology that I could capture these images, but I’d rather lost interest by this stage, and so was delighted when we reached our hotel for the night, Hotel Búðir, on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula. There was talk of midnight sun photography of the Black Church, but, frankly, since you could barely see the thing, I was grateful that we called it a day so I could retire to the bar.

The hotel is a destination location in Iceland, very well-run and featuring an excellent restaurant.  After getting embroiled in the bar in conversation with some other guests, we ended up sharing a table with an American lady called Sherry as well as Dagur.  Having drunk too much we therefore ate too much of the lovely food before retiring to bed and wondering what the next day would bring.  Perhaps you’d like to read the next entry to see what we discovered?

 

Cry Freedom! And let’s slip into Reykjavik

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Monday 28th June 2021, evening. We spent some three and a half hours acquainting ourselves with our hotel room whilst we anxiously awaited the outcome of our Covid tests.  In the distance, we could hear the tinkling of a piano.  Well, it as more a crashing than a tinkling.  I wondered if it was someone practising, Jane thought it was just rubbish. But it gave us something to get slightly distracted by whilst we waited……

At 8pm, the all-clear came in the rather prosaic and anti-climactic form of an SMS text saying “Screening could not detect COVID-19”.  No fanfare, no chorus of angels, just the beep of an incoming message.  But good news, nonetheless, as we were both getting a bit sharp set.

So we decided it was time to go out and explore our surroundings somewhat, not least because, against all odds, the sun was shining – not something we felt we had any right to expect.  We took an interim stop in the hotel bar, which was useful in several respects: firstly, getting to know Viking beer, a decent local lager; secondly getting a steer from the barman as to somewhere to eat (see later); and thirdly, to meet, briefly, Chris Foster, a friend of Jane’s from her folk-singing days. I would say “dim and distant” but if she reads that, she’ll slap me. The cost of spirits being what it is in parts Nordic, we’d brought a decent scotch and thus were able to present it to him.  We plan to meet him again when we return to Reykjavik en route home.

The Sand Hotel is set in Laugavegur, one of Reykjavik’s centralised, largely pedestrianised, streets, and very charming it is, too.  You can see at a stroke the quirky nature of this street, as well as the ubiquity of the electric scooters which make life as a pedestrian more tense than is strictly necessary.

As I took this photo, it became clear where the piano “music” was coming from. Up the street was a piano player who had extraordinary technique but could only muster appalling results.

We pottered in the direction that the barman said contained a good burger bar, noting the artworks adorning many of the street’s buildings

and spotting, in the distance, the hint of an impressive spire.

We eventually found the burger joint that our barman recommended

and it’s entirely in keeping with the quirky nature of the neighbourhood.  The burgers are OK, but the chips are stellar!  Walking back to the hotel, we detoured to explore the spire, and found it belonged to a quite remarkable building.

It’s called Hallgrímskirkja, locally referred to as the “Space Shuttle” and can be visited during the day; perhaps we will get a chance to look inside on our return to the city.

By this stage, it was getting a bit late and cool, so we wended our weary way back to the hotel and so to bed.  The day was a disconcerting mix of strange and familiar, and we felt the need of getting some sleep to help us be ready for whatever tomorrow might bring, and who knows what that might be?  Come back and find out!

So, How Was The Journey, Steve?

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Monday 28th June 2021. Both my wife and I had read many newspaper articles concerning likely apprehension about doing things that were once considered normal – international travel, visiting places and, you know, talking to people and that. And, of course, we completely pooh-poohed them because clearly that was rubbish…until we actually had to do some of these things. It’s not that we’ve lost the knack of talking to people or anything; we still had mastery of the basics of social interaction, but yet there was a definite tingle of apprehension in the air as we waited for our taxi. It’s been nearly two years since we last undertook a journey of significantly more than 50 miles, far less taken a step onto foreign soil; and we’ve lost the familiarity with the process (book the taxi, don’t forget the passports, tell the neighbours, etc etc) which is somewhat disconcerting. Add to that the other stuff that the pandemic has thrust upon us – pack masks, register your trip, arrange tests upon return – and it’s all too easy to worry that Something Will Go Wrong and we’ll spend our fortnight in the Keflavik departure lounge.

Our domestic arrangements, also, were slightly more complicated than for previous trips, though, thankfully considerably cheaper. Cheaper because we no longer had to engage a live-in carer for Jane’s mother whilst we were away; and more complicated because now we had to worry about practical things like leaving an empty fridge, cancelling the milk and turning the heating down. All first world problems, I agree, but still items that added to the general sense of excitement, adventure and slight terror.

Anyway: taxi arranged – it might have been nearly two years since the last one, but our local taxi firm still recognised our phone number and so knew what address they had to get to, which I found quite impressive; flowers watered; people organised to look after the house whilst we’re away; bags into the taxi and off we went.

In the end, the journey from home to aircraft was completely routine with two exceptions. The first was the wearing of masks, which one accepts as a necessary evil; the second was a pleasant surprise, in that we weren’t expected to check in our own bags at an impersonal terminal. We had a good old-fashioned visit to an Icelandair desk where a nice lady took our bags from us and handed out boarding passes. She also, it has to be said, checked our vaccination and Icelandic pre-registration status, so it was clear they were paying attention.

Thence to security. Heathrow Terminal 2 was pretty quiet,

but The Powers That Be had still managed to arrange things so that the usual pinch points still featured a slow-moving queue. But all was well and we soon found ourselves, via a short detour to duty-free to buy some scotch for an old contact of Jane’s in Iceland, at the Caviar House and Prunier bar for our usual pre-flight indulgence.

That was a nice brush with the familiar, as was our subsequent trudge to the departure gate which, according to my fitness monitor, was half a mile and which as usual was at the very furthest reaches of the terminal building. It was worth travelling in the walking boots, after all, and not just to save suitcase space.

Mask-wearing aside, the rest of the journey was exactly as it used to be in the Good Old Days. One could take the masks off whilst consuming refreshments and beverages, so I bought an extra beer to prolong the pleasure of being mask-free. The Icelandair 757 was perfectly comfortable, and, furthermore, provided an opportunity to be emotionally prepared for Icelandic (spelt “scandalous”) prices; two beers, an apple juice and a couple of tapas snack packs set us back £28. But it’s a holiday, so it doesn’t matter. It also taught me that Google Pay on the phone works even in airline mode, which quite impressed me, actually.

The flight was otherwise uneventful, and we came into Keflavik airport just enough ahead of time that they weren’t quite ready with the jetway. On the way in, we caught our first sight of Iceland.

(Look, I know it’s an undistinguished photo, but I want to confirm that the sun was actually shining; I have low confidence that this will be the case for much of this holiday, so just wanted some blue sky for the record, OK?)

The transit through the airport was frighteningly efficient. We were able to produce the right paperwork to convince the authorities that we were probably not plague-ridden and then actually had to dash across the baggage hall to retrieve our bags from the carousel before they disappeared back into the bowels of the building. Our chauffeuse, Sandra, awaited us and we merely had to pop into the adjoining Covid test facility so that we could be swabbed before Sandra whisked us into Reykjavik. This was further than I thought it would be; over 50km. This was my first hint of the size of the island – it’s bigger than Ireland, which I was only just beginning to realise. En route, the terrifying efficiency of the Icelandic Covid response showed itself further in a text that said that I had to quarantine in the hotel room until I got a text telling me all was OK.

So here we are, in the Sand Hotel, in our quarantine cell.

It has the facility to boil water and we brought our own teabags (just as well!), so we could do worse as a place to possess our souls in patience pending the release back into society.

Assuming that we are indeed not infected with the lurgy, our dumb luck continues – Iceland has just announced the removal of all Covid restrictions, so we will be able to enjoy the rest of the holiday without the cursed facemasks! Stay tuned to see how it unfolds….