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Published: November 1st 2009
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7:20 PM
The Golden Circle tour left me cold and damp by the time Herman dropped us off, but I had already formed a solution to this, a solution that lay in City Hostel’s basement in the form of a nice, hot shower. There were showers upstairs on the same floor as our room, but a tip-off from Joe had led me down to the dungeons, to a bathroom nobody else seemed to know about, where I could get a shower in the morning without queuing or having to be as quick as I can to avoid other people having to queue for my place. The showers here have two settings - hot or off, and the price of utilising the naturally hot water underground around Reykjavik is that you have to take a shower with a slightly eggy smell due to the level of sulphur that is also drawn out of the ground. Despite this, I found the shower particularly refreshing and not long later we were all ready to get moving again. We arranged to meet Joe again later in the English Pub, and almost made a party of it by inviting both Tina and Christina, a new
girl in our room, but both decided in the end against going for a drink with three English strangers and a Canadian that they had never even met, for some reason.
Before the pub we stopped off at a Thai restaurant for a meal, continuing the trend of blowing our food and drink budget over the first couple of days of the trip (although this was mainly through drink). We arrived at the pub about 9.00, and considering it was a Friday night, it seemed pretty quiet, particularly compared to the night before. As the night went on, though, another local band turned up and the place started to fill. From what I can gather, people from Iceland don’t drink a great deal in the week, and make up for it at the weekends, the trend being that everyone starts late and ends up with their face in the gutter sometime around sunrise. We left the locals to it not long after midnight, grabbing a taxi back again and trying (but failing) to go to bed quietly without waking our roommates.
This morning we were up fairly early again so that we could leave Reykjavik and
get the bus to Vestmannaeyjar. While John had a little bit longer in bed (he likes his sleep), I was persuaded by Lyndsey to get up early enough so that the two of us could steal some breakfast (we hadn’t paid for breakfast, but Joe was pretty sure that we could just walk in and take what we wanted. He was right). I’m not sure if it was the guilt of stealing breakfast, but by the time we got down there, we weren’t particularly hungry and ended up just drinking a cup of tea. By 9.00, all three of us were ready and packed, so we set off on the long walk back to the bus station.
The Reykjavik streets were absolutely deserted at this time on a Saturday morning, presumably because most people were still sleeping off the major drinking session from the night before, although I can’t imagine many other capital cities being quite so quiet.
At the bus station, I was all for using a ticket machine to book our tickets, but English is so widely spoken in Iceland that it really is easier to ask. Not only was it easier, but the
man behind the desk for Trex buses was particularly friendly, and had us picking from a variety of chocolates before we had even told him what we wanted. On top of that generosity, he then gave us our tickets to Þorlakshofn for half of the advertised price. After a short wait in the bus station, which we used to pop into the sheep’s-head restaurant and pick up a sarnie for the journey, we were on our way out of Reykjavik and heading south.
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