Blogs from Southwest, Iceland, Europe - page 46

8:10 PM Travelling around Iceland, climbing volcanoes, waterfalls and glaciers can be tiring, and there is a lot to be said for sitting in a bath of sulphur, so our final complete day was a much more relaxed affair. We had always planned to end the trip at Iceland‘s main tourist spot, the Blue Lagoon, which sits in the lava fields between Reykjavik and the airport (via a slight detour), gently whiling away our last hours in its soothing waters. The Blue Lagoon is something of an accident, the by-product of the nearby geothermal power station. Like the other power stations in the area, it uses the hot water below the ground to generate electricity, after which the water is left to pour into the volcanic craters and holes next to it. Some clever person years ... read more

1:00 PM We were warned before we came that the weather in Iceland was changeable, and in our first three days we’ve seen pretty much every season. Today is by far the warmest it has been since we arrived, which sounds silly when the temperature boards on the roads out of Reykjavik are reading -1°C, but with the sun shining and the Atlantic (or possibly Arctic) winds having subsided, it feels relatively warm. It could be that it just feels warm because we are now used to the weather here, or it could be that we are comparing it to yesterday, which, at times, felt pretty extreme. Reykjavik was pretty dull and miserable first thing yesterday morning when the bus for the Golden Circle arrived. The bus was a few minutes late picking us up from ... read more

The ‘Þ’ character in Icelandic, used in places like Þingvellir and Þorlákshöfn, is pronounced like a ‘Th’ is in English, as in the word ‘Thing’. In fact, to avoid confusing tourists, the ever helpful Icelandic people often write those place names down as Thingvellir and Thorlakshofn, rather than use the extra character in their own language. The ‘Þ’ symbol was actually a letter in the English language until the middle ages, with both Icelandic and Old English largely deriving from the Old Norse language of the Vikings. In the end, England scrapped the extra character due to German technology, maybe the original cause to use the phrase ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’. Through the middle ages, the English started to write ‘Þ’ without the top curve, so that it basically looked like a backwards letter ‘y’. When the ... read more

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 ... read more

5:25 PM I found out while shaving yesterday morning that the Canadian bloke is called Joe. He was also a man without anything particular to do, so he joined us for the day while we perused the sights of Reykjavik. We decided to take a walk along the bay towards the city centre, the same route that we had started but given up on the night before, except that this time I had a fleece, John had a woolly hat and Lyndsey had a thermal vest. With those, there was no stopping us today. Joe didn’t seem so bothered about the cold, although he did wear a hat, but that is probably because he was much taller than the rest of us and it gets cold at those higher altitudes. Before heading for the city, Joe ... read more