Blown over in Reykjvík

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You know those nightmares where you are being chased by a monster and your legs are breeze blocks meaning that you can barely move, let alone run? There's an invisible force pushing you back so hard that you're almost bent over against it just so that you can get one step ahead. This was how it felt to walk around Reykavík a lot of today, getting increasingly more difficult the closer we were to the sea - so naturally we walked to a lighthouse.

The day started very dark and was briefly light for a few hours, then continued with the darkness. Flying from Luton at 7.45am, it was getting light, but as we got closer to Iceland, light disappeared and I could see Reykavík twinkling in the twilight through the frosty plane window. We landed at 10.30am but it felt like the middle of the night and it was raining.

Glyn had pre-booked the Fly Bus to take us to our hotel from the airport which was full of tourists. As our hotel was the last but one drop off, the journey took 90 minutes. But it was a good journey, taking us through the lava fields where we could see the snow covered mountains in the distance and the sun making a really poor attempt at rising. I've never seen the sun struggle so hard at getting up, it was worse than a teenager on a school day. And when it did eventually put in an appearance it was a rather pale effort that was quite eerie at times.

In contrast, the wind was all powerful. From the bus I could see the trees swaying insanely and the cranes on building sites looked absolutely terrifying as large, heavy chains swung dangerously in the gale. Flags were flapping madly and the flagpoles bounced around as though they were on springs. So when we got off the bus, it was hard not to be blown over, especially as the ice was wet and more slippery than the slipperiest of eels.

The Icelanders don't seem to worry about taking down Christmas decorations by Twelfth Night, and so everywhere was glittering with lights. Windswept Christmas trees buffeted by the wind still managed to stay adorned with lights and street decorations were blowing about like tissues in a wind tunnel.

We are stay at the Artic Comfort Hotel which is a 40 min walk from the city centre. We had booked it through Groupon and the entire trip is mightily cheap as a result. The hotel isn't amazing, but it's warm, clean and safe, and that's all I need.

We had wanted to go on a City Walk as it had great reviews on TripAdvisor, and we had just enough time to get to the start (these tours are always useful when arriving at a new city to get your bearings). Or we would have, had we not been told that the bus we were taking terminated at our stop. In fact, we went right past the bus station (it was so small we didn't recognise it) and out the other side of Reykavík to what looked like an industrial estate and the bus driver asked us where we were going as he was stopping for a coffee break. He recommended that we wait for him as the walk back would take 50 minutes and let's be honest, we would get lost.

The journey back into the centre didn't take long, the traffic is pretty minimal although there does seem to be far too many traffic lights and every single one is on red when we get to them.

Reykavík is more like a large town than a capitol city (btw it's the most northerly capitol in THE WORLD and the most westerly capitol in Europe just in case you need to know for a pub quiz). Most of the buildings are two storeys and you can cross the roads almost anywhere. The traffic is so polite, if you stand by the edge of the road waiting to cross, they stop for you no matter where you are. This is quite a contrast to the UK where you have to wait for a gap in the cars or find a crossing.

Many of the buildings are grey or white, but often they are really brightly painted - rich blues, golden yellows and leafy greens. In the main shopping area, there is no ice or snow on the ground. This is because the pavements are kept warm with underground water piped up from the Laugarnes boreholes, this system is part of the city's unique geothermal heating system that makes it possibly the greenest city in THE WORLD. However, it still is bloody cold.

We headed up to Hallgrímskirkja which is an enormous church that dominates the skyline. It is very unusual in appearance, like a fluted pointy rocket. We could stand in the middle of the road to take photos of it, as the little traffic that there was politely waited. Inside the church was pretty minimalistic which I've read is normal for a Lutheran place of worship, but it does have a massive organ that is 15 metres high with more than 5000 pipes, I know, I counted them all.... ok, I read that in my guidebook.

We paid to go up a lift to the area behind the clock faces. Up here the wind was a lot louder. There were a few flights of steps to climb and through the door to an area with open windows. Now if you take into account that the wind at ground level was making it hard to walk, imagine what it was like up a 73 metre tower. I didn't have to imagine, it was whistling all around me and I had to shout over it if I wanted to communicate with Glyn. The views out of the open windows were amazing, the coloured houses in the foreground with sea and snow capped mountains in the distance. From one side, there were golden rays of sun setting weakly in the distance - it was around 3pm by this time and the sun clearly was worn out from it's few hours of minimal effort.

I was wearing two pairs of gloves, but needed to take off at least one pair to take photos. It is hard to use a camera with gloves, but a few minutes sans gloves was freezing! If I left my hands out of the gloves for too long, once I put them back on, it felt like my hands were burning.

When we'd first set off from our hotel, I was worried for a while that I was over dressed. I had on thermal leggings, cragshopper trousers, lining socks, thermal socks, thermal shirt, tshirt, thermal jumper, hoodie, large coat, buff type thing that covers my face, thermal hat, two pairs of gloves, walking boots. I was quite warm for a while, but when you're hanging about taking photos at the top of a windy tower, it can soon get cold and I was glad for every item of clothing.

After we came down the tower we battled more wind that literally blew us and others sideways. I had to find a sheltered spot to take a photo as I couldn't hold my camera steady. Tourists were cowering in a concave area under the Leifur Eiríksson statue, waiting for the wind to drop long enough from them to get safely across the road.

We headed towards the harbour, looking for Beejarin's Beztu Pylsur which apparently once won an award as the best hotdog stand in Europe. I don't know when they won this award as it's been there since 1937. As I'm a vegetarian, I wasn't interested, but Glyn ordered one with all the trimmings and was rather unimpressed. However, he has now been to where ALL the Icelanders go for hotdogs and surely there's bragging rights in that.

At the harbour the sea was as choppy as choppy sea should be. The wind that I've now mentioned a few times was blowing it into a frenzy and I didn't want to get too close lest I get blown into it it, I'm sure the cold would kill me in seconds.

At the harbour was the Cinema of Fire Ice and Northern Lights. Sounds impressive does it not? Upon opening the door of the timber building, we were confronted with narrow wooden steps up to a large loft area with sofas, comfy armchairs and coffee tables laden with books and magazines about Iceland or movies. There was a screen on the wall and the films were played through a pc. Glyn paid the rather uncharismatic owner 1000 kronas each (around a fiver) for our entrance fees. I've read that Icelanders can be a bit shy at first, but this guy barely spoke. We were the only customers and he was the only staff. Glyn bought some cheesy popcorn and a kitkat for me as I'd not eaten since I'd had veggie sushi at Luton airport for breakfast. I asked about the likelihood of seeing the lights over the next few days, the proprietor said he didn't know. End of conversation.

The first film was a documentary about recent eruptions of the volcano that had stopped air traffic for some days a few years ago. There was video taken from a light aircraft flying over the volcano as it spewed out lava and ash billowed out into the sky for miles. The second film was about the northern lights. It explained how they occurred and then there was lots of amazing footage and time lapse photography. They were interesting and visually brilliant, but still I had to prod Glyn a few times as he began to doze off.

Both Glyn and I had read about Grótta Island Lighthouse, at Seltjarnarnes on TripAdvisor and thought it was worth the walk there. People had said that that it was the only place possible to see the Northern Lights in Reykavík should they occur, but even if they didn't, there would be awesome starry views. So we walked and walked and walked... and walked. We walked so much we doubted that we were going the right way and I risked switching on data roaming so that I could ask Google maps for help. After sending us to a building site (where the builders were working in the dark with floodlights, they have to or else they would only work for a few hours a day), Google told us it was still a 30 minute walk. We had come that far and we were not going to give up now.

I had already thought it was extremely windy, but I was in for a real treat as we were both blown along the coast. The further along we went, the more residential it became with lots of apartments and further still, fancy houses with huge windows. I guess the windows are large to let in as much of the minimal light as possible; most of them didn't even bother with curtains, so we were able to see inside the large open plan rooms with staircases running through them.

Eventually the road became a very dark track, but knowing what we are like, I carry torches in my camera bag and we continued closer to the lighthouse. A few cars passed us by and pulled up at the end of the road. We continued down the track, but the signs warned us of the incoming tide and we could see choppy sea surging up and thought better of getting much closer. As far as seeing anything spectacular, we were totally out of luck, it was not so much dark, but black. Not a star in the sky, no sign of the moon and certainly no Northern Lights. Even the light of the lighthouse was pathetic, how that warns ships to stay away is beyond me. However, we did find a large skeleton on the ground that is possibly from a whale, it was hard to tell by torch light.

We headed back past a couple of parked cars. At first I assumed that like us, they had come up in the hope of some spectacular night-sky action. But in hindsight, maybe they just had come up for some action, they did seem to be hanging around a bit too long in a place where nothing seemingly was happening.

The walk back was hard work. The wind was completely against us, we both put our heads down and battled through painfully slowly in the dark. I really felt like an Arctic explorer fighting against the elements (except there wasn't much snow here) just to put one foot ahead of the other. Eventually we found a bus stop and gratefully sheltered in it although one side was coming apart and the constant banging of metal on metal quickly got annoying. The bus journey back to the city centre was extremely quick, it seemed almost ridiculous how long it had taken us to walk that distance. We stopped at a 10-11 to buy snacks and drinks for our evening meal and took a last bus and final icy walk back to our hotel. The road were dry so we walked on them as cars were few and far between. I am absolutely knackered.

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Photos

10.30 am
view from the plane after we landed in Iceland