We come from the Land of the Ice and Snow

Europe » Iceland
July 18th 2017

Published: July 19th 2017

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flying kiwis

the Sun Voyager

sculpture in Reykjavik

The water from the tap is boiling hot and sulphurous but makes your skin feel soft and smooth. The people are polite and charming but their landscape is harsh and unforgiving. Volcanoes spew molten lava through frozen glaciers but are talked about with affection like a favourite pet rather than a destructive, uncontrollable force of nature.

‘Iceland - land of contrasts’...seems an inadequate description.

On more than one occasion we got quizzical looks when answering the ubiquitous traveller’s question of where we come from…”don’t you have a lot of the same things there?”...”“isn’t Iceland a little New Zealand?”…yes, there are a lot of similarities, but it’s so, so different.

We expected it to be cold (the clue is in the name) and had stocked up on Katmandu thermals, but I found myself constantly thinking ‘this would be gorgeous in summer…’ then realising it WAS summer – we’d arrived at the summer solstice when the sun never sets.

Temperatures are colder in their summer than a South Island winter. We reached a sunny 16 one day but mostly shivered around 9-11 with the wind chill making it feel below zero. On the day we drove the ‘Golden Circle’

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from Reykjavik, a watery sun deteriorated into driving rain and as we weren’t at that stage wearing ALL our layers of clothing at once, we were glad to get back to the shelter of the rental car after each geographical highlight.

My family will understand how seriously cold it was when I mention we DROVE PAST! the last couple of stops on the Golden Circle in our eagerness to return to the warmth and waiting brandy in our apartment.

We also thought we were prepared for the crowds doing the Golden Circle – a roughly circular day trip from Reykjavik linking the Mid Atlantic Ridge, Geyser and Gullfoss waterfall, usually done as a bus tour but perfectly drivable by private car.

It is the thing you do if you only have a day or two in Iceland and some tour companies do several runs a day. You know the drill – bus turns up, disgorges 50 or more punters who run either to get the best selfie shot at the attraction or to the loos, take photos like crazy then all pile on the bus again.

What we weren’t prepared for was bus loads of people

beautiful lupins everywhere

who completely took over every place they stopped, pushed you out of the way to get the best view, waved selfie sticks around with disregard for others’ safety, knocked over ropes and poles which clearly showed an area was out of bounds so they could take millions more photos – not of the stunning scenery, but of them and their friends/family jumping up in the air… completely obscuring the stunning scenery.

And this is not silly teenagers – we had our path completely blocked by a shrieking mass of pink and orange puffer jacketed middle aged women jumping in the air as best they could (which was about a centimetre in most cases) while everyone took photos of everyone else in a kind of mass hysteria.

This was in one of the most enthralling natural environments I’ve ever visited – the rift valley where the North Atlantic and Eurasian tectonic plates are pulling apart and stretching Iceland by about 2 cm a year – in fact this plate movement and resulting volcanic activity is what created Iceland in the first place.

I am certain the pink and orange puffer jackets had no idea of the significance of

Thingvellir

the North Atlantic Rift and site of first Icelandic parliament

where they were, or why they were there. Oh for the days of the ridiculous but less space invading V sign pic.

Verdict on the Golden Circle: you have to do it – Thingvellir (both the rift valley and the site of Iceland’s first parliament in 930 AD) is absolutely stunning but try to wait for a lull in the bus tours. Don’t waste much time at Geyser – it may be the one after which all other geysers in the world have been named but it was a dismal site compared to Rotorua and Rhys said he could pee higher.

You should also avoid the coach tours that stop here for a frenzied shopping spree at a huge souvenir and designer clothing complex in the middle of nowhere. But do carry on to what we think is the best waterfall in a country of countless waterfalls. Gullfoss is a stunning double fall which can be viewed from several vantage points – at the lowest point you are actually below river level as it thunders down rapids before the first big fall.

We saw nine named waterfalls as well as hundreds of beautiful but unnamed ones just

in between the tectonic plates..

hard to take a photo at Thingvellir without a coach load of other tourists

happily cascading down escarpments without the stress of busloads of tourists fouling their environments, but Gullfoss is the best.

The landscape is the star in Iceland - although there are museums and galleries in Reykjavik they are expensive and the island’s history is easy to get a handle on. First settled by Norwegian Vikings in 870ish AD, this is a new country compared to the rest of Europe and although we think of NZ as being a geologically new country, Iceland beats it by millions of years, first erupting out of the north Atlantic Ocean around 20 million years ago.

There is only one small island that is actually in the Arctic Circle, but all the country experiences 24 hours of daylight in summer. Coming straight from an overheated southern Italy might have made us feel the cold more, but nothing could mitigate the effect of the midnight sun.

Although I had a good eye mask, my brain still knew it was light out there and I didn’t do a lot of sleeping, especially when the accommodation had only the flimsiest of curtains (don’t they realise their guests aren’t necessarily used to sun at midnight?!)

Fortunately

the Mid Atlantic ridge

we only had a day and a half of bad weather so we were able to enjoy the constantly unfolding spectacle that is the Icelandic landscape. We drove right round the Island on the ring road which was developed more for tourists than its secondary purpose of linking previously remote, tiny villages.

1336 km long, we took six days to drive round, you could do it in less but I’d recommend taking longer – yes you can spend longer driving each day as it doesn’t get dark (!) and the roads are (mostly) good with comparatively little traffic, but you need time to enjoy walks to waterfalls etc and the scenery is so epic you suffer sensory overload!

We also spent two days in the northern town of Akureyri which definitely warrants a closer look.

There is the blue haze of lupines cutting a swathe through lime green moss covered lava fields, a palate of sienna around the geothermal areas, pink, white and blue giant marshmallows of silage decorating the newly harvested fields of thick, lush grass in the sheltered farming areas and the ever present foreboding mountains - the lower ones still with patches of snow

Thingvellir

the site of the first parliament in 930AD

and regularly punctuated with waterfalls, the higher ones hiding their still active volcanic cores beneath icy glacial duvets.

Reykjavik has some interesting architecture but buildings in the towns and villages are plain and functional, many built out of corrugated iron – houses, churches and public buildings - because of the fear of fire. With such a small population and potential for a variety of natural disasters (earthquakes, eruptions, floods etc) Icelanders are very risk averse. But they make up for this utilitarianism by painting their houses wonderful bold colours of red, blue, green and pink.

All the Icelanders we met were charming and spoke nearly perfect English, so good conversations are to be had, for example with the guy in the hat shop. This was only one of his many jobs as he was studying for his masters in history and had 6 kids! He admitted the cost of living is high for Icelanders as well as tourists (but some people clearly like to make things harder for themselves). He saw tourism as a two edged sword – it’s now Iceland’s main source of income but the high price of accommodation, restaurants etc has an effect on the

Gullfoss

the best waterfall by far

local economy as well.

Eva who ran the lodge at Sellfoss was German and spoke no Icelandic but she loved the place, was going for a job and hoped to love there permanently. In the hot pool in Grundarfjordur we met a man from Vermont who is cycling round Iceland – we’d seen many doing this, mostly in pairs or solo.

The best alternative transport we saw was in the north after Akureyri … I couldn’t quite believe my eyes so haven’t got a photo…as we got closer I realised it was two guys on skateboards propelling themselves with ski poles through the barren mountainous landscape. Insane.

I asked the guy from Vermont why he as doing it (something we had been asking ourselves every time we saw someone cycling against a freezing wind up a steep hill). It’s a challenge he said after a pause. I took the pause as a symbol of whatever he was running from in Vermont.

When he got out of the hot tub a local woman slipped in. After a few minutes of listening to us she joined in after we said, ‘were always the only kiwis..’ There are apparently

Gullfoss

a couple here in Grundarfjordur (pop 872) – they came for the fish processing 20 years ago, met local women and stayed. There’s also a third – a barista in a local cafe – making the kiwi population of Grundarfjordur roughly .3%

Iceland is so beautiful I can see how someone would want to stay… except for the constant risk of hypothermia and perpetual darkness in winter. Another local entered the hot tub and we talked about whether they ate whale (yes) or puffin (one no and one yes – it doesn’t taste fishy but meaty) and how we were supposed to immerse ourselves in the nearby tub of freezing water after emerging from the hot tub. I put my arms in the cold tub, discerned that it was in fact freezing and offered a kiwi colloquialism of refusal to our two new friends - which they took with good humour. Like the landscape, I think there’s a lot of difference between Icelanders and New Zealanders…but a lot that’s the same.

And no…I didn’t see Bjork (although I was looking…)

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