Advertisement
Published: January 10th 2016
On the minibus taking us to the airport, Glyn and I were sitting next to a Brummie couple who asked if we had seen the lights last night. Sadly, no. They were rather surprised as they had had an excellent show, it was amazing apparently! It turned out that their trip ran a lot later than ours and that the lights had put in an appearance some time after 11pm. This is gutting - I can handle missing them if they didn't happen, but knowing that we were a mere hour or two too early, and that we had been taken back to Rekjavík (with lots of apologies) when the lights were just getting ready, well that is just frustrating!
The only way to do the lights for an inexperienced tourist is with a tour. There are no street lights outside Reykjavík, which is great to keep light pollution to a minimum, but scary for a lost tourist not used to driving on ice - they do crash a lot in winter and it is an issue. Also, the tours are in contact with the weather station who supply them with up to the minute information on cloud free areas
which are required to see the lights, plus your coach driver not only knows the land, but the places to park. So there's no way we could have hired a car and gone looking ourselves or this blog would have been written from a hospital bed or not at all!
So I guess I need to come back to Iceland! And despite being constantly on the go, there's still a lot I want to do that we didn't have time for...
I'd like to ride an Icelandic horse and experience their fifth gait of "tölt".
I want to go on a trip to Viðey iIsland which is also meant to be good for seeing Icelandic horses and puffins in May.
I'd like to relax in one of their thermal spas which are a social thing in Iceland rather than a health activity. Apparently locals hang out in the hot swimming pools to socialise much the same way Brits hang out at the pub after a day at work.
And I'd like to go on a Whale Watching trip, but one where the whales do turn up. On the plus side of the Northern Lights disappointment,
the Brummie couple despite having had a spectacular light show, their Whale spotting boat ride was whale free, they told us this to make us feel better - thanks!
Iceland is a great country in that it's so clean and safe. We only saw one policeman on his motorbike and for Eric, our tour guide at that time, this was a talking point: a policeman, out on the streets (the heart of the capital city as it goes), what on earth might be happening?! There was no need to hang on to bags tightly as is often the case in most countries, including my own. Walking around with expensive cameras wasn't risky. I didn't witness any trouble, fighting, drunks or bad atmospheres up town like I do at home. And it was just about litter free. Although there was some graffiti, it was mostly the arty type (not the usual abusive scrawl) and lots of street art often adorning entire sides of buildings.
The water is clean (although tap water could taste a bit sulphuric) and the idea of buying a bottle of water was considered a joke. The air is clean, although the snow had turned grey
in the city centre due to the light bit of traffic.
I have read previously that the quality of life in Iceland is one of the best in the world. Yes, they do have high taxes but they have great healthcare and education. In fact the population is regarded as over-educated in that people are working in jobs less than their level of education.
Gender equality is very good, I feel safe walking around at night and the jobs roles appear to be mixed. The magazines, newspapers and advertising that I have seen don't contain loads of titivating images of gormless young women purely for the male gaze - they seem to enjoy the same respect that men do in Iceland, this respect is universal in that they don't assume my hubby is paying the bills, and men talk to me the same way they do Glyn. Speaking to a Swedish young woman at the hotel bar yesterday she felt the same, but gender equality is also good if not better in Sweden. She said that female friends coming to London had been shocked at how such a modern country was so backward (gender pay gap for example
which is deemed as so old fashioned to her, like it happened to her Mum who was incredibly angry about it) and had experienced men ejaculating over them on the tube. There's no underground system in Iceland, not even trains, so no worries there!
There doesn't seem to be many immigrants in Iceland, possibly because it is expensive? We did spot a wide variety of restaurants from Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Indian and a handful of American fast food joints (KFC, Subway and Dominoes but no McDonalds!) Plus a few English pubs. But apart from a few foreigners working in these places, there didn't seem many about. Although, I would never have known the Swedish woman was Swedish had I not asked! So maybe they have lots of Scandinavian immigrants? Tourists were mainly European, with a few Americans, Australians and Japanese. We did come across one couple from Brazil and a guy from Turkey but that doesn't count as he currently lives in the USA. Maybe this is different in the summer?
So in conclusion, I would love to come back to Iceland as there's so much more to see and I would recommend it to anyone who likes
to experience new places safely. If pools and beer is all you require, give it a miss as you will be cold and broke in a day. I would even consider living in Iceland despite the weather and strange daylight hours - would they let me in though?!!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.088s; Tpl: 0.044s; cc: 10; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0342s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
A Small Swede in the Big World
Per-Olof Persson
To Bad...
...that you missed the aurora, especially after enduring all that cold and wind (quite a trademark of our northern countries). I hope your next trip to the north will yield better results. :)