After catching a 9:30pm red-eye flight from Boston, I dozed a bit on the plane and before I knew it had landed in Reykjavik! (Yes, it took me well on two or three months of Iceland travel planning to figure out how to spell that.) The story behind the Iceland trip: a friend of mine from Stanford and her boyfriend had been thinking of/planning a vacation to Iceland since at least this past winter, and asked me if I'd like to come along in July. At first I wasn't sure how the timing would work out, but then the ASDC conference trip back to the States popped up -- and I had heard of a handy little thing called Iceland Air. The airline, which flies in and out of Reykjavik, has a Iceland tourism promotion deal where you can take a layover in Iceland en route to another destination, for up to seven nights, with no additional flight charges. Since the roundtrip prices from Heathrow to Boston via Iceland Air were comparable to, and even cheaper than, other airlines, the conference organizers agreed to let me book a flight through Iceland (as weird as I'm sure they thought it was). I was set, and the timing worked out perfectly: en route back from my trip through New England, I would stop over in Iceland for five days and join my friends on the first half of their ten-day trip!
I landed in Iceland feeling a bit concerned about the weather. Even in the summer, the warmest it ever really gets is 60 or 65F, and it's often rainy and windy. I'd had to go from formal conference presentation mode, to casual New England traveling while trying to fend off 85F heat and humidity, to much more frigid temps (and rough terrain requiring hiking boots) in Iceland. Would it all fit in my small-ish bag? Turns out, I've become a much more economical packer since I started traveling internationally earlier this year, and it was all fine! I bundled up in Reykjavik the morning I arrived (after the East Coast temps, 55F was almost nice) and trekked from the airport to bus station to the guesthouse where my friends were staying after arriving the day before. After dumping my stuff with them and letting them sleep off their jetlag for a few more hours, I got to take a quick walking tour of the city. That included the unique and strange Hallgrimskirkja church, pictured above, and the Reykjavik harbor and opera house (below).
The air felt crisp and clear, and the blue of the water was incredibly deep and fresh. Trendy/artsy shops abounded on my walk through Reykjavik, and in my sleepless haze I started to get giddy: I was in Iceland! Around noon I grabbed lunch with my friends, hopped into the rental car, and headed out for our first foray into the eerie, almost otherworldly Icelandic landscape.
It is a landscape full of volcanic rock, lakes and rivers, thick moss and lichen and incredible purple and yellow wildflowers. Geysers and geothermal springs appear on a regular basis. The colors were incredible, the line of the horizon sweeping and dramatic. It feels like another planet at times. We kept stopping to take photo after photo.
After two hours of driving around, we headed to the famous Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa of the weirdest, brightest, and palest blue. It's not far outside of Reykjavik, and is admittedly a very touristy destination in Iceland -- but, as some friends told me before I ventured on this trip, you can't go to Iceland and NOT go to the Blue Lagoon. Sitting in the spring water for nearly two hours felt glorious and helped wash away some of the jetlag. We even tried a skyr smoothie while we were at it (skyr being the trademark Icelandic yogurt, very rich and yummy in my opinion, though no I did not try the traditional dishes of fermented shark or sheep testicles while I was there).
Then we were on our way through yet more eerie Icelandic landscape, as the hour grew later but the sun remained persistently bright in the sky. We drove along the coast, saw more sulfur clouds from geothermal springs, and my friend and I even made the mistake of walking into said sulfur cloud with sunglasses on, which immediately fogged up and freaked us out in the midst of the billows of steam and the thick sulfur smell. I don't have the photo of us running away to post here, but suffice it to say it was an unexpected encounter with nature.
We reached our guesthouse, not far outside of the southwest Icelandic town of Hella, around 9 or 10pm, and around that point I found it very hard to go to bed (despite having almost nodded off in the car from exhaustion all afternoon). It was so bright outside! Still, I crashed by 11pm, grabbed nearly ten hours of sleep, and in the morning we got up ready to venture out on our first full day of adventures. On the list: the Golden Circle! This is one of Iceland's most famous drives, past Gullfoss waterfall, the geysers Geysir and Strokkur, and Thingvellir National Park. We had about a two-hour drive to the first destination, Gullfoss, and quickly discovered one of the iconic parts of driving through Iceland: driving past pony treks!
We also kept discovering the commonplace oddities of the Icelandic language (bonus points if you can pronounce any of these words, on just another regular Icelandic road sign):
Finally, we made it to Gullfoss, said to be Iceland's version of Niagara Falls. This immense waterfall was created from combined forces of glaciation, tectonic plate shifts, and erosion, and the volume of water passing over the falls per second is overpowering. In the last century or so, some considered harnessing its power to make a hydropower plant, but fortunately a small handful of conservationists fought to save the falls for visitors to witness and enjoy.
There are few things more mesmerizing than standing beside such a huge waterfall, crashing into the canyon below, especially in the midst of such a green landscape. We had lunch beside Gullfoss, then headed off to visit Geysir and Strokkur that afternoon.
The Icelandic geyser Geysir is actually the origin of the word "geyser," and although it is largely inactive nowadays it still erupts geothermal water and steam intermittently, mostly after large earthquakes or instances of tectonic activity. Mostly, it bubbles hot water and steam up from a pool of incredibly deep, rich blue. The geyser Strokkur, however, just a few dozen meters nearby, is still very active and very regular. It shoots up its subterranean hot liquids every five to ten minutes, meaning we were able to stand by the pool and witness several eruptions in a row to get the photos and videos we wanted. (Even Old Faithful in Yellowstone isn't as frequent around the clock as Strokkur, though its explosions are larger.) Erupting geysers are as much of a crowd-pleaser as I remember them being when I visited Yellowstone at the age of eight, and we ooohed and aaaaahed at Strokkur for several minutes before hiking up the hill to get a better view.
It was an amazing view indeed, with the blue skies and a fast-moving storm on the horizon, but then we were off again to complete our drive through the Golden Circle by visiting Thingvellir National Park. (What a name.) This is a mystical-feeling location, on the banks of Thingvallavatn Lake in a location right along the tectonic plate rift between North America and Europe. The rift is clearly visible in the park, and the plates apparently move apart at a rate of two centimeters per year. Thingvellir is also an important site in Icelandic history, being the location for the very first Icelandic Parliament, which would meet in the land between the plate rifts once every year. The chieftains and tribes from all across Iceland came here for centuries to convene, draft new laws, and dispense justice.
It honestly felt like a scene out of Middle Earth, or some old Nordic myth. The eerie power of what C.S. Lewis called "Northernness" felt very present at Thingvellir.
I could imagine Tolkien's elves creeping out of the stone under the rainy gray sky, and could indeed imagine why the Icelandic people in medieval times believed in stories of fairies and elves.
I could also imagine old warrior lords there -- you know, Thor and whatnot. Then the sun came out (one thing we learned is that Icelandic weather, like the landscape, is very fast-changing and unpredictable) and we walked back up to a beautiful glacial waterfall cascading over the tectonic rift.
That completed our tour of the Golden Circle, and we drove back to our guesthouse and had dinner and headed to bed. But wait -- one more shot from the day, the sun still out and bright in the sky at 10:30pm:
Iceland day three, Tuesday, was one of the days I'd most been looking forward to. You see, Icelandic horses are a big thing in Iceland -- they were brought over to the island when the first settlers came from Norway in 870 or thereabouts. They then played a pivotal role in transportation and farming and overall culture in Iceland, and the present horses on the island are direct descendants from these ancestral Viking steeds. Iceland's equine population is under quarantine, meaning that since there are few to no infectious diseases on the island no outside horses are allowed to come in. (Nor are Icelandic horses that leave allowed to come back.) The only horses on Iceland are Icelandic horses, and they are a hardy, small, steady breed, more of the size of a traditional medium pony even though the locals insist on calling them "horses." They're also incredibly gentle and easy to ride, and are known for their additional gaits: the tolt and the pace. I had the good fortune to ride Icelandic horses back in California, through the chairman of the Stanford Red Barn's board, who had several and who was generous enough to let Stanford students go out and ride them on an occasional basis. A good tolt on an Icelandic horse is one of my favorite things and one of my favorite memories from California, so I was incredibly excited to make it out to the "mother country" and ride Icelandics in their native habitat.
We made it out to the beach -- which I'd never done before -- and went for a nice tolt beside the waves. The mist rolled in from the sea, and we stopped after a few minutes to let the horses rest before turning back. The tolt is a very fun, very smooth gait, known as a "running walk." Three of the horse's legs are on the ground at any given time, as opposed to the trot, a two-beat gait that feels far more bouncy, especially for inexperienced riders. The tolt feels, for lack of a better description, like gliding across the earth on horseback.
My friend Jaslyn is also a horse person -- we rode on the Stanford team together for several years -- and we took the opportunity for an equestrian reunion photo opp! (Jaslyn's boyfriend, Ian, had opted to spend the morning playing golf.) And then I turned to enjoying the very best view there is, between a horse's ears (with a whole ton of shaggy Icelandic forelock in there, of course).
I wished we could have ridden out longer, of course, but two hours was probably best for my very-out-of-shape riding body! After tolting back along the roads of the Icelandic countryside, we thanked our guides and returned the horses and headed off to the afternoon's adventure, a ferry ride out to Heimaey island. This is an island where a volcanic eruption in 1973 drove people from their homes and increased the island size by a whopping 20%, and we visited a neat museum about the eruption and then walked up to survey the heaps of volcanic rock and ash looking out over the sea.
After a few hours walking around and exploring on the island, the three of us headed back to the mainland and drove up the coast, as always stopping along the way to enjoy the waterfalls and scenery and views.
We got to our guesthouse late, as was becoming our wont, and then took advantage of the ever-present Icelandic northern sun to take a hike up a nearby waterfall at 10:30pm:
As usual, it was hard to make ourselves go to bed, but we did -- and then got up the next morning for a day of driving up to the coast of east Iceland, my last full day in Iceland. On the way, we passed the immense Vatnajökull glacier, the largest glacier in Europe and I believe the largest outside of the Arctic Circle/North Pole. It reigned over the mountains above us, and we passed through a few lava fields shaped and flattened by immense glacial motions/runoff from the last Ice Age. It was the first time I'd ever seen a glacier, and the scale of the looming ice felt ominous.
We also stopped at Jökulsárlón lagoon, one of Iceland's most-visited and most-photographed places along the southern coast. This lagoon is full of icebergs from the glacier, which sit and float and slowly circulate out to the sea. I found them absolutely mesmerizing. As Jaslyn pointed out to me, if I listened I could even hear the ice melting and cracking in the water.
Next up: driving several hours up the coast to our destination in Egilsstadir, a drive full of panoramic views and amazing scenery. I'm always a sucker for road trips, and this was an amazing one.
It was also a drive full of the ubiquitous Icelandic sheep, a curly-locked beast that more or less owned all the roads and cliffs and fields we drove past (to the point where we exclaimed, HOW did that sheep even GET here?!).
There were more lakes and waterfalls and snow-capped mountains in store as we drove up to Egilsstadir.
Once we got there, we had a very Icelandic experience of eating reindeer burgers (at least, my friends did) and watching the World Cup in an Iceland Shell station packed with cheering fans. Who knew. Anyway, after dinner Jaslyn and I headed out for one last late-night walk through the countryside, where we came across a wonderful farewell-from-Iceland present (for me, anyway): the friendliest Icelandic foal in a pasture neighboring our guesthouse.
Absolute happiness, and at 10pm to boot. The next morning, while the other two continued on their travels around Iceland's Ring Road, I caught a quick domestic flight back to Reykjavik, where I spent a few hours and walked around and visited the National Icelandic Museum before heading back to the UK. Five days in Iceland flew by, but they couldn't have been more full of amazing scenery and new experiences. I would go back to do some more hiking and trekking, truly. On my bucket list: a trek across the Icelandic highlands on horseback...? That will need to wait for the next round of adventures!
