Iceland, Part One

We arrived in Iceland on a cool and rainy Thursday afternoon, just after the longest day of the year. We took the airport bus inland along the lava fields of the Reykjanes Peninsula, stopping at the Blue Lagoon with the other tourists. I can't imagine the cold shock you would feel in dead winter in the five steps from the locker rooms to the outdoor pool, but man even on an Icelandic summer day it felt good to step down into the steaming lagoon. You can see the steam from miles away in fact, outlines by the dark rock of the volcanic ridge behind it. It looks like a small factory, but is the storage and pumping mechanisms for the near-boiling geothermally-heated water that they cool just enough for us to stand. We soaked in the white, steamy, sulphur-smelling pool for an hour before returning to the bus, feeling warm and jello-like despite the cool and uninhabitable surroundings.

Rob's aunt Gudda and uncle Guðmunder picked us up from the bus station. They welcomed us with cold beer, Domino's Pizza and a cozy basement guest room (an ideal place to sleep on a sunny Icelandic summer night, when it gets dim for a few hours but never gets fully dark), and, along with 13-year-old Þorunn, showed us pictures and videos of the many places we were to visit. Icelanders are clearly proud of the amazing geography their country holds, embracing the digital camera as well as the paintbrush to display some of their most striking scenery.

The next day, with me fully prepared wearing sweater, jacket and boots, we toured Reykjavik on what turned out to be a sunny 70° day. It was beautiful to sit by the downtown lake, sparkling in the bright sun, and filled with ducks, geese and their newly hatched offspring. We walked the three miles from the downtown ports back to Gudda's house, through the main shopping/nightlife streets, quiet neighborhoods (mostly smallish concrete houses with green yards and colorful gardens - pansies, peonies), past geometrically-creative Lutheran churches and the new (and only?) mall in the city. Nothing is showy or spectacular, but sitting by the bay in a green valley surrounded by low mountains topped with nearly-melted snow, the city seemed simply quiet, friendly and liveable.

On Saturday we woke up early to a huge breakfast spread of toast, smoked meats, raw veggies, cheese, coffee and donuts, as well as a complete picnic lunch packed for us by our wonderful hostess, to take the popular Golden Circle bus tour around inland southwest Iceland. Our first stop was, unadvertised, at the new geothermal power and water plant, which provides all of Reykjavik's electricity and most of its hot water. (Geothermally-heated water is used, by the way, both to melt snow on city streets and to heat the floor in Gudda's sunroom by running pipes underneath. So crafty these Icelanders are!)

Next we headed to Gullfoss, an impressive waterfall on a river running from the Langjökull glacier, which we could just see to the north, with the higher mountain peaks shrouded in clouds. Then we backtracked ten minutes to the boiling hot springs and geysers at Geysir National Park. Rob and I enjoyed our picnic on a hill above the hot spots, watching Strokkur explode every ten minutes. We didn't witness the other, larger geyser, which doesn't go off regularly, but being named Geysir it is the geyser after which all other exploding hot springs are named.

As the afternoon temperature neared 80° and I stripped off layers of clothing down to my tank top, we sweated and dozed on the bus traveling back west to Þingvellir. Þingvellir is the site of Iceland's largest lake, the world's oldest parliament, and it lies along the North American-Eurasian continental rift, so you can see the canyon proving that Iceland is slowly growing larger. There are also deep fissures filled with crystal-clear lake water, where silver coins sparkle in the sun at the bottom. Pictures cannot show the crispness of colors in the pure northern air. The water was so clean, with islets of bright green grasses dotting the edges. Walking through the black-rock walls of the canyon, I saw clumps of the yellowest buttercups and dandelions, contrasting perfectly with the purplest of violets.

And at that, we returned on the bus to cloudier and cooler Reykjavik, where the bus driver sceptically dropped us off in the residential district while all the other tourists waited to be taken to their hotels. Lucky us!

That night we enjoyed excellent Icelandic salmon and homemade wine at dinner with Rob's (sort of) uncle Bjossi. Afterwards, we walked through Reykjavik's pretty botanical gardens with Bjossi's daughters Hrönn and Linda. We finished our Reykjavik experience that night, when Hronn and another cousin Lena decided to give us a midnight driving tour of Reykjavik's beaches. So, between midnight and 1am, we listened to nesting birds and watched the sun set behind the clouds on the horizon, as Rob played by the freezing water, I blew dandelion seeds and Hronn bathed her feet in a warm-water bath in a hollowed-out rock by the bay, which is apparently a popular place to be on a night such as that one. And we drove over to Reyjavik's heated beach, which is in fact not heated on a Saturday night in summer, probably to prevent drunken (or in our case, non-drunken but equally ridiculous) late-night outings. They then wanted to take us downtown to the all-night bars, but exhausted and knowing we had an early flight to meet more family in Akureyri the next morning, we (being decidedly lame!) declined. And so ended our visit to southern Iceland.

Now to the north!