Iceland Easter 2008

ICELAND
March 2008
Easter Weekend

Once landed, the shuttle bus from the airport took about 45 minutes to the Reykjavik central bus station. With everyone ushered off the bus we were left standing with about 40 other travellers in the freezing cold with no idea what was happening staring at each other totally exhausted and bewildered by why we were all dumped at 2am at a closed bus station. Eventually the bus driver and some smaller shuttle bus drivers popped out of the terminal and the drop off to the local hotels began. As we waited for our bus a guy who we guessed worked for the bus company decided to pick us out of the bunch and drive us to our hotel in his taxi. No money exchanged, it seemed our ticket from the bus was good enough, even though he didn’t want to see it.

Our hotel room over looked the city centre about a kilometre away giving a great view of the city surrounded in parts by snow caped mountains in the distance. Two thirds of the country lives in the capital with the countries population 310,000. So as a result there aren’t that many cars about, most are 4wd’s with one in three featuring massive fatty tyres the height of an adult. A few days later we went out in one with a local woman who took us for a drive through the south west part of the country which was amazing. We drove off road through the moss covered lava fields to a beach where seals were swimming just off the shoreline. Headed up and over any type of terrain to the ice covered Lake Kleifarvatn breaking up at the shoreline revealing iceberg like sheets of ice, surrounded by black mountains.

After a good kip in and massive buffet breakfast we headed out to the geo thermal pools at the Blue Lagoon. The drive out blew us away. Although we read a couple of guide books we weren’t prepared for the diverse landscape; razor like lava fields covered in green moss and snow, vast flat plains and rocky mountains. As we approached the Blue Lagoon the steam from the springs cast an eerie mist across the lava fields. Out of this amazing sight beside the lagoon we spotted an industrial factory, quite a strange site in such a landscape where they harvest the hot water and pipe it around the country to provide energy for the houses, industry and horticulture. The lagoon average temperature is 40 degrees but because it’s heated from the core of the earth there’s no thermostat to adjust the heat so occasionally a hotter wave of water passes over you like someone pouring a boiling kettle over your body. The temperature outside was about 5 degrees without a cloud in the sky and after a couple of hours we lay half in and out of the water eating ice creams as if it was a summers day on a beach. Walking through the water we could feel slimy mud squishing between our toes and scooped it up with our feet revealed it was white volcanic mud, which we guessed was the main ingredient for the facial and body masks box’s that were placed around the edge of the lagoon. After 5 hours we were well prunie and relaxed.



One clear but ear bitingly cold night we spent a couple of hours standing in a field beside a single lane highway searching for the northern lights, unfortunately, other than a cold we only caught a short glimpse of the phenomenon, seeing a moving white brush like stroke across the sky in contrast to the well documented green flowing glow from many of the photos for sale in the shops of Reykjavik.

The main Geyser fields in the country bubble and gurgle like a kettle before the steaming water expands at the surface like a pregnant ladies belly to send clouds of moisture twenty to thirty metres into the atmosphere. A flimsy rope at knee level is the only protection keeping people from the gapping hole and I’m certain a news story in the future will feature some sort of tragedy. A spectacularly enormous water fall not far from the geysers at Gullfoss looked a scene straight from the ice age and sliding in a rollerblading fashion over the frozen ground was the only way to make it to the lookout platform. The country is slowly tearing itself in half and long after humans have killed themselves off the planet will be divided in two, but with the constant magma flowing in three separate underground rivers under the earths surface its the most hostile geo thermal country in the world, but oh so beautiful.

In the deserted fields Icelandic horses roamed freely and are the only breed of there type in the world and once sold to foreign owners cannot return for fear a disease. The strangest site of all was in the rural areas where there were wood A framed, open aired constructions with mass numbers of dead fish drying in the cold brisk air for future smoking. We saw no sign of the artic foxes that inhabit the island but since we have left a polar bear was shot for illegally entering the country by hitching a ride on an iceberg that drifted across the Denmark Strait from Greenland. Not much immigration in Iceland!