Iceland
Iceland seems to me to be an unlikely kind of place. The terrain is unlikely, the people are unlikely, the wildlife, the climate, lifestyle. Everything seems so random that it's almost surreal.

Firstly, we spent a small fortune getting and staying there, but Laura and I have decided that it was more than worth it, and that Iceland will be seeing us again before too long. We visited the south-west corner of Iceland. This is where the capital city Reykjavik is located as well as their major airport. Next time we'll be going to the north-east where there are lots more picturesque fjords and even less people.

We left from Stanstead Airport outside of London and flew Iceland Express.

Coming from London, Reykjavik was amazingly refreshing given the low population density and the absurdly friendly people. Seems as though everyone dresses stylishly, has blond hair and is an artist. All of the buildings and artwork is just slightly odd. Like, intentional, well thought-out odd. Stylish yet functional. Seems like the Icelanders sure don't take their architecture lightly.

We had pre-booked a hotel room. The cheapest room we could find in all of Reykjavik, you don't want to know how much it cost, but we were surprised at the modesty of the room itself. Lets just say, with no exaggeration, we could have stayed in a nice room at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. But in Reykjavik, we got this little room, with no shampoo or conditioner.

It was a rather rude awakening to the prices of things in Iceland.

The climate is very unintuitive. The average temperature in Reykjavik in July is 10 degrees. This seems low to me, but it's something that I would expect of a country that borders the arctic circle. But then in January the average temperature is -2 degrees. Significantly warmer than winters I'm used to. The first day we were there we had cloudless skies and 14 degrees, it was great. The rest of the time it was overcast and a little cooler, but still quite nice. We dressed appropriately and it was fine.

Reykjavik is a very happening city. It's the most populous of cities in Iceland with 113 thousand people. The whole country has about 290 thousand, so it has a large chunk of the people. It's has a large University, tons of restaurants is not overly touristy. Very easy to get around, and *everyone* speaks English.

Icelandic is an interesting language, we had the good fortune of sitting in front of an extremely drunk Icelander on the bus from Keflavik Airport to Reykjavik. He had a deep gruff Viking voice and he sang and laughed to himself in Icelandic. It's a Germanic language, like English but was obviously very Nordic. I kept hearing words and inflections that sounded almost Russian. Neat stuff.

Their are some great churches in Reykjavik,

Again, the architecture is grand, but not pompous and overly ornate like most other European churches.

There is a lot of weird art all over the south-western part of Iceland.

My Aunt Kathleen tells us that that third sculpture (the egg with the thing creeping out of it) is the "Birth of a Jet", it's located outside of Keflavik Airport. Icelanders have a good sense of humour.

So anyway, armed with our printed out email of suggestions from Aunt Kathleen, who has been to Iceland several times and who is herself of Icelandic background, we took to checking out the country around Reykjavik. First thing we did was wander around the city and snap pictures and do touristy things. Then we rented a car. We could have taken bus tours around, but we wanted to go it alone, and I haven't driven in four months, so I was itching to zip around the roundabouts in a little European car.

We tried to get the lower-end smallest car they had available (cheapest) but they didn't have any available, so they gave us a free upgrade to their "larger" model. It was in stark contrast to the enormous wheeled SUV's and trucks that are very common in Iceland. We figured that we'd be laughing at all the large truck drivers at the gas stations!
This was not the case. To fill up our little 35 litre tank, it cost us about 3800 Kronur, or about 37 pounds (about $85 Canadian). Thank goodness we're earning pounds.

This is a country of huge vehicles.

But this is not due to a highway arms race, or because they are status symbols as is the case in much of North America. It's due to necessity. The interior of the country is all bumpy dirt roads that snake around mountains. We did a couple of these roads in our little Chevy Kalos but this was only doable because we went *really* slow. They aren't good dirt roads. It is pretty similar to the Dempster Highway that Alan and Jen went up a couple of weeks ago in the Yukon, only we weren't quite as secluded as they were.

We went to a geothermal hot-spring fed spa called the Blue Lagoon.

The water is full of various minerals that they claim have healing effects. The blue colour is natural! There is a white mud that you can cake onto yourself that makes your skin pretty smooth. This is the most luxurious thing we've done in years. We stayed for about three hours, then went back again, a second time, right before our flight home. :)

The landscape varies a lot. Some of the time it's all obvious lava rock formations with moss and lichens growing all over it, other times its grass lands, and other times it's like Mars.

Next we went to see the famous Iceland Geyser's. At this one location, there is both the second largest geyser in the world, as well as the most regular geyser. There must have been about 20 little bubbling geysers and steaming pools. You really had the sense that this whole place was rather temporary be geological standards.

This geyser that went off in front of us was the "small" one. The water reached about 20 meters in the air and it went off about every 5 minutes. By contrast, Old Faithful in Yellowstone National park goes every 30 minutes or so. After taking that picture, I had to run out of the way or else I would have been soaked by sulphurous hot water.

About 10 minutes from there, we saw a canyon to our left, so we decided to go down a little side road to check it out. We happened upon this waterfall.

This was the waterfall we had been trying to find, but it startled us because we accidentally went down a different route to get to it, and there was no warning. The road ended, and enormous waterfall started.

After this we continued around to Žingvallavatn (we didn't even bother trying to pronounce it). Its the site of the world's oldest Parliament, and is where the early laws of Iceland were read out (because people didn't write).

It is also where the decision was made, overnight to become Christian and do away with the old Viking gods, Thor, Odin and all the rest. But apparently that decision wasn't all that heeded by the general populous.

There are basically no large mammals native to Iceland. They think that the Arctic Fox might have been there before people came, but the only animals besides birds and fish living there are Norwegian Horses, domestic Sheep and Moose and Reindeer which were both introduced by people.

And they love their horses and sheep! They are everywhere.

We dressed up as Vikings,

And ran amok.

One of the days we drove north west along the coast to Iceland's highest waterfall. You'd think this would be a tourist attraction, but it's not. This is because it is extremely inaccessible. You have to drive down bad dirt roads before hiking for an hour through some of the most challenging trails I've ever seen.

On the trail itself, for the entire afternoon, we saw one other person. We had to climb down and up into a river gorge, cross a relatively fast moving river, before getting to a precarious perch where we could see the waterfall. It was pretty unbelievable, it was like something from Indiana Jones.

On the hike back we were pretty ecstatic about the whole thing, and extremely happy that we had splurged and got good hiking shoes.

Due to prices, we leveraged our free buffet breakfast as much as humanly possible. We made make-shift sandwiches and stored them for our lunches. This worked out great! We only had to pay for suppers. When we did eat out, it was really good.

We also shopped where the locals shopped, at the "Bonus" grocery store.

I'm not sure whats up with the demented looking drunken pig, but I thought it was picture worthy.

We had an uneventful flight back and are already planning our next trip. Here are all the pictures.