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Iceland 1999 Photos
Reykjavík 5 October 1999
It was still dark when we arrived in Keflavik at 5:50 this morning. We puttered around the duty-free shops before picking up our luggage, loading up the rental car, and heading out into the bizarre Icelandic countryside. We drove south on the Reykjanes peninsula, the most southwesterly tip of Iceland, stopping to clamber over the volcanic landscape as the overcast morning brightened. What a strange place! A major lava flow covered this area in the thirteenth century; “moonscape” is too mundane a word to describe it. We crawled to the very edge of sheer cliffs hundreds of feet high and peered out at sea stacks and odd-shaped islands, and down at sea birds riding the updrafts.
Through Hafnir, a fishing port on the edge of the lava field, we drove to the Blue Lagoon, smack in the middle of it. Here, a geothermal energy plant (one of several we saw during the day) uses the heat and pressure of superheated groundwater to produce power for Reykjavík. The runoff, cooled to a bearable 103 or 104 degrees F., is used as an enormous spa. The mineral-rich water is a lovely turquoise, similar to the glacial lakes in the Rockies, but much more opaque; one cannot see more than a few inches down into it. The minerals seem to precipitate on the skin. Despite a thorough shower, I could feel a microscopic crust on myself hours later. It seems to be quite healthful.
We found our way into Reykjavik and to our lodgings at Flókagata 1. An intended late lunch became an early dinner, followed by a pub crawl. There are a few nice pubs here, but not much in the way of decent beer--Guinness is available at several places. It’s very quiet, too, but it’s also early in the week.
Akureyri 6 October 1999
We left Reykjavík at about 9:00, through the tunnel under the fjord to the north of town. We stopped for gas in the suburbs and shortly found ourselves in the wilds of Iceland. In the middle of a lava field, a sign-posted trail led up to the rim of a volcanic crater called Grábrók. Two other cratered cones stood nearby.
At about noon we pulled into the town of Hvammstangi to visit the post office and the bank, and to have lunch. There was one restaurant in town, with precisely one menu item available---fish and chips, virtually identical to last night’s dinner. We were the only customers. I gather that Icelanders don’t go out much during the week.
Off we went in pursuit of Hvítserkur, a sea stack shaped like a great grazing buffalo (a petrified troll in the Icelandic imagination), which my guidebook led us to believe was a few miles up the road from Hvammstangi. The pavement ended just outside town, but the dirt road was well maintained. A few miles farther than we’d thought the mighty buffalo would be, a sea stack jutted up above the coastal bluff. We made our way laboriously down to it; it wasn’t Hvítserkur. Another few miles on, the road deteriorated considerably. It became apparent that a major reconstruction project was going on. At points the undercarriage dragged on the loose sand and rocks, and we feared getting stuck. Before long we were entertaining thoughts of being stranded at the end of the earth.
Finally, we came upon the construction workers responsible for the mess. I showed one the picture of Hvítserkur in the guidebook and asked him how far. He showed me varying numbers of fingers and said “ten”, then “fifteen”, then “eight”. In retrospect, I think I was supposed to multiply these. At least the crew hadn’t gotten around to destroying the road beyond that.
Around the tip of the peninsula we drove. Suddenly, Win found the beast on the map; we’d never spotted it because it was on the opposite side of the peninsula from where we’d thought it would be. Finally, we arrived at the sign-posted trail, and cursed the errant buffalo all the way down. But Hvítserkur itself was pretty spectacular, and the sun smiled on us as we took pictures.
A short time later, the road climbed up the shoulder of a high knoll, and we stood at the foot of Borgarvirki. In a horseshoe of hexagonal basalt columns, Vikings had built, some 900 years ago, several buildings and a well, all now in tumbled ruins. They fortified the gaps in the crater wall. The site dominates the valley, with magnificent views of mountains to the east and west and the fjord to the north. We lingered despite the strong cold wind, enchanted by the mystery of this place.
It was late afternoon by this time, and it was apparent that we were going to be quite late into Akureyri. We had two hours yet to drive, so we drove hard and fast the rest of the way. We crossed the head of another fjord, Skagafjörður, just after sunset and drove up into a pass in the snow-peaked mountains in the eerie blue twilight. We arrived in Akureyri at about 8:00, found a room and dinner, and now sit in a kaffi (café) sipping seven-dollar Guinnesses served by the blond and beautiful Birna.
Akureyri 7 October 1999
We left late this morning, slowed by last night’s beer. Our first destination was Goðafoss, a graceful thirty-foot waterfall. The legend is that a Viking chieftain, returning from a meeting at Þingvellir where it was decided that all Iceland would convert to Christianity, threw his pagan idols into the falls. The next landmark was Lake Mývatn, where we found a number of pseudocraters. These were formed by lava flowing over wetlands, the buried water thus boiling and blurping up these forty- or fifty-foot cones.
Over the next hill was a field of mud pots, steam vents, and fumaroles, steaming and sulphurous. One could almost imagine oneself on some volcanic moon of Jupiter.
We drove a long time across a desolate plain, the most truly moonlike landscape we had seen, gray and arid. The monochromatic effect was enhanced by an increasingly overcast sky. We crossed the broad and shallow valley of the river Jokulsa a Fjollum and turned northward. Some miles farther we pulled into a parking area, walked down toward the river and found ourselves in the presence of Dettifoss.
Neither as high or as wide as Niagara, Dettifoss nevertheless gives the same impression of raw power, intensified by the fact that it is not crawling with tourists or surrounded by ticky-tack. The largest waterfall in Europe by volume, it is a truly awesome sight.
Alas, it was by now late afternoon and we had to leave sooner than we would have liked. We had one more mission for the day: to loop around the northeasternmost peninsula for the simple purpose of seeing how far north we could get. The guidebooks say that only the tiny island of Grímsey sits on or above the Arctic Circle. As dusk fell, we pulled off the road near the lighthouse at Hraunhafnartangi and consulted the GPS device I’d bought for this very purpose. It read 66° 31’35.6”---perhaps three miles south of the Circle, as close as we would get. We took a commemorative photograph in the gathering twilight.
It was a long drive back to Akureyri in the dark, but here we sit, warmed by Guinness and the glow of the lovely Birna. At about 10:00, we noticed a substantial increase in the traffic going by the window, and supposed that the local movie theater had just let out. But the flow did not abate, and many cars turned around in the parking lot across the street, or made U-turns. We suddenly realized that the local youth were cruising the three or four blocks of Akureyri’s downtown, circling and looping endlessly. We asked Birna if this was what kids normally did for fun. She just rolled her eyes. We dubbed this activity the Icelandic Crawl.
Reykjavík 8 October 1999
We stayed too late last night basking in Birna’s boreal aurora, and decided to sleep in a while and leave at 9:00. We wandered into the book and music store and spent too much time browsing, and left even later.
Snow had fallen overnight, a dusting in town that melted off with the rising sun, quite a lot on the mountains that did not. Akureyri sits near the head of a fjord with spectacular mountains on either side, and the fresh snow and clear sky gave the country a new brilliant aspect.
We headed up the west side of the fjord, having decided to circle the peninsula between Eyjafjörður and Skagafjörður. The road climbed up away from the water and quickly became icy. At the top of the hill was a tunnel, not apparent on the map, which cut through the mountain to the interior of the peninsula. The tunnel was a single lane, with turnouts, 3.4km long, with jagged walls cut from the naked rock. On the other side, we descended into a vale entirely covered with snow. The treacherous road made me hold my breath; the view took it away. At one point I stepped out of the car to take a picture. Standing in the chilly silence, I felt immersed in this white world, unsheathed from the rental car.
The rest of the day was spent driving and stopping for pictures. The road cleared at lower elevations. We saw some rocky islets in Skagafjörður, similar to Roche Percé and Île Bonaventure off the Gaspé Peninsula. We took a break in Sauðárkrókur, a fishing village at the head of the fjord. The road iced up through another pass, but we arrived safely in Reykjavík at about 8:00 and found the Kaffi Brennslan for dinner and a beer or three. This is beer heaven in Reykjavík, with more than a hundred different bottles available. A Sam Smith’s Nut Brown Ale is no more expensive than anything else. If only Birna had served it to me, this would be heaven indeed.
Reykjavík 9 October 1999
We rose a bit late again today and set out to see two things: the waterfall Gullfoss and the geyser Strokkur. On the way out we saw a volcanic crater called Kerið. From below it looked much like Grábrók, and we almost blew it off. We were surprised to see a pretty turquoise pool at the bottom of it.
A fierce wind roared across the plain above the gorge of Gullfoss. It was a struggle to walk against it, and I imagine that somewhere there is a troll examining with great interest the zip-lock bag I inadvertently sent flying across the fields. The falls were magnificent, two tiers at right angles dropping into a narrow gorge, but I found them difficult to photograph. I doubt I did them justice.
As we were getting ready to leave, a bus arrived with police escort. Knowing that Hillary Clinton was in town for a “Women in Democracy” conference, we rushed back down the 105 steps to see if it were she. It weren’t. We later found out she’d been there perhaps five or ten minutes ahead of us.
Next was Strokkur. (Hillary beat us there by half an hour.) It goes off at irregular but fairly frequent intervals. It’ll spend five or ten or fifteen minutes burbling and swelling and receding; then the pool swells up in a large blue bubble before bursting in a sixty- to eighty-foot spray. Then it will explode once or twice more in the next minute or two, not so high, draining down its round hole in the rock like a huge toilet after each surge, before settling down to another ten minutes of burbling. We stood, fascinated, and watched a dozen eruptions.
The one other place we thought to visit on the way back to Reykjavík was Þingvellir, site of the world’s oldest parliament. But darkness was falling, and as we drove past the lake near which it stands, we settled for a few pictures of the china-blue twilight. There’s something for the next trip. We had dinner at Kaffi Brennslan again, chatting with Lalli, the bartender. Shortly we must make our way up Laugavegur, past the kids doing the Icelandic Crawl, to our guesthouse. Tomorrow I must rise early to catch my flight to Glasgow; Win’s flight is late in the afternoon. I am nostalgic already. We must return.
Fin
Orthographical note: The Icelandic letter ð (upper case Ð) is pronounced as a voiced th, as in "bathe". It is often transcribed in English as "d", which I think is totally bogus. The letter þ (upper case Þ) is pronounced as an unvoiced th, as in "thick", and is usually transcribed as "th", which is just peachy.
Iceland 1999 Photos
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