June 21-25, 2007, Iceland : Our flight out to Reykjavik departed at 9:30pm and arrived at 6:30am. After leaving Boston common (described previously), we retraced our steps to the airport, with laura transporting the luggage by cab and the common folk taking the Blue Line. IcelandAir shares a lounge with Aer Lingus at Logan International- Guiness in the beer fridge! The plan was to run Kade and Sierra around all day so that they’d sleep through the flight, and the tactic was largely successful. An interesting collection of people on the plane – very blond expatriates returning home, people taking advantage of low fares to Europe via Reykjavik, and a small number of tourists like us.
It’s midnight here and the sun has just set on this Solstice day (it will rise at 3:00am). We’ve been trying to decide what Iceland looks like – perhaps a cross between Wyoming and Hawaii. There are treeless ranches framed by snow capped mountains, occasional glimpses of the sea, two lane roads with no cars in sight, geysers, volcanoes, restless wind, and vast expanses of black volcanic rock. We have even seen snow fences.
We’re staying in a nice two bedroom apartment in Reykjavik near the city center, on the same street as the Russian and Chinese Embassies. (They’re not that large, given that Iceland’s population is only about 300,000.) There’s a good collection of books here, primarily international novels translated into Icelandic. It’s fun trying to guess the original: some are easy (The Hobbit, 1984), but others require a bit more thought. We decided that Margaret Atwood’s “Saga Therrunar” must be “Handmaid’s Tale” and William Kennedy’s “Jarn Gresid” is “Ironweed”, but Yukio Mishima’s “Sjorainn Sem Hafith Hafnathi” was a stumper. With the help of the internet, we eventually figured out that it was “The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea” (“Gogo no Eiko” in Japanese). The breadth of titles available was quite surprising for a country so small.
Since the apartment has a kitchen, we made a trip to the grocery store. Prices are a real shock, given the unfavorable exchange rate and the general cost of importing almost everything; a roasted chicken was $20, and gasoline is selling for $8/gallon. The beer ($2 for 500mL) seemed like a great deal until we got it home- thin stuff, with an alcohol content of 2.25%. Regular beer, plus wine and distilled spirits, are only available in state liquor stores, with hours 11am to 6pm. We eventually found one of these- they’re called “Vin Bud”, which sounds like an Anheiser Busch foray into the wine business, but they actually sell a bit of everything. The selection was quite good, though we passed on the twenty five dollar bottle of Beringer White Zinfandel.
Iceland also has numerous geothermal features, including the geysers shown in the pictures. The most active of these erupts about every eight minutes. The English word geyser is derived from the name of this area (“geysir”). Iceland takes active advantage of this activity- in addition to heating for Reykjavik, there is a year-round geothermal swimming pool (Sierra’s favorite place so far), direct piping for bath water – our shower smells strongly of sulfur.
On our longest day, we drove along the south coast to Vatnajokull, the largest ice field here (area equal to that of Rhode Island). The area is dotted with waterfalls formed by glacial meltwater pouring over cliffs to the sea. Where the soil is good, this forms lush green fields where the Icelanders grow hay and raise sheep and horses. There are also barren lava flows and vast glacial river bottoms of gray rock and black sand. Underneath the ice cap is an active volcano- when it erupts (last in 1996), it melts the glacier and floods these bottoms, carrying ice, boulders, and the road with it out to sea. At Jokulsarlon, the ice cap extends all the way to the sea, where ice breaks off and drifts out in a small bay.
It never does get dark here- even in the middle of the night (about 1:30am), there is still enough light to read outside. This in conjunction with jet lag has us all on very sporadic sleep schedules- seeing the sights or going to the pool at 9:30pm is the order of the (long) day.