THE TRIP

From Monday, July 2 to Thursday, July 5, we took Iceland Travel's Glaciers and Volcanoes Tour around the southern part of the island. As you can see from this map, we covered quite a lot of territory in four short days.



Generally, I'm suspicious of the idea of a tour. The only other one I've ever been on was in the Grand Canyon. The guide was knowledgeable but with a bit of an attitude. My fellow tourists were a mixed bag containing one too many complainers. Then 9/11 happened on our second day, which blew a hole in everything.

A friend of mine warned me against going on another tour. She went on one in Turkey, she said, and just when she found something of historical interest, the rest of the people wanted to go shopping.

I guess we lucked out. Mind you, there was plenty of opportunity to spend our American dollars everywhere we went, but our tour guide was beyond excellent, and the rest of us were more than game to follow where she led us.

Here's the story of my great Icelandic adventure.


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THE PEOPLE ON THE BUS

There were twenty-eight people on our tour from all over the world, the United States, Canada by way of Romania, Portugal, Finland, Hong Kong, Australia.

I talked to perhaps half of them, but four of them stood out.

Maria, me, and Luz.
Luz is from Lisbon. She's a retired college professor who loves to travel and talk about her adventures. Early on, she confessed to having been married often. I asked her how many times.

"Oh, six or seven," she replied.

"Wow," I said. "You're in Elizabeth Taylor territory. Did you marry any of them more than once?"

"No. Even I'm not that stupid."

Maria, Luz's traveling companion, understands English but doesn't speak it nearly as well as Luz. Maria is Luz's straight man. The two have been best friends for decades. Maria is the sister of Luz's first husband. Maybe blood isn't thicker than water!

Sunita and Suresh.
Sunita just passed the New York State Bar, and going to Iceland was her way of celebrating. When Terry told her she looked like an Indian but sounded like a valley girl (she was born in New Jersey), she smiled.

"I get that all the time," she said.

She played basketball in high school but turned down an athletic scholarship to Columbia, where she got her bachelor's degree. She graduated from Duke Law School.

Suresh, her father, is a child psychiatrist. He moved to New Jersey from Hyderabad in the early eighties. His wife, also a shrink, was not on the trip. Suresh changed my attitude toward nuts as a healthy snack forever. One day at lunch, I was happily munching on my unsalted almonds.

"You know, your body only needs three or four of those a day," he said. "The rest is just waste." His semi-polite way of letting me know I was making myself fat.

"Uh oh," I said, slamming the bag down on the table. "I just ate three months worth!"

"Dad!" Sunita shouted. "Cut it out."

Stina.
Of course the tour wouldn't have been what it was without our guide, Stina. She's originally from Sweden but moved to Iceland with her husband, a native citizen. She has four children and teaches school during the rest of the year. But summers she spends doing what she seems to love most, guiding visitors around the country she has adopted as her own.

She's a historian, sociologist, archeologist, expert on literature and culture, and a wonderful singer to boot. She brought the whole experience alive with the breadth and depth of her knowledge, as well as a wealth of anecdotes, legends, folktales, and songs. I learned so much from her and had a great time doing it. Huzzah!

Last but not least was our intrepid bus driver Gymynur. That's how his name sounds to me. I have no idea whether I've even come close to spelling it correctly. Many apologies for that.

Gymynur (sp? big time).
Gymynur maneuvered our big, honkin' bus over narrow roads with wispy thin shoulders and nearly zero margin for error. He was always there when we needed to get from point A to point B and moved our luggage around with aplomb. I complimented him on his driving once.

"It's nothing," he said, with characteristic Icelandic understatement. "Once you get used to it."

"There's the rub," I said.

"Oh, you could do it."

I seriously doubt it!


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MOVIE REVIEWS

No vacation would be complete without at least one visit to the movies. We discovered an old-style cinema in Reykjavik showing classic Icelandic films with English subtitles and treated ourselves to two entries in their revolving repertoire.

The first one, Jar City, is a 2006 thriller based on Icelandic crime author Amaldur Indridason's 2000 novel of the same name. Jaded police detective Erlendur struggles to connect the murder of an elderly man with a rape that took place decades ago. What crime is committed and who is responsible were never in doubt for me. But the atmosphere is haunting (endless windswept vistas, dark city streets), and Erlendur's life is sufficiently bleak and unstable (due mainly to a drug-addled daughter he's trying to save from herself) to keep me on the edge of my seat.

Dark humor abounds, particularly in the form of Erlendur's junior partner, who claims to be a vegetarian and who is rebuffed as a soft-headed American when he tries to order a cappuccino at a coffee shop. Later on, he sits in a car, staking out a suspect, munching on a donut. So much for a healthy diet.

Speaking of which, Erlendur pulls up to a drive-in window and orders himself the aforementioned sheep's head to go. In the next scene, he tears it out of its styrofoam container, scoops out the eye first, and then licks his fingers.

There are menacing thugs and a perpetrator who is himself a victim.

Great fun but UGH! Apparently, the director Baltasar Kormakur is now filming an American version that takes place in Louisana.

The second movie is 101 Reykjavik (2000), the postal code for the downtown or "old city." All week long, our tour guide had been telling us tales of Icelandic bravery and ingenuity. So it was a great relief to discover that the country also has its share of slackers.

Hlynur is about to turn thirty. He lives with his mother, who is divorced from his alcoholic father. Hlynur has no prospects. He watches a lot of porn and goes bars. When someone asks him what he does with himself all day, he says, "nothing." Pressed to elaborate, he replies, "A nothing kind of nothing." The Icelandic welfare system supports him.

Everything changes when Lola comes into his life. She's a Spanish flamenco dancer/instructor with whom his mother has begun a relationship. During his mother's brief absence, Lola and Hylnur have drunken sex. Then she moves into his mother's apartment.

What's a boy to do?

It turns out that Lola is pregnant with his child. He's infatuated with her yet somehow manages to get his life together--sort of--by the end.

Hlynur's wry observations (about the similarities between his mother's new-found lesbianism and migratory birds) and his rich fantasy life (he imagines taking a machine gun to the members of his family who are literally boring him to death at a Christmas gathering) save the film from collapsing under the weight of its own whimsy.

Surprisingly, both of these movies were directed by Baltasar Kormakur, who also starred in the only other Icelandic movie I've ever seen, a gem entitled Devil's Island.


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REYKJAVIK

We spent our last day in Reykjavik. Terry had a guidebook with a walking tour. But the directions were so confusing--and the people we asked for help only made matters worse, though they were very nice about it--that we quickly abandoned our plan and winged it.

Two churches dominate the view.
We explored City Hall, where we discovered a lovely diorama of the entire island. We retraced our steps over the last several days. Much more vivid than on a map. Try as I might, I couldn't get a good picture of the diorama, although I did manage to get a panoramic view of the city from across a lake that divides it.

Terry talks marketing with a friend.
We headed to the Iceland Museum of Natural History. On the way, Terry sat down on a park bench and struck up a conversation with a new acquaintance. Since he was a man of few words, their talk was a bit one-sided.

Fairweather ducks...
We also encountered  outgoing ducks, who posed happily but then cooled toward us when we didn't offer them anything to eat.

Oops, I lopped off the top of the church.
No visit to Reykjavik would be complete without stopping at the Hallgrimskirka or Hallgrimur's Church. It's the most prominent landmark. Iceland is a Lutheran country, and this church was designed with the basalt lava flows in mind. It was commissioned in 1937. Construction began in 1945, and the building was complete in 1974. A statue of Leif Ericson (you were expecting maybe Vasco da Gama?) stands in front of the church.

Stark but beautiful.
The interior is done in flying-buttress style but without the ornamentation of earlier European churches. Simple, plainspoken, and yet awe-inspiring, like the country itself.

We took the elevator to the observation deck at the top of the steeple and looked out over the city. You could see everything from up there, and I was missing Iceland already.






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CATS AND OLD MEN

My new best friend for a little while.
We began the last day of our tour with a visit to the Fridheimar Horse (and Tomato) farm. This friendly little man greeted us when we arrived. Since I had been catless for almost a week, I bonded with him immediately. He was obviously used to company and acted as a master of ceremonies to the horse show that followed.

Another new best friend.
Icelandic ponies are small and purebred, of course. They are unusual in having mastered all five gaits, which the occupants of the farm, including a small boy of three, demonstrated for us. We socialized with the ponies afterwards. They are the most docile horses I've ever been around in my life.

Then we repaired to a huge greenhouse that supplies a third of the tomatoes, grown year-round, to the surrounding grocery stores and supermarkets. We helped ourselves to some of that sweet fruit before boarding the bus again.

The old man
Our next stop was the Geysir Geothermal Area. "Geysir" means "old man," and in fact, the eldest of the geysers seemed to be retired and living on social security. The younger whippersnappers were friskier, though.

I want this bathtub.
I'd like to have a bath just like this hot spring pool to soak in at the end of a hectic day.

We also stopped at the Gulfoss Waterfall, a three-tier glacier runoff that looks like it would be fun to whitewater raft down.
Let's go rafting.

But I suppose I thought that because I'm basically a landlubber. And I was safe and dry above.

Parliamentary justice is served...
Our very last stop was to the "Parliament Hill" in the Binvellir National Park near Reykjavik.

This Icelandic parliament was established in the tenth century. Chiefs of the various clans and tribes would meet here once a year in the spring to settle disputes and try criminals.

If, for instance, a man was found to have coveted his neighbor's wife, or worse yet to have acted on the impulse, he would be thrown over the cliff. Hmmm--couldn't help wondering what might have happened to our elected politicians caught in compromising positions. Congressional hearings unnecessary. Taxpayer dollars saved. Problem solved.

Offending women, too, were placed in cloth sacks and tossed over the edge.

Here and there.
This site is geographically significant, as well, since it's at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge--look one way to see the North American tectonic plates; look the other to see the Eurasian tectonic plates. It is literally a continental divide.







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WESTMAN ISLAND

The bus and ferry rides to Westman Island were made all the more pleasurable by the large plate of lox I ate for breakfast before starting out.

The town as seen from the volcano.
Westman Island is a bit north and east of Vik, where we spent the night before, as well. Only one of the islands is inhabited--there's a town of about 30,000 people. Picturesque and VERY attuned to tourists.

The main island was devastated by a volcano in 1973 that wiped out whole neighborhoods. The eruptions took place over a five month period--like 9/11 on steroids, toxic gas, black air. The ever-ready Icelanders mounted a huge rescue campaign. Miraculously, no one died, and the town, well it's quaint and inviting. AND drivers will stop for pedestrians. I'm still in a state of shock over that one.

Half way up the volcano.
We climbed the offending volcano, a mile upward hike on slippery ash. Quite an adventure but spectacular at the top. Going back down again was an exercise in side-stepping so as not to tumble into the ocean.

Not quite as impressive as the original.
A museum called (in a fit of hyperbole) "The Pompei of the North" contains the remnants of a block buried in fifteen feet of ash. Only a few foundations of homes that once stood there remain. The government would like to excavate the site more completely but has run out of money. Sigh, what else is new?

Where's Mom?
Then it was time for the puffins. We climbed a mountain by a lighthouse, and there they were, posing for our cameras like little divas. Most of the birds we saw were babies, waiting for their moms to come home with dinner. So they hovered nearby, not quite ready to fly.

How did they get here?
I hung over the edge of a steep cliff to take this picture of several sheep, improbably grazing on a ledge near the ocean. How in the world did they ever get down there? My best guess is through a tunnel that we couldn't see from where we were perched. But they were self-assured and unfazed, like all of the livestock in this country.






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TRUCKS AND WATERFALLS

I awoke early to a truck rumbling across our tiny room. "What the heck?" I thought. Then I rubbed my eyes and realized it was only Terry snoring. I couldn't see the clock, so I glanced outside. Naturally, it looked like the middle of the day, since the sun supposedly rises at 3AM this time of the year and sets around midnight.

I decided to forget about how early or late it might be and go back to sleep. When I woke up again, my stomach told me it was time for breakfast. Our "hotel" (really more like a group of cabins with volcanic rock on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other) served a great breakfast. I made a hill out of lox, ringing it with cream cheese and black bread. I ate every last bite and pronounced myself a happy camper.

A long walk ahead.
We went for a rather long bus ride to the edge of the Skaftafell National Park. This is a picture of Terry and me before we began the mile-plus hike to a waterfall. I suppose the idea of going straight up a mountain is why my face is so pained.

The climb was worth it.
But we got up close and personal with serious glacier run-off.

Broccoli? You be the judge.
We sat at the edge of the waterfall, taking in our surroundings. Terry noticed that an adjacent canyon wall resembled broccoli. I think he's right.

Sunlight turns the ice a deep blue.
After hiking back down the mountain, we headed to the Jokulsarion Glacier Lagoon, where we boarded on land a boat with wheels that had been decommissioned from the US Army after the Vietnam War. This particular lagoon's claim to fame, aside from large blue chunks of the glacier sitting in the middle of pure, pure water, is that it was the setting for DIE ANOTHER DAY. The producers  "rented" the lagoon for a month, topped it off with several feet of water, froze the water, and then filmed a scene in which James Bond drives his Astin Martin across the ice. Something that would have been impossible under normal circumstances--meaning James and his car would have sunk to the bottom with a thud.

Antique ice never tasted so good.


Our tour guide was hilarious. He claimed the lagoon always looked different to him. Every morning when he went out on a boat, he wondered, "Who changed my f--ing office."

He broke off pieces of thousand-year-old ice for each of us tourists to suck on. It tasted fresh and clean--much more satisfying than chomping on those square cubes at the bottom of a water glass in a restaurant.








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THE TOUR BEGINS

As we headed eastward and south of Reykjavik, leaving the city behind, I was amazed at the wealth of livestock freely roaming the hills and valleys. Apparently, there are few natural predators for the sheep and cows that are pure Icelandic breeds. They looked so happy. Let me say right now that in my next life I'm coming back as an Icelandic sheep.

This bridge flew several feet in the air.
Wind is a big problem for people driving on the island and coverage against getting blown off the road is standard in all insurance plans. I was amazed to see a large piece of a steel bridge lying by the side of the highway, where it had been deposited by a storm. So the gentle breeze that knocked out the power in Columbus for almost a week would be like swatting away a fly to your typical Icelander.

Skogar waterfalls.
Our first stop was at Skogar, where we climbed part of the way up to stand near the first of several beautiful waterfalls we saw on our travels. We didn't go all the way to the top because the weather was in the 50s and we didn't want to get wet. We were shivering, but the native Icelanders were walking around in shorts and sandals, this being their version of summer.

A fabulous outdoor museum is adjacent to the waterfalls. It was established by a ninety-year-old man named Thordur Tomasson, who, alarmed at the lack of historical artifacts in the country, gathered together an enormous collection, too many for us to take in during our short stay in spite of an amusing and informative museum curator.

The surrounding buildings contained reproductions of Icelandic houses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century--considerably more spare than their counterparts in other European countries.

You can't take the boy out of the classroom...
There was also a schoolhouse, where Terry was able to get his teacher on, having been out of the classroom now for more than a month.

Excuse me while I mow the roof.
Several of the buildings were "underground," meaning they had grass roofs. Surprisingly, we didn't see more of these subterranean dwellings in the places we visited.

A less than pristine glacier.
After we finished at the museum, we walked on the Solheimjokull (have NO idea how to pronounce that) glacier. We slapped on our crampons, grabbed our ice picks, and headed up what looked like an endless expanse of those piles of dirty snow the city plows up and leaves on the side of the road to melt. The glacier is still covered with volcanic ash from the big 2010 eruption.

Walking on crampons took a little getting used to. I had to conquer my fear of falling on my rear end and making an utter fool of myself. I got my footing, though.

Good luck becoming a real person.
Our guide was a recent graduate in electrical engineering who said he was planning to become a "real person" at the end of the summer. I told him to let me know if he ever found out what that was.


They'll build a museum to anything.
The last thing we did was visit a museum that featured an amazing film about the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull. I can't say the name, and it doesn't sound a bit like it looks. Generally, phonetics are useless in Anglicizing Icelandic words. Terry sat in the front row of the small theater and promptly fell asleep. Some things never change!

We spent the night in a modest hotel in Vik, the southernmost point of the Island. Still, no matter how faraway we felt, the Internet was in the hotel lobby. Across the field was a woolen store that caters to tourists, staying open until 10PM, at which point they roll up whatever streets happen to be available in this town of 400 souls.


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BROOKE SHIELDS LIVES!


Hollywood is everywhere!

The very first thing we did was to stop at the Blue Lagoon. Yes, that’s right—Iceland’s tribute to possibly the worst movie of the 1980s, body doubles for naked scenes and hair glued to Shield’s bared breasts aside.

This is a total tourist attraction. A plant adjacent to the site extracts geothermal power from water that is then pumped into a man-made lagoon. Icelanders are so practical. Despite the spectacular volcanic backdrop, the lagoon is pretty cheesy. 

A monster rises from the depths.
But when you are as jet-lagged as we were, a leisurely rest in a sulfurous pool is just what the doctor ordered, in spite of the sixty degree weather. I rubbed my face with a mud bath, reclined in the water, and listened to the people around me speaking French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and some other Scandinavian and Eastern European languages I couldn’t quite decipher.

The quite lovely center of town.
Afterwards, we made our way to Reykjavik, a lovely town of 150,000 people, where the cars stop for pedestrians and road rage seems nonexistent.

A typical downtown street.
Plus they take VISA everywhere you go, and they all speak English. Every American's dream! We ate fresh fish at a wonderful Icelandic restaurant—nary a sheep’s head in sight. Stomachs full, we took a taxi to our hotel, fell into bed, and slept the sleep of the dead.




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THE BIG STORM


I’m a nervous traveler, to say the least. Terry isn’t. When we go to the movies, he gets upset if I dawdle too long at home. I think, “Big deal. So we’ll miss the ads and the previews.” But he wants to be in his seat well before the lights go down.

My devil-may-care husband.
About getting to the plane, he’s much more relaxed than I am. I want to be parked in front of the gate forty-five minutes before departure. That way, I won’t get left behind. He wants to take his time checking his bags, sitting somewhere comfortable and far away from the hubbub where he can read a book, and being the very last passenger to board. He figures they won’t leave without him.

These opposing philosophies sometimes make for tension while we’re getting ready, as well. I like to have everything packed twenty-four hours ahead. I feed my electronics liberally in the hours before I leave home so that they’ll have enough food to last until I arrive at the next outlet.

Terry throws stuff together at the last minute and takes everything but the kitchen sink. I cull and narrow things down to my one small suitcase.

So you can just imagine what getting ready was like when a huge storm hit the night before we left. I looked out our bedroom window at the swirling wind. Then I heard the loud groan of a transformer blowing. Uh oh.

I didn't kill him, but I wanted to.
At three o’clock the next afternoon, sweaty and sleep-deprived, we pulled away from a hot dark house, cats pacing forlornly, food slowly rotting in the refrigerator. Not exactly an auspicious beginning to our great Icelandic adventure.

We flew to JFK and waited for hours for our connection. It was an overnight flight, and the plane was packed. Terry and I didn’t get to sit together. I was in a window seat, agony for a charter member of the weak bladder club like myself.

But we survived and landed in Keflavik, the airport much improved over the last forty years.


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WHY ICELAND?


I first went to Europe forty years ago this summer. I was a poor graduate student, so I flew Icelandic, then known as Hippy-Dippy Airlines.

In the middle of nowhere,
or so I thought in 1972.
Two-thirds of a lifetime ago, I took off from JFK around 12AM. In what seemed like the middle of the night, we landed at the Keflavik Airport. I’m a city girl, so I’m used to SOME sort of activity twenty-four/seven. In Keflavik, it seemed like no one was home. AND everyone had left in a big hurry.

An imposing Brunhilde of a stewardess yelled over the loud speaker in a foreign language that made her sound like she was choking to death. Then she barked her orders in English. All of us were expected to get off of the plane.

When I tell you that it was pitch black outside, I mean it was pitch black. I could hardly see to put one foot down in front of the next, and when I did, it felt like I might fall off the end of the world. I snaked my way toward the lone beacon of light in the darkness, a tiny hangar.

The only thing open inside—the gift shop! I remember mailing my husband Terry a postcard with a goat on the top of a mountain. “Love from beautiful downtown Keflavik,” I wrote. Hardly the most original phrase I’ve ever set down on paper.

Moonrock landscape from a bus window
in 2012.
The sun was just beginning to rise as I made my way back to the plane, having spent a dollar of my hard-earned American money on whatever Iceland had to offer. As we rose and headed toward Luxembourg City, I stretched over the empty seat between me and the window, staring hard at the landscape below. I wondered what it would be like to live in such a place.

A few minutes later, Brunhilde approached me with a tray containing a plate piled with sickly yellow eggs. I tried to decline, but she was having none of it. Since she outweighed me by at least seventy pounds, I decided it was best to accept graciously what she had to offer.

Over the intervening decades, I have often asked myself why this particular plane ride made such an impression on me. So many things have happened in the course of my life, most of which I have sloughed off like old skin. But this memory stuck with me. Was it the Twilight-Zone silence of the place? The Wagnerian flight attendant? The glacier-pocked, volcanic land that looked the surface of the moon?

Volcano, Westman Island--
more about this later.
When Terry proposed the idea of a trip to Iceland, after we watched several shows about the country on the Travel Channel, I thought, “Yes! I was there once. I want to go again. As long as I don’t have to eat a sheep’s head with the eye still in it.” Which is apparently a popular fast-food item there. We saw a movie in Reykjavík (with English subtitles) in which the hero ordered a one to go from a drive-in window and scooped the eye out first. Yuck!





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