Day 2 – Reykjavík I

On Day Two we prepared our luggage properly, separating actual camping supplies into backpacks, and city supplies into our suitcases. Since I’d packed to leave by essentially hurling things I thought I’d need at my suitcase, this was an important step to take before entering the hiking phase of our trip.

Elf rock

We dropped off our luggage at BSÍ to be stored (in a room choked with the backpacks and suitcases of other travellers) while we spent some more time in Reykjavik for the day. The Free Walking Tour was worth every cent. We learned a number of things on that short walk, from the talkative, bold Icelandic guide who mentioned sex often, told us what he thought of real estate and Icelandic banks, and who had lived nine years in Canada:

The rock in the picture is an elf rock. When machinery breaks or gets stuck when trying to move a rock, they don’t use bigger machinery, they call in a mediator who negotiates with the tenants of the rock for an amicable solution. In this case it was a week to get ready and a new downtown location. I guess hidden people don’t have so much to pack.

Reykjavik’s city hall houses a wonderful handmade relief map of Iceland. Odd to say, but it really put Iceland in perspective, especially the magnitude of their glaciers. Iceland’s glaciers spit on our “glaciers”. Vatnajökull wouldn’t deign a glance at the Columbia Icefields. Vatnajökull might give PEI a passing nod. Jökull = Glacier. This beautiful piece of work made of 1mm layers of paper took over 16 “man-years” to create- four people over four years. All those complicated little fjörds. I can imagine whoever worked on the Eastfjörds feeling like Slartibartfast from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy– “those fjörds there- I did those.” It is remarkable.

Inside, Reykjavík’s city hall looks like a place where work gets done, meaning, it’s not pompous at all and doesn’t put on airs. Maybe an air of streamlined efficiency. Outside, it had a striking wall of moss on rock with portholes in it overlooking a square pond.

We didn’t notice the anchor on a welded chain rising up out of the water. We saw that a week later when we went by and said “Hey! That anchor couldn’t have been sticking out of the water like that when we were here before, we would have noticed!” Are these people fucking with us? The next time we passed city hall, the anchor was sticking out of the water, but at a totally new angle. By that time, we could file it under weird sculpture, which we were quite familiar with, but we still don’t know what’s up with the anchor and why it does what it does.

Reykjavik 871 +/-2 is perhaps the world’s most oddly named museum (names of attractions rarely include tolerance factors, I’ve noticed), but it had an awesome elevator. What’s most extraordinary about this place is that an entire, modern, multi-storey building is built over top of an archeological dig, completely preserving the excavation and housing an interpretive museum around it. There’s even a window through the sidewalk looking down into the entrance “lobby” of this hall built in 871 (+/- 2 years – hence the name). They don’t seem to think this is remarkable, and all the pictures and info about discovering the remains of the Settlement Age hall under the foundation of a few other builds, the exceptional effort of preserving it, and the engineering of building around it, all live in an unassuming little room adjacent to the bathrooms. We wouldn’t have seen it except for admiring the elevator.

The elevator!

The exhibit itself is quite interactive with lots of high tech flashy bits. We were already noticing a trend with Icelandic museums: there isn’t a lot of actual stuff in them. Not stuff that’s old, and real. Every single Viking and Settlement artifact known in Iceland could fit in a short wing of the British Museum, if not a room. It was a staggering comparison- the incredible glut of collected historical artifacts jam-packed into every museum we saw when we were in London, versus the starkly empty exhibitions of Iceland (with one exception, that comes later). So, there’s a lot of interpretation going on.

Museums started to feel like books, written on walls. Like being inside a book. Walk around instead of turn pages. This made me crazy. “I want to be outside, not be in a book!” So we’d dart around museums taking pictures of all the copious text, in two-four languages, for reading later someplace more boring (like Canada) and run back outside. Or not go in the museum at all, once they started to become suspect entities. But this opinion coalesced much later on after more museums. All that my notebook said this day was: I’ic museums don’t seem to take very long to go through. As opposed to say, the British Museum, where you should make sure someone knows when you went in and how long you can live on the snack bars you brought, in case they need to send in a search party a few days later.

Despite this “lack of old stuff”, Icelanders know their history with a detailed, intimate completeness that’s unrivaled, thanks to the sagas. Caveat to this generalization about Iceland’s museums: we did not take in the National Museum, unfortunately. Possibly there’s a bunch of stuff there. We also missed the Phallological Museum, a members-only “must-see”.

Most crucial to our travel plans was the information we could glean about puffins. I was on a mission to see puffins, and we knew our timing was cutting it close, arriving in mid August when the puffins are scheduled to depart.

The Olís cat.

No one seemed to really have their ear to the ground on puffin status in Reykjavik, but consensus seemed to be “you will see puffins still, but they are leaving now.” This solidified our plan for the next couple of days- head for Vestmannaeyjar in pursuit of puffins.

We caught a kid on a two wheeled skateboard and some off-duty blue ninjas practicing in the park on our way to retrieve our packs and get on the road. We got camping gas and ice cream on the way out of town at a gas station that had an interested cat. Cat strolled into the gas station through the automatic door and weaved the aisles like it was looking for something. I shared my ice cream.

We hitchhiked to Selfoss that night, where we camped among an innundation of German travelers at the campsite. First time with the new tents, and all the research paid off: it rained, and none of our stuff got wet. Success.

***** This better not carry on like this – one post per day? I’ll be writing the most comprehensive Iceland travel diary ever- Journey to the Center of Iceland; 20 000 Photos to See (really, really bad pun). Then again…I’ve little else as exciting to write about for awhile.

More pictures of Reykjavík

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Day 21 – Jökulsárgljúfur

I woke up in my bag on the ground under a bright sky in a desolate landscape.  Derek had caught some sleep in the car, eventually.

We drove to Húsavík, which was very close, hoping for the Skuld café, but it was closed.  Nearly everything was.  There was a small mall of hutches of competing whale watching tours with big colour banners overlooking the harbour, bristling with boats.

We were approached by three blond high school boys with unusually poor English, who asked us a half dozen questions off a list and recorded our answers on  a clipboard.  They couldn’t explain what their project was to us, though.  We explored the church, and happily, found a quality bakarí to start the day off with a sugar bang.

We drove on right past the Phallological (Penis) Museum.  Derek was much relieved that it was closed.  I was disappointed because this museum promised to be one of Iceland’s  weirdest, but alas, it was just too early in the day for penises.  This museum is in Reykjavík now.

To Ásbyrgi.  At the visitor’s center there, a super sweet blonde girl with a big smile did her best to teach me to say Jökulsárgljúfur and then gave us a run down on the sights in this park, now included in Vatnajökull national park to make the largest protected reserve in Europe.

We started at Ásbyrgi, a natural amphitheatre of cliffs rising straight up from the plateau.  From the top of the cliffs, you can see the formation is a perfect hoof print, where Óðinn’s horse Sleipnir accidentally touched down.  Inside the ring of the cliff, there’s a maze of paths winding through the shrubs and birch trees around little lakes and small streams of water pouring straight out of the cliffs.

Besides the hidden people, there were these crazy birds!  We first noticed them in the parking lot. White gulls, but they seemed either injured or horribly inept, because they would take off with very dramatic flapping and then crash land with a big skid on their chests.

It was a very alarming and loud, unsubtle performance.  I think we heard them before we saw them.  After each attempt the bird would lie there for a while or walk into the bushes a bit and sit there breathing heavy.

It was weird that there was more than one of them at it, but still they seemed greatly distressed.  Luckily there were signs posted saying Don’t try to help the fulmars.  It’s normal.  This is what they do.  Or words to that effect.

This happened to be the time the juvenile fulmars left the nest and found their way to the ocean, about 3 km away.

Hopefully they got better at flying on their way across that distance, because it hurt to watch them at this stage, skidding across the gravel.

One crashed right into a tree.

A drive south, on the better road west of the long gorge that is the central feature of this park, we stopped at Vesturdalur to walk around the basalt formations.   The black rods of basalt form every kind of shape, arches and caves and walls.  This is a very beautiful place, and a cozy inviting campground at the head of the hiking trail, too.

We carried on south and walked to the river again at Katlar, a delta in the river of rocky columns with the river rushing around them.  It’s a big area with little bridges across marshy spots and the waterfalls Hólmáfoss and Urriðafoss.

It was a day of big fosses.  Hafragilsfoss is huge and sends up a big spire of mist.  We were looking down on it from the viewpoint.

And Dettifoss, at the bottom of the park, is the largest volume waterfall in Iceland.  The plume of mist is so big it’s wet everywhere, and you get wet standing near it.  Which you can, stand quite near, and photographers can be seen everywhere disregarding the rope suggestions and standing out on the shelf of slick flat rocks at the edge of the water, which is hammering over the drop with such violence the water makes arrowhead shapes as it falls, and it’s tremendously loud.

On the other shore, the contents of a tour bus were walking around, looking insect like and vulnerable hopping about on the rocks above the gorge the water plunges into.  People were scaring me.

We walked upstream to see Selfoss too; on the way there are little black sand shoals where only a little water gets diverted from the main plunge, purple pumice lava that is amazingly light weight, it’s just so full of air, and farther upstream basalt cliffs above the river.  I bellied out to look over one, and saw writing in the sand on the beach below.  I want to know how those people got down there.

The basalt columns were shearing away from each other, cracking along their geometric seams, some of them standing alone where they’d separated from their neighbouring columns.  It all seemed dangerous.

So much water and so much risk.

As the sun was starting to set over Selfoss while we were there we drove fast from there to Krafla, on a packed gravel road through a long monochromatic dead zone where thankfully we could go fast.

Turning towards the Krafla power plant, where the big pipelines arch over the road like inchworms, we stopped first at the Stóra-Víti crater.

Derek took some sheep-in-the-sunset pictures and I climbed to the rim of the crater.  Seized by a spontaneous urge, I started running around it, and then once I started, I had to run the whole thing.  It wasn’t easy, the rocky trail went up and down the parabolic curve of the rim.  This was the first time I opened into a run since me last knee reconstruction, and I felt strong and whole and invincible.  There were some interesting white hot pits fed by the geothermal plant behind the crater, too.

All lit up by that, I advocated for running from the parking lot to Leirhnjúkur, where we hung out in amazement with the steam hissing from the lava heaps, a field of black lava riddling with steaming cracks and dangerous white hot ash pits.  The paths aren’t exactly marked, but they are pretty evident, compacted gravel.  Wrong steps off the path though, and you can feel the heat under foot through your shoes.  I was carefully touching the sharp rocks, amazed by the warm air and steam pushing its way out of the ground.  Derek took pictures of the sunset and the moon through steam.  Awesome.

It seemed to be a greater distance back down to the parking lot, and we saw some of those strange birds that we saw on Day 14.   They were on either side of the trail making soft questioning chirps.  Er?  We could hardly see them, but they were white on their undersides  It was hilarious to see only their bottom halves on the move, like pants walking around.  It was completely dark when we got back to the car.

We drove in the dark all the way back to Akureyri and got into the campsite in the middle of town.  I was very tired but hungry too, and I made pasta while we set up our tents.  The campsite was wide awake and lively still, but didn’t keep me awake.

More great photos of this day are here.

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