“We feel cold, but we don’t mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn’t feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It’s worth being cold for that.” (The Golden Compass)
In May last year, Pete presented me with my final 30th birthday gift; and what a gift! You can imagine my excitement when I opened this little blue Wallpaper City Guide and realised we were going to Iceland, a country that had been top of my bucket list since Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy captured my teenaged heart.
I couldn’t believe I was going to get the chance to see those mysterious green lights in the sky for myself. Pretty great present; hard to top, you might think. Until, three days into the trip, looking down on the lights of the Blue Lagoon at dusk, I turned around to find Pete down on one knee! So, you see, it really was the trip of a lifetime and I think it’s about time I blogged about it, even if it has taken me eight months to get around to it.
We flew out in the middle of November last year and were treated to the most glorious sunset as we drove out to our hotel in the middle of Reykjavik. The sky in Iceland is something else – aurora aside, it’s breathtakingly beautiful in all its vast colour-shifting glory. Every night presented us another bonfire in the sky, the oranges, purples and pinks impossible to capture on camera screen. Visiting the lunar landscape of Iceland is probably as close to space travel as you can get, while Reykjavik itself seems a Sylvanian town huddled at the bottom of the huge ice-capped mountains.
We were staying bang in the middle of the city, in the gorgeous Centerhotel Thingholt, designed by Icelandic architect Gulla Jonsdottir. The moment we stepped through the doors into the warm, leather-tiled lobby, saw the big open log fires and clocked the black lava wall with its trickling waterfall, I knew Pete had done good. The lovely staff at the reception desk were brilliant throughout the whole stay, helping us meet all our tour guides on time and generally being super friendly and sweet. We had the smallest standard room, a sleek and shiny bolthole with one of the most comfortable beds I’ve stayed in. That said, we were so tired at the end of each epic day that I would have slept like a log pretty much anywhere!
The only issue with the room was that the bathroom ran alongside the bottom of the bed, and the wall between the two was transparent enough to be able to see pretty much every movement of the person inside! Which put pay to any plan of Pete’s to propose in our cosy hotel room (still kind of wish he’d got down on one knee on the bed while I was sitting on the loo opposite. So romantic).
On our first night there was time for a quick dinner in the hotel restaurant Isafold before our ‘car’ arrived to take us out to hunt down the fabled Northern Lights. I can’t speak highly enough of Superjeep.is, a team of Land Rover Defenders, modified with big wheels that can tackle the hardiest Icelandic glaciers and rockscapes. It’s pricier to go in these monster cars than on a coach but it’s so worth it. You get to explore far beyond the usual roadways, and in small groups of six rather than massive coach tours. Our guide and driver was Logi (meaning ‘flame’), a big bearded Icelandic dude who we were going to get to know really well during our stay: he turned out to be our driver on the Golden Circle tour the next day too!
Logi knows everything; the best thing about going out in the jeeps is that you get to chat with the guides one-to-one and find out so much; not just about Icelandic history but also about the way people live now, from the common belief in elves to the best places to get drunk in Reykjavik. The Northern Lights tour lasted four hours and we stopped at four or five places to catch the lights, with varying degrees of success. At our final stop, a small copse far into the rocky woods, we managed to grab ten minutes of eery green swirls; awesome!
Even before that, we’d seen the lights beginning to form over our heads in streaks of silver. Weirdly, these showed up much more impressively on camera (as you can see!)
The lights weren’t the garish LED magic show I’d been led to expect from professional photographs but they were no less special for that. And actually, for me the most spectacular part of the tour was when we drove right up to the top of a mountain ridge to look down on the city lights, spread out in a sparkling river slick below. It was dizzyingly wonderful.
At this point, Logi and the other driver realised how bloody freezing we all were (especially me in my woefully inadequate Zara ankle boots) and produced vodka and hot chocolate to revive us. A word about the cold – take proper professional snow boots, thick thermal socks, and a PROPER ski jacket. I only had my high street-bought camel coat and, warm as that was in wintry London, it was in no way suitable for trekking across glaciers. By day two of the trip, I was layering three pairs of socks and four jumpers (which is why I look like the Michelin Man in a lot of these pics).
It was an early start the next morning, greeting Logi at 8.30am for our Golden Circle day tour, which would take us 4x4ing around Thingvellir National Park, the Geysir geothermal area and Gullfoss waterfall. If you go to Iceland, you have to do this tour. It’s expensive, but it’s a whole day of exploring a mindblowingly beautiful lunar landscape you’d never see anywhere else in the world (we got back sleepy and moonstruck at 8pm). We picked up our four jeep companions on the way, two lovely ladies from Manchester and two American guys (‘crazy’ Matthew McConaughey-lookalike Jeremy and his long-suffering friend who spent the trip stopping him jumping into geysirs and falling into the Gullfoss). First stop was Thingvellir, where the Icelandic parliament was founded over 1000 years ago. The pictures of this incredible viking settlement speak for themselves. We wandered around in a kind of daze, completely staggered by the cold, rugged beauty of the place.
Then it was back into the jeeps and off to the geothermal area in Haukadalur, via a huge warm water lake where we stopped to dip our toes in the hot springs and absorb the black lava landscape and strange blue algae.
The final leg of the morning tour took us to the boss of all the geysers – Strokkur, which erupts almost every five minutes. I can’t begin to describe how cool this is, especially the bit just as the geyser erupts in a huge swelling blue bubble, and then shoots up about 18 feet, blasting you with warm spray.
After a spot of lunch at the geysers, we were off road! Logi drove us across glaciers and highlands, treating us to a wild ride splashing through rivers and bouncing us over the rough terrain. At one point he actually turned us horizontal… We stopped at the foot of the glacier, where some of our companions were snowmobiling, although we were out of budget for that. Instead we were driven onto the glacier itself for a bit of a snowball fight.
The views up there were stunning – the light is white cold, with the sun highlighting the edges of the snowcaps and the broad expanse of powder white snow stretching as far as you can see. We felt like men on the moon. Logi showed us where the North-America and Eurasian tectonic plates are slowly pulling apart, and we stood right on the dividing point!
The final leg of the trip took us to Gullfoss waterfall, the Niagara Falls of Iceland, a roaring beast of a waterfall plunging into a deep gorge. Coffee in hand, bracing ourselves against the icy wind and freezing spray, we made our way along the narrow mountain path and up to the viewing rocks, where we looked down into the mouth of Gullfoss. It was bloody impressive.
The drive back was long but we were all totally wiped out, managing to snooze through the bumpy ride until we reached the Kerið crater. It was pretty dark by this point (it gets dark early in November in Iceland!) but we managed to get a quick view into its murky depths before being dropped off back at our hotel.
The great thing about Reykjavik is that people go out to eat and drink late – so we had time for a disco nap before heading out to party. The city was both smaller and bigger than I thought; physically, you could walk the main streets (and we did) in half an hour, yet all the cafes, bookshops, even laundrettes double-up as bars come sundown. Which means Reykjavik is basically two towns in one, night and day. That evening we started at Laundromat Cafe (above) which has an actual laundrette in the basement but serves diner-style food upstairs. It’s also a bookshop, the bars lined with colourful covers. Books and booze in one place? Sold.
A few beers later, we grabbed a quick cocktail in Austur, a sleek Miami-style bar near the harbour, and then hit Happy Hour at Boston, a bar sat above vintage clothing store Sputnik. Boozing isn’t cheap in Reykjavik, so Happy Hour is a total life saver. I don’t have any good photos of many of these places – blame the dark or the Icelandic vodka…
Our stomachs were rumbling by this point, so we headed to the infamous Icelandic Bar. Who should we find there but our tour companions? After sharing some wine, the six of us stumbled off to end the night at Kaffinbarinn, a tiny rust-coloured drinking hole (cafe by day) signposted by a London Underground sign over the door. Shots of vodka all round!
Day three was dawning and we still had so much to come: the Blue Lagoon, a seven-course tasting menu at Nordic restaurant Dill, a trek up to The Pearl and up to the top of Hallgrimskirkja, riding Icelandic horses across the ravines. Oh, and the small matter of that little box Pete had been carrying around with him this whole time… Part 2 post to follow soon!
All photos copyright of Alice Oven or Pete Durant
