When we woke the next morning at 8:30, there was about an inch of a fresh snow on the ground, and the snow kept coming down hard as Billy and I made our way to the hostel associated with the campground for their “buffet.” After our “dinner” of crackers and cookies, my stomach rumbled at the prospect of eggs, sausage, French toast, home fries, etc.
But once Billy and I got there, we were sorely disappointed at the array. No omelet bar, waffle iron, or anything of the like. Just a variety of breads, slices of cheese, ham (which was out of stock), and cereal and milk—and to add insult to injury, all the cow’s milk was gone, leaving only soy milk. Kaye and Gwen soon joined us and I made the best of it—a bowl of muesli with soy milk, then two open faced ham (once it got replenished) cheese and cucumber/tomato sandwiches, followed by a bowl of granola with cow’s milk (again replenished), washed down with two glasses of apple juice and a cup of coffee. The grand total for the four of us was $55, which seemed pretty steep considering that even my gluttonous repast couldn’t have cost more than a buck, but then I realized I was thinking in USA terms, not in terms of a quasi-Arctic island where pretty much all the food needs to be shipped in.
After breakfast, the kids played foosball in the common area of the hostel. I looked around at the other people staying at the hostel and I noticed how young everyone looked. I wondered to myself, thinking back to my own hostel days, whether I’d ever looked that young. But then I realized that the crowd appeared to be high schoolers on some sort of retreat, judging by a matronly looking chaperone who looked over them.
After Gwen and Billy’s epic game of foosball (Billy won) we headed to the bathrooms to get ready for a long day ahead of us. I knew we’d be outside a lot that day, so given the heavy snowfall I put on a merino wool base layer and my new pair of snow pants over a rust-colored wool shirt. Now I felt like a real Icelander!
And of course, Iceland weather being what it is, by the time I got out of the bathroom, fully clad in my snow gear, the snowy weather had given way and it was suddenly clear and sunny. Ah, Iceland.
We reconfigured the van and were ready to go at around 10:30. On our way out, Kaye sideswiped one of enormous concrete planter boxes that marked the boundaries between parking spots in the camping area, but thankfully there was no damage to the van (we got the maximum insurance coverage anyways). As we made our way toward downtown Reykjavik, the kids played an annoying Burger King jingle called “Whopper Whopper” over and over again on the IPad Spotify and—despite (or perhaps because of) Kaye’s and my protests—sang the first two lines of that song over and over again throughout the rest of the day. That jingle is now permanently burned—or should I say scarred, or seared—into my brain, so I’ll reproduce it here:
Whopper Whopper Whopper Whopper
Junior, Double, Triple Whopper!
As the kids slowly drove us insane with the Whopper song, we drove past Reykjavik harbor, which offered stunning views of the North Atlantic Ocean and high mountains in the background. There were people strolling past the frigid waters and going for runs and I realized it was a lazy Sunday morning for the people of Reykjavik.
We parked in a seemingly trendy neighborhood full of high-end shops and restaurants and bars. As Kaye and I fruitlessly tried to figure out how to pay for parking, the kids kicked loose piles of snow (midtown Reykjavik, just like everywhere else in Iceland we’d been, seemed to eschew any sort of snow or ice removal) into a stream of melt off running down the gutters and happily sang, “slush factory!”
We sought refuge in a small souvenir shop called Little Proud Puffin to try to figure out the inscrutable parking app (again, like any other big city in the world) and eventually gave up, but not before Gwen got herself a little ceramic whale and Billy a little Puffin charm for the back of his backpack. I’d wanted to get a picture of the two of them with a giant statue of a puffin in the store—its namesake I suppose—but the shop had filled up with tourists by that point. I surveyed the merchandise, much of it fixated on Iceland’s purported Viking past: t-shirts with tacky legends like, “Too Many Idiots, Not Enough Axes,” or “A True Viking Fears Only Odin and His Wife.”
We made our way from the gift shop to a little thoroughfare called “Rainbow Road,” which had been painted the colors of the rainbow one Pride Week and then left that way after people liked it. Everyone was a little disappointed in the Rainbow Road—Kaye because it only took up a block; the kids because it was just a road and not some sort of levitating rainbow bridge as in the “Thor” movies.
We headed to Bakabaka then, a well-regarded local bakery. Again, we noted the Icelandic indifference to snow removal: a reluctance bordering on contempt. The steps up to the bakery, crowded with well-heeled looking Icelanders and tourists, were covered in ice, and I envisioned myself slipping and breaking my neck on them. As we entered, there were separate lines for take-out versus in-store service. Kate had originally planned on getting pastries to go, but remembering the stress I felt in the camper at falling crumbs—this is where we would be sleeping for much of the next week—I insisted we eat at the cafe. “The more time we can spend outside the camper, the better” I said, and Kaye agreed.
The pastries wound up being as good as advertised. Gwen and I had both had cinnamon rolls, Billy had an apple Danish, and Kaye had a Chocolate croissant. Three of us also had coffee—Billy included. He had his favorite, which he would request at every restaurant we went into –a decaf caramel latte, which he slurped with relish. But it was too hot for him to finish in its entirety so we put the rest of it in a to-go cup and wound up taking it back to the camper (where it would come to a somewhat disastrous end, as we shall see).
After we finished up at Bakabaka, we piled back up into the camper and headed out of Reykjavik a little before noon. There wasn’t much in terms of suburbs; one minute we were in city sprawl and the next in vast white, snow-covered terrain, flat land for leagues and leagues, with craggy mountains in the background. Soon we reached the terrain we’d see for most of the rest of the day: vast swathes of snow-covered volcanic rock stretching to white-dusted mountains in the distance.
We also saw a surprising number of livestock in the snowy, cold conditions—mostly horses, often gathered around a bale of hay, but sometimes groups of cows and sheep, huddled together for warmth. We also saw many farms storing scores of hay bales, shrink-wrapped in plastic to protect it against the constant snow. At one point I saw two riders galloping on horses across the snow-covered expanses.
Also looking aback at my photo reel, this was when I would start taking seemingly endless series of landscape shots, trying to capture the majesty of the Icelandic terrain. I know from experience from prior trips to overwhelmingly beautiful places—Alaska, the Amalfi Coast, Montana –that I rarely look back on the landscape shots. But I just get so awed by the natural beauty of these landscapes (and particularly the mountains, I realize as I look back at that list of places) that I want to capture them for posterity, though I’ve found it impossible to truly convey the natural beauty of the mountain, with its endlessly fascinating gradations of color, light, and sedimentary design.
The first major city we crossed was Selfoss. It looked like a charming little city, over the Ölfusá river. But we weren’t stopping there and I regretted it (though later in the voyage we’d spend an extended amount of time there.) A little past Selfoss, we got passed by an over aggressive tour bus, which cut us off and caused Kaye to have to brake hard. We heard a shriek of dismay from the back; it turned out that the remainder of Billy’s caramel latte had tumbled to the floor of the camper van and spilled all over. Kaye pulled over the camper at the next stop and wiped up the mess the best she could. We resolved to grab paper towels and/or Swiffer pads at the next time we hit the grocery store, as the backseat was bound to get gross with our constant eating and congregating in a space that was going to have to serve as our bedroom as well.
We hit our next destination, Gluggafoss waterfall, at about 1:45. There was one other car parked there (in contrast to some waterfalls we would see later in our trip, which were jam packed) but there was nobody else in sight. There was heavy snow there and the wind, always an issue throughout our trip, was whipping snow almost sideways. The “trail” (such as it was) had been rendered indiscernible by knee-deep accumulation. Not for the last time this trip, I was very happy I was wearing snow pants.
Poor Billy was also wearing snow pants, but was also wearing his low-top Keens and soon found his shoes full of snow, which would be an issue for the next day or so as we tried to dry out his shoes. Gwen’s boots hadn’t been tucked properly into her snow pants, and her boots too were soaking wet by the time we got back to the camper. Kate, mother of the year, stuffed towels into both children’s sodden shoes, and let Gwen wear a very nice pair of designer snow boots I’d gotten her for Christmas for most of the rest of the trip. I was startled that Gwen had grown to such a stature that she could comfortably wear her mother’s shoes.
The waterfall itself was amazing—about 170 feet high in total, with two main drops: the first around 140 feet into a narrow recess, then another for a further 28 feet, with the water then flowing into a small stream. The weather had been cold enough that much of the waterfall had frozen, so the “main” flow erupted in a shower-like spray from frozen stalactites; while the lower part was diverted into five or so streams, erupting from pristine snow-capped ice.
Waterfalls have long been a source of comfort to me; an old friend once posited that they emit “positive ions” that are intrinsically calming to the brain. I looked that theory up once and it appears to be pseudoscience, but regardless of the “positive ions” theory, to me there is something calming about the steady roar of a waterfall and the feeling of fine droplets of its waters sprayed onto the face. I closed my eyes and attempted to be “present” with it, to let my consciousness become one with the timeless rush of water….
But of course, I was traveling with the kids—who, having grown bored at decorating a snowman someone had left near the waterfall, now were complaining about their wet feet—and Kaye, who had a seemingly second-by-second itinerary and was urging us to get a move-on. I sighed in irritation, but realized that Kaye had planned this trip, and that her efforts allowed me to play the “philosopher” and think such hokum about “positive ions” and becoming one with nature. So I reluctantly left the waterfall and hiked back through the snow drifts to the camper van.
And of course, no sooner than we got loaded into the van and were driving off, the sun came out.
Our next stop came at around 3:15 at another waterfall, this one called the Seljalandfoss. If anything, it was even more impressive than Gluggafoss, around 197 feet tall, part of the Sljalands River with an origin in the volcano glacier Eyjafjallajokull. But whereas our last waterfall had only a single car parked there, and not a single other human in sight, this one had a huge parking lot packed with vehicles, including several huge tour buses. I joked with Kaye that this was the most people we’d seen in Iceland. I was wondering at the time what accounted for the disparity in visitors between the two waterfalls we’d been to that day, but later looked it up and the Seljalandfoss has had a significant part in pop culture, forming a backdrop to an episode of “The Amazing Race” and had been featured (along with a few other Icelandic landmarks we would eventually visit) in a Justin Bieber music video.
Despite the crowds, Seljalandfoss was truly remarkable. Whereas the Gluggafoss is broken up into several drops and multiple streams, this one was A single torrent of water from a source towering over us. Although Seljalandfoss, like Gluggafoss, was a bit dammed by frozen estuaries, the flow was immense and impressive.
We made our way along a trail leading to the waterfall, taking pictures along the way. There was a small trail leading behind the waterfall that was, sadly, closed at the time. I could see that it was closed for good reason, though; between the sun—warm enough to melt the top layer of packed snow and ice that coated the ground—and the scads of tourists tamping down the fresh snow into a glossy, packed surface, the trails had become very slippery. At one point I lost my footing and fell to the ground and I was not the only person—there were portions of the trail that were so slippery that people just dropped down to their butts and slid down, including one foolish tourist (who appeared to be from Japan or Korea) wearing a leather miniskirt and fashionable high-heeled leather boots who was comically contorting herself in an effort to slide down on her butt without getting frostbite on the backs of her thighs.
We stayed for about a half hour, and then left so we could make it to “The Lava Show” in our next stop, Vik. True to Iceland, the weather began to turn just as we left. On our way back to the van, dark clouds moved in, obscuring the sun and turning the sky an ominous dark grey. A light sleet began whipping into us as we approached the van, and I was happy we left when we did.
We drove across the Icelandic terrain, destination Vik. We passed farms, the Holtsos lagoon, separated from the Atlantic by only a thin strip of sand, and Skogafoss, a massive 200-foot waterfall that was visible from the main highway. I again wondered why there wasn’t the same mass of tourists for Skogafoss as for Seljalandfoss and realized that the answer is probably “Justin Bieber.”
We reached Vik then—120 miles away from Reykjavik, and the location of the Lava Show as well as our planned dinner at Black Crust Pizza (which I was very much looking forward to after the morning’s light fare). As we entered the city, we saw a lonely church perched up over the town. We learned later that it was the designated evacuation meeting point for a potential flash flood that would happen if the nearby volcano of Katla were to ever erupt and send a tidal wave of melted glacier water from the Mýrdalsjökull glacier (which lies directly over Katla) to inundate the town. Apparently, this had happened with rather disconcerting frequency, with the last torrential flood occurring in 1918. Some other disconcerting facts we learned about Vik is that Katla was long overdue for an eruption, and that if the volcano were to blow, we would have a whopping 15-minute warning to get out of the way of onrushing flood waters.
We parked, piled out of the camper and went into the small bar/restaurant attached to the Lava Show. The kids were starving by this point, and I smuggled my trusty bag of almonds into the room where the show would be staged. As I furtively took the bag of almonds out of my snow pants, the kids asked whether we were allowed to have food in the show, and Kate and I taught them the old adage, “Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
The Lava Show soon began; as a prelude, we watched a short video about Iceland’s volcanic activity, and we learned the aforementioned disconcerting facts about volcano floodwater that was overdue to obliterate the town. Then the main event began: the host activated a stone smelter that poured a stream of lava down a chute. The bright orange flow made the room noticeably hotter—the guide mentioned that in its hottest form, it was over 1,000 degrees Celsius (or 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit)—and made sizzling noises as it slowly rolled down the chute. The host then used a giant pair of tongs to “stretch” lengths of lava, which glowed hot orange in the darkened room. He let the lava cool a bit to a stony crust with the bright orange lava still visible underneath, and then cut a cross section to demonstrate how hot lava can still be hundreds of degrees even when it appears to have cooled. It was a fun show.
After that we ate dinner at Black Crust Pizza, where the food was quite excellent, and then went to Black Beach, a beach of black volcanic sand overlaid by snow and ice. We were lured over by a striking, four-crowned rock formation we could see from the parking lot of the Lava Show. But by the time we got to the beach, dense, low-hanging clouds had rolled in and obscured the rock formation, which was now almost indiscernible against the darkening sky. I looked out at the sea, where huge waves from the North Atlantic were crashing into the craggy black coast. Kaye warned the kids to stay far away from the incoming tide, as this was an area where the infamous “Sneaker waves” would sweep a frightening number of tourists out to their icy deaths in the North Atlantic every year. Despite the danger, we saw a man walking alone and making his way out a small estuary of rock that protruded into the ocean. I watched in horror as huge waves crashed into the narrow bridge of rock he traversed; but fortunately, he was not knocked down into the icy depths.
We piled back into the van and went on to Kirkjubæjarklaustur, about another hour’s drive, where our campground was. On our way we passed more incredibly beautiful scenery – cliffs and ridges and towering rock formations that seemed to have been carved out of the landscape by the elements. At one point we passed a small pond and I saw dozens of white swans peacefully floating around, seemingly immune to the cold and wind.
We made it to our campground at around 8, as the light was failing for the day. As we checked in, the attendant at the gate asked how many of us there were—Kaye told him 2 adults and 2 children, and Gwen shouted from the back, “and three stuffies.” We learned that it would cost us 300 Icelandic Kroner for a three-minute shower, and I cursed myself for not showering that morning, but we sighed and paid the attendant for four showers. In exchange, we got 24 50-Kronen coins, which would allow each of us to have a 3-minute shower.
We set up the van to camp for the night and trekked across the dangerously icy parking lot (I almost wiped out several times) to play a few games of “Uno” and have a pre-bedtime snack in a small kitchen area, with tables, chairs, and a sink. We all hit the ludicrously undersized co-ed bathroom—a total of four toilets, four sinks, and two showers for a large parking lot holding at least a half dozen camper vans; they were also expected to suffice for about a dozen small cabins that were on the site. But we managed to go to the bathroom and brush our teeth, and we all were soon fast asleep after a very busy and eventful day in Iceland.
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