zotz | Iceland

Words now. Pictures, hopefully, soon.

Warning : the entirety of the following is the opinion of the author, and therefore not necessarily factual. If you have better information or more entertaining opinions, please share them with us.

I had been thinking of going to a concert the night before (Kenny Young and the Eggplants) but I wasn't packed and I hadn't managed to arrange where to meet Kate and I was a bit tired and . . . I didn't go. So I spent the evening looking out black Tshirts and pairs of socks and phoneing Kate to see when and where we were to meet. She was out when I got through, but she called back about an hour later. Half-past eleven, terminal one. I reckoned I could manage that. So I got some sleep and woke up at the usual time - abut five - and did the usual job of tossing and turning for another couple of hours trying to get at least a little more sleep, before giving up and reaching for some clothes. So I ledt the house - as usual, worrying about what I'd forgotten (and as usual reassuring myself that as long as I had a bank card, my passport, toothbrush and a change of pants I'd survive) - about eight and walked to the station. I had an interesting minute or two working out whether to allow myself to be fleeced for a Heathrow Express ticket. I decided that getting a tube ticket when I arrived was probably the best option (as it turned out to be) and I got a paper and hopped on the train. The run into London was smooth and uneventful. I read the paper - including an article about Katrin Cartlidge, who had died the weekend before. I hadn't heard. A great shame.

The tube was slightly less uneventful, but not greatly. The train slowed suddenly just before one of the station near Stamford Brook, and when it got there we were all told to get out and wait for the next one because the thing was dead. I wasn't greatly worried because I was making good time. The next train wasn't scheduled to go as far as the airport but it was quickly redesignated and we were on our way again. I was finally at the airport about half an hour early, found the checkin desk and kicked my heels until my sister arrived - her having the tickets, of course. Half-past came and went. So did twenty-to, and the bloke on the desk looked at me quizzically and pointed out that it was closing in five minutes. I remarked (with only slightly forced humour) that being a lawyer, she was probably charging someone by the minute (this is very unfair - she works for Unison pursuing unfair or constructive dismissal and industrial injuries cases). However, it was also her cue to arrive, so the bags were away in no time and we went to the chemist to get zinc oxide tape, acyclovir and all the other essentials for a foreign holiday. I never cease to wonder at the amazing things they sell in duty-free these days. It's like being in a shopping mall. Actually, you can get more stuff in Heathrow than in Cambridge, I'm sure. Kate picked up an Ian rankine she hadn't read and I gawped at all the useless tat that was for sale, having provided myself with all three parts of the First Chronicles of Thomas Coverup, the Unbelievable to read on the trip (fairly nice book, by the way, if you can stand the sound of Stephen Donaldson grinding various axes all the way through. Pisses all over most other modern fantasy . . . IMO). Having done my waiting on the concourse, I didn't have to wait long for the flight to be called and we wandered out to the gate. At which point we were delayed due to air traffic control issues. Actually I know somebody that I'm sure could tell me a lot of interesting things about the workings of the British air traffic control system, but I haven't seen him in some years. This was only about half an hour, though, so I chatted to Kate, read a few pages, watched a dragonfly buzz around outside, stared rydely at fellow passengers . . . the usual sort of thing one does under such circumstances. I noticed that in the middle distance there was what looked at first sight like an airliner. A further glance made me think that it seemed to have a couple less then the usual number of wings. It was also a curious green colour and looked to have the front end of an old 747 and the tail of a Tristar, without being long enough for either. There's no punchline to this - I didn't work out what was goin on over there and I'll probably never know. Eventually we got let onto one of Mr Boeing's finest (a 757, in this case) and sat down.

I really like the process of taking off. And of landing, in fact. And, indeed, of flying over anything recognisable. But particularly the taxiing and runway business. There's so much to see. Planes from (and presumably headed back to) all over the world, in all manner of liveries. Strange vehicles with stranger functions. All manner of bizarre buildings. It's great. Flying on foreign airlines is fun, too, because I can spend hours trying to work out what all the attendants' names are. There was an Unnur on the way out (and on the way back, although it might have been a different Unnur). Someone seemed to have the middle name Bork. And on the way back there was a Stella Maria, which had me singing "Stella Maris" to myself most of the way. Anyway, the exciting throttly bit on the runway (yes, that is the correct technical term) was exciting and throttly, and then it all calmed down for a bit. I don't want to offend anyone from the midlands, but I've actually been there and seen some of it from a lot closer, so I didn't find it very exciting. We went over Dublin, though, which I wasn't expecting. I thought we'd be further north, but it seems to be the usual route, pretty much - we came back over Belfast. After that it was pretty much exactly uneventful for a couple of hours. It seemed to get slightly lumpy outside at one point, but not enough that anything got spilt or we all got ordered back to our seats. Very calm.

In due course it became apparent that we'd about got there. The dead giveaway was the fact that instead of the pointy end being up a bit, it was down a bit, and we started to get announcements about staying sat down. Out to the left it was mostly cloudy, but just occasionally there were breaks, or mountains poking through in a suitable charismatic fashion, and all us bloody tourists started to get all anticipational. Of course, when we did get below the clouds we were about at the end of the Reykjanes peninsula, so the view wasn't so hot any more. Actually, it looked just like the bleaker bits of Scotland, only flatter. And with more radomes. There were a few of these, and some suspiciously bunker-like hangars for small and probably very expensive aircraft. The runway worked in the usual manner, though, and in mere moments we were trundling towards the terminal. The view wasn't amazing - overcast sky, flat dull green ground - but it didn't look anything like Cambridgeshire, so I was happy. The formalities were unremarkable, and when we got out onto the concourse our mum was there wiating - she'd arrived a few minutes early, and we'd been half-an-hour late, so she'd beaten us in. The airport's surprisingly small for the main (and almost only international) airport of a nation, but on the other hand this is a nation considerable fewer in population than Edinburgh, so perhaps i shouldn't have been surprised. It's very nicely built, though. the terminal's fairly new and rather nice. It's got some really good big stone walls. It reminded me a little of Coventry Cathedral in that respect, although admittedly not in any others. There's a regularish bus from the airport (which is incidentally at Keflavik (in which, incidentally, the F is pronounced like a B), about 45km (30 miles?) southwest of Reykyavik at the end of the Reykjanes peninsula. The peninsula's the first bit of Iceland you see . . . and it's flat. Flat and empty and covered in lumps of lava, mostly. There are some hills (or are they big enough to be mountains?) but they mostly stand fairly isolated and don't spoil the extreme flatness to much. Unsurprisingly, they're extinct volcanoes. In general, it's probably safe to assume anything in Iceland is an extinct volcano until it actually starts talking to you. Or erupts. Or both, if it's quite talented. Apparently it used to be the most fertile bit of Iceland - when the place was settled a bit over a millenium ago - but a combination of overgrazing and massive thirteenth-century vulcanism put a stop to that. It's pretty much a waste-zone now, in the agricultural department at least. But it looks incredibly dramatic. Some areas are grassed, but most of what you see on the way north to Reykjavik is ash and rock with moss growing on it. The flows have contracted and flexed and cracked as they cooled and parts have collapsed into old gas pockets. They've been eroded to a greater or lesser extent, but the revegetation's going to take a lot longer. There are a few fishing and cargo ports on the coast, but no inland settlement that we saw. But the road's apparently the busiest in the country. In about half an hour we were on the outskirts of town and gazing at a mountain across the bay. It's a huge lump of rock, with a smooth flat top that I assume was ground away by the ice, called (I learned later) Esja. The wind was from the northeast and as it rose over the mountain it formed lens-shaped clouds over it, and the could be seen downstream also as the airflow rippled away to the south. We droce through various suburban areas on the dual carriageway (they drive on the wrong side over there. Heathens) until eventually we turned off the main road and went down another road to stop at . . . another airport. This one was a lot smaller, though. Reykjavik airport itself was built by us, apparently (Keflavik was built by the Yanks a couple of years later) after we had the phenomenal bad grace to invade their neutral nation in 1940. Denmark having been occupied, the Icelanders decided against remaining under Danish rule. No surprise there. But before they'd gotten around to formalising it, Big Winston C decided that the place was far too bloody strategic and landed some troops (note : a more detailed - or, indeed, accurate - account of this would be very welcome. Particularly if it included what Icelanders actually thought of all this). On the US entry into the war, they dropped in and replaced Brits as the allied presence. Amazingly enough, they've never really left. You'd never have expected that, would you? They built the airport at Keflavik and there's still a large NATO (for which read : US Air Force and Navy signals) presence there, on the other side of the runways from the civil area (and does that make the NATO bit the uncivil area?). There are about 4000 US military personnel, which makes it the size of a decent Icelandic town. I guess it was the flat terrain that appealed to them. Their/our (i.e NATO's) presence has been controversial. The decision to allow it to stay after the war apparently caused a riot in downtown Reykjavik.
Anyway, to get back to the matter at hand, we were dropped off next to the city airport (mainly used by light aircraft and flights to Norway and Greenland, I believe) to catch a minibus to our hotel, which was handily named so that we wouldn't forget what country we were in - the Hotel Island. Actually, that's the Hótel Ísland - whoever devised the Icelandic orthography had no truck with the idea of a letter representing two sounds - stick that accent on and it's a different sound and therefore a different letter, alright? They all go at the end of the alphabet after all the ones that don't have accents. There seems to have been some slight slippage in the centuries since, but surprisingly little Keflavij/Keblavik was about as dramatic as anything I came across. Doubtless my linguistican friends will set me right on this in an embarrassingly public manner, though - watch this space! It's a fairly new hotel, about a mile or so from the city centre, so easily walkable in my terms. It's on a hill with various other newish hotels and various shops, with houses and a football stadium on adjacent blocks. My room had a very good view of Esja across the water. Certain other rooms probably had a very good view of the Hótel Esja over the road, which was in the middle of a major refurbishment. I think it was about seven or so by now (local time - an hour behind the UK, where it would have been eight or so) and we decided to walk into town. Or maybe catch a taxi. We discussed this for a while and then decided just to walk. Of course, we then needed to know which way to go. A handy bus stop with a map told us where to go, but it wasn't as obvious where the locals had put the city centre. We had a guess at where we'd have put it if we'd built the city, and then my sister asked a taxi driver and it turned out we were completely wrong. Sensibly, they'd built the city centre right next to the airport where they could keep an eye on it. So after about fifteen minutes walking through a suburban area that we decided reminded us of the Netherlands (albeit a suprisingly mountainous bit of the Netherlands) in its style of modern architecture, we got to some older and lower buildings that were the start of the centre. These were tenements, mainly, that I guess were from about the fifties. And they were quite dowdy. I got the impression - which I think is justified - that Iceland's become a lot more prosperous in the last few decades. The new buildings look quite flash compared to the ones that seem to precede them. The ones that are older still are often corrugated iron over timber, and are well taken-care of (and nicely painted), so they look much better even though they were probably even cheaper to make, so I think the point stands. We went past the bus station and got to what we thought was something like the high street. It wasn't quite, but the Fort William jokes were out in force for a few minutes. We wandered down for a few minutes looking for a place to eat, and happily the city's well supplied with very acceptable-looking catering emporia. Unfortunately the spray-on Irish theme pub has also arrived, but I'll do my best to say no more about that. We settled on an Italian restaurant (loosely speaking - they didn't feel the need to be pedantic about it) called Caruso. Yes, that's right folks, I have now officially developed a habit of going to foreign countries and eating out in restaurants that have their own websites. Somebody shoot me. Anyway, it's nice place. Eating out in Iceland is a bit expensive, but this wasn't beyond the norm and the food was good. As was the building and decor, actually. And the staff. Well, our waitress was very smiley, at least. I can't answer for the others. I had a pizza which, while very nice, was surpassed later.

We'd walked a fair way down Þingholtsstræti (I'm desperate to see if that works, incidentally. I've just pasted it in from the Caruso's source code - can people tell me whether they see it properly? Ta update: dont' bother. It doesn't. In fact, in certain respects it actually seems to break LJ, which is interesting. I've changed it to the standard special-character representation) to get to the Caruso, so we were almost at the city centre proper - downtown Reykjavik. As a city, it's about the size of Cambridge. I must stress, though, that it's much nicer. Frankly, it pisses all over the festering dungheap that I have to live in, although it's maybe not as nice as Edinburgh. Incidentally, if anyone from the Icelandic tourist board wants to quote me on that, my rates are very reasonable. Cheques to the usual address. And if anyone from the Cambridge tourist board wants to discuss it . . . just give me fair warning and I'll skip the country. The central few blocks sit between the harbour and the lake (Tjö:rnin). Apparently if you walk past this further west you get to a really nice old bit . . .but we didn't because we found a bookshop, where I bought a map of the country and the Rough Guide I should have bought before I left, and shortly afterwards a bar. This was the Café Paris, which was very pleasant. I surprised my sister by having a whisky - I haven't seen her enough in the last couple of years for her to have picked up on my drink-more-whisky project. From the receipt, the waitress' name seems to have been Freyja. She was very pretty, as I recall (Shallow, me?). We didn't stay all that long, though My mum doesn't really do the late-pub thing very much, and after a long day travelling none of us were as lively as we might have been. We got a taxi back to the hotel and I perused my book and map for a while before making some Zs.

This brings us to Saturday. I don't usually bother with breakfast, and I skipped it totally in favour of an extra ten minutes in bed. Kate had booked us on a coach tour leaving at about a quarter to nine. This was one of the Golden Circle tours which take in a range of tourist traps in an area extending about 100km (80 miles?) northeast of Reykjavik. It left from the city airport, so there was a minibus there first and then we changed into a bogstandard I'mastupidbloodytourist coach. Our guide for the day was an Icelandic woman whose name I forget. She was blonde, in her late forties or early fifties, at a guess, and had an endearing habit of bursting into song at quiet moments during the tour. I thought it was endearing, anyway. My mother and sister thought it was a bloody irritating habit. I was quite interested in hearing what Icelandic really sounds like, and of course I had the usual problem with Brits abroad - so many people speak English and are keen to practice it on you. That and the fact that they can spot us a mile off. "Look - he's wearing lots of black. Let's go and ask him what Marmite tastes like."

Anyway, the bus headed out of Reykjavik almost directly East on what I see from my map is road number 1 - the ring road. This runs roughly right round the south and east coasts. but cuts off some corners (actually, by the map, some quite big corners) in the north. We just headed east across some hills and past the odd lake towards Hveragerði (that d is actually an eth, and the H is apparently pronounced pretty much as a k). As we left town and climbed, the land got more like the north of Scotland, and visibility deteriorated. We got mist, then rain. We passed an airfield, which apparently is used for gliding. I was surprised, because the area I'd seen - the peninsula - was far to rugged to land a glider on, even though it was fairly flat. Off the peninsula, though, the land is smoother, mostly, with grass, so I guess it can be done.The high ground was smooth and bleak and surrounded by smooth glacially-eroded mountains that i could hardly see (but I've got family in the West Highlands and on Skye, so I've seen these things before). As we came down, things got a bit drier and clearer. We passed through a more sheltered area with some trees - just low scrub, really, but not bare grass - which had been colonised by holiday cottages. These are apparently very popular. After that we got to Hveraderði, which is apparently known for its greenhouses and their produce, which is flowers, vegetables and fruit. Everything from begonias to bananas, I guess. We stopped to visit a glorified gift-shop-cum-garden-centre, which was a slightly odd experience. They were selling cacti. They grow cacti - in Iceland - and try to sell them to people visiting from abroad. I can't work out whether I want to call Alanis Morrisette or a really good psychiatrist. My head hurts, either way. The really worrying thing is that as business people they are presumably doing this because it works. My only hope is that they sell these things to passing locals as well. Otherwise we're all doomed.

I picked up a couple of postcards. Mostly these were distinctively Icelandic things like geysers and mountainscapes. I got a really fantastic picture of children playing football on snow as well, that reminded me of some pistures

gingiber took at a club we used to be involved with many years ago. More about this postcard later, if I remember. Then we sloped off eastwards again, towards Selfoss, but turning left before then on the Reykholt road. There was another knee-high forest with summer houses, and we stopped at Kerið, a sudden unexpected crater with a raised edge, about 200 feet across and deep, with a lake at the bottom, sitting looking very natural and unassuming in the landscape - quite a trick. Apparently it was probably made by a gas explosion about three thousand years ago - so go and make sure you've turned the oven off before bed tonight, OK? We were due to stop at a church just after this, but it didn't happen because somebody wa sfilming in it. I didn't catch what the significance of the church was. If it wasn't Skálholt then it was in the area. We stopped at what looked like a quite impressive (but turned out later to have been quite a minor) waterfall, by which local farmers (and evryone else, it seemed) were gathering their sheep and horses off the high ground in preparation for the winter. There's a word for this event, but it's in Icelandic and I've forgotten it. There were actually quite a lot of animals there. Apparently after the day's business was finished, certain of those present were probably going to overindulge with the local rotgut. I, of course, was shocked and disgusted to hear this.

Next up the road was Gullfoss, the golden waterfall. As I said, it was overcast so it didn't look very golden, but it did look very impressive. It's not by a long chalk the biggest in Iceland - I believe that honour goes to Dettifoss, the dirty falls, in the north of the country, which is the most powerful falls in Europe - but it's quite big enough and more than picturesque enough to do me for a while. There's a path from the nearby car park up the side of the gorge (sixty feet or so deep and apparently a mile and a half long) that the falls have carved since the last ice age, finshing on a rocky outcrop that sticks out into the short gap between the upper and lower section of the falls. The noise is impressive, the spray boiling out of the gorge is impressive, the amount of water going past is stunning . . . this was fairly elemental.

After about twenty minutes there we headed for our lunch stop at Geysir. This is a small (about 3 square kilometers, I'm told, although it looked smaller to me) area of hot springs named after its most famous component, the eponymous gusher. It's apparently thought that its activity started after a thirteenth-century earthquake, and there've been hot springs spouting and seeping here ever since. There were some tremors in the summer of 2000, also, after which activity increased. the area's beside a road at the edge of a plain beside a small mountain. Across the road there's a hotel (go on, guess what it's called . . .) and a visitors' centre. We debussed and opted to go to the hotel for a bite first. Nice enough. Nothing to write home about. After that, I sloped over the road (my associates weren't finished) to examine some phenomena.

And pretty phenomenal they were, as well. As I got over the road, Strokkur (the Churn) went off. It was still a couple of hundred yards or so off at this point. I've seen - as I expect you have also - pictures of geysers erupting. So I knew what it would look like, but I didn't know what sort of timescale to expect. How long does it take? Well, the answer seems to be that it's all over in a moment. Stillness, quiet and then suddenly WHOOSH! and half a ton of water looks to have sat on a drawing pin. From a flat surface to a collapsing plume of spray and a cloud of dispersing steam in less than a second. Not bad for free. And it happens every five minutes, too. You can't say fairer than that.

The area with the springs slopes gently up as you move away from the road, and the area to the left is marked off as unsafe. There are hot pools there, and apparently boiling mudpots although I didn't see any. The problem is that they crust over, apparently, and people fall through into the hot water. Tourist soup's probably a delicacy in some circles, but I understand Iceland gave up on that around the time they abandoned whaling. The area had a long plume of steam hanging over it, starting from the taped-off area and blowing downstream over the path past Strokkur and Geysir. As you walk into it, there is of course a tremendous sulphurous reek, like the weekend after the power cut at Bernard Matthews' place. The path is fairly dry, but there's some water flowing over it from the springs. It leads more or less straight towards Strokkur, which these days is the banker. It goes off every few minutes, and sometimes two or three times in rapid succession, throwing a plume of water and steam sixty or seventy feet into the air. It's a fairly undramatic-looking pool of hot water between-times, aboutfifteen feet across or so, with a visible shallower ring of the deposited salts that encrust the rim of the pool also. There's a line of low metal pegs around it, keeping people a couple of feet away from the water behind a piece of string. The pool just sits, calmly motionless, ignoring the ring of expectant staring eyes. After a few minutes maybe it starts to look like there's some vague movement in the central ring. Perhaps some vague sign of convection disturbing the surace . . . or maybe it's just your imagination. Or the wind, perhaps. And then suddenly the surface rises into a bulge two or three feet across and a visible bubble appears rising under it and WHOOSH it's all over again. The spray falls, the steam disperses downwind and everyone around perceptibly relaxes. People turn and talk, a few laugh and are relieved that the tension's relaxed. And then maybe it suddenly happens again without people expecting, and heads jerk round to see the plume rocket upwards. Some people jump, and this time the laughter afterwards is louder as they recover from the surprise. Soon afterwards one of them notices someone trying to be Italo Calvino and kicks the crap out of him.

There are other hot pools as well. Some of them are also geysers, but are dormant or erupt infrequently enough to hardly count as such. They spill hot water gently and it runs down the hillside, depositing coloured salts wherever they go. The water in some of them is opaque. In others it's clear. One has a gaping hole visible at the bottom, leading down into hot caustic darkness.

And then there's the Great Geysir.

It's also down by the road, but a bit along from the hotel. If you've walked the couple of hundred yards to Strokkur, then gone round it to the left and uphill to look at the rest of the larger pools, then as you look directlt downhill towards the road you'll see a raised disk. Except that it's a low cone. With a crater at the top filled with water, maybe twenty feet across. The whole thing's quite big - more than a hundred feet in diamater - and it's bare of vegetation. In fact, it's completely composed of the deposited salts that encrust the edge of the pools, and it's better than head-high by the crater, sloping off to meet the ground on either side. It looks ugly. I've been told many times that this thing doesn't go off any more. It's dormant or dead - probably fatally damaged, choked by people throwing stones in to speed its cycle. I didn't want to go near it. Some things just unsettle me, and this is one of them. I did, after pussyfooting around for a while, step up onto the cone, walk forward and take a couple of pictures of the pool. I think if I knew then what I found out later - that the thing apparently has started going off again, occasionally - I wouldn't have dared. I'm a complete coward when it comes down to it.

If I go back, it would be tempting to hang around there for a very long while in the hope of seeing it. In its heyday, it used to spout to over 200 feet. I don't know how high it's managed in the last couple of years, or how often it's gone off in that time. If you google diligently, there are a couple of articles somewhere translated from an Icelandic newspaper (mid-2000) that talk about it, but apart from that there's surprisingly little.

Apparently there's a geyser called Steamboat that manages over 300 feet, but it doesn't go off often. It can go years between eruptions. It's somewhere in the States.

By this time it was early afternoon and we'd been in Iceland for nearly a whole day. Personally, I was feeling fairly pleased with myself. We all trooped back ontot he bus like a herd of particularly obedient sheep. The next bit of the trip, I was pleased to realise on Sunday, exactly follows the route taken at one point in Running Blind - west from geysir through Laugurvatn ("Laygurva", apparently, for some reason), which is a small place with one of the big boarding schools for kids from outlying areas to attend during the months of cold and head-high snow. After that we turned onto a road made of black gravel (a gravel road? In a tour bus? Fantastic) and headed up over a range of rugged hills to get to Þingvellir, the meeting plain, where the Icelandic parliament met until 1800. It's awfully historic, and in a staggeringly nice rift valley. Nice, that is, if you're into braided rivers, shattered rock valley walls and gaping chasms in the ground. Personally, I am, so I had a nice time of it. I think my mum and sister thought it was a bit colder than was really justified by the amount there was to see, and if they ever write their impressions up I'm sure they'll tell you so very forcefully. Apparently part of the Öxará (Axe River) was diverted, forming a very picturesque little pool into which people throw coins. In olden days, other things were thrown in - women, mainly. This is apparently why it's called the Drowning Pool. It didn't happen often, though. Apparently Iceland's never been very keen on capital punishment. It didn't happen to men at all. They just got beheaded. But again, not often. Near there is a wooden walkway and some seating by a flagpole to mark where the Law Rock might have been - traditionally where the speaker of the parliament stood to address the gathered throng. All very intriguing.

The valley itself is, of course, a rift valley and is spreading by between 1.5 and 2 cm per year. The floor sinks a couple of millimetres a year in response - though after an earthquake in 1798 it's believed to have sunk by about half a metre in ten days. Puts Sunday night into slight perspective. This is to do with Iceland being the only part of the mid-Atlantic ridge to be above water. The valley is one of the more obvious sections of this. On a clear day you can apparently see the original shield volcano, after which the category is named, just a few miles up the valley - Skjaldbreiður, "Sheild-broad".

Have I mentioned yet that Iceland is a physical geographer's wet dream?

Anyway, after that we rebussed and drove along through the hills above a rather large and pitcherskew lake (Þingvallavatn) before peeling away wetwards to get back into Reykjavik about four or so. Not a bad use of a day, in my view. Of course, it wasn't entirely over. I was tired (I hadn't slept very well - not that I ever do these days) so to make sure I didn't spend the evening biting people's heads off I made up for an hour or so of the previous night's wakefullness, and then we reconvened for dinner. I'd been asked to have a trawl through the guidebook and find somewhere we could eat, so I did - the Kaffi Brennslan, just over the road from the Café Paris. It's a very nice place. I had a stirfry, which was good, and three different beers, which left about 97 of their range unsampled. It billed itself "alternative" in a tourist freebie (oh, alright, yes that's why I wanted to go there - but the guidebook really did recommend it) but I saw little sign of this. Most of the customers were young and there was an interesting mix. Only a few metally types looked genre-specific, but it was nice to see signs of something countercultural. I expect it's all there somewhere if you know where to look, though. We had a wander round a few streets as well. A nice and relaxing finish to the day.

Sunday was also overcast. A staple of the trip away from the hotel by this point was the temperature. We'd always have a daft discussion about whether it was warmer or cooler than the day before. This was daft primarily because there was absolutely no point talking about it - there are several big digital clock/thermometers by the main roads around town and we'd pass one within a couple of minutes anyway. Besides which, we'd only been outside for the thirty seconds it took to get to the bus by this point. Anyway, on the Sunday it was brighter but no warmer (about ten degrees) than before and we were off on a trip around the Reykjanes peninsula. This, as you'll recall, pokes out south and west from the corner of the island and has Reykjavik at the northern side of its bass. The two aren't named after each other, incidentally. Reykja- means "smoky" (although the people who named it were actually referring to steam from hot springs). Vik means bay, and ness of course refers to a peninsula, as it does in many fine British placenames. Anyway, as I said it's a fairly barren area since its (geologically) recent vulcanisation left it unfarmable, but not without its points of interest. It's about 45-50km long and a bit more than that long, and the tip is swept north into a point. The population lives around the edge in a series of small and medium ports, except around Reykjavik (major metropolitan area, of course - several large towns (by Icelandic definition) are clustered here) and at Keflavik, inside the bay formed by the northswept terminal spur. The middle is flat lava plain, rounded mountains and the occasional hot spring. One of these - one of the most famous, was our first destination. Our guide for the day was Pietr, or Pyotr, or whatever the local version of the name is. Disappointingly, he showed no urge to regale us in song at any point during the day, although I'm sure that my folks were quite relieved. We got a little spiel on the way out about each of the towns we went through and how they fitted into their place in the Greater Reykjavik Co-Prosperity Sphere. More importantly from my point of view, I got to hear how their names were pronounced. Some of them (happily including Hafnarfjörður) were exactly what I expected. Kópavogur, on the other hand, seems to have lost a GU in the poplular imagination. We also passed (by the airport highway as it goes leaves Hafnarfjörður to the southwest) passed Iceland's largest industrial plant, an aluminium smelter. This, of course, is an enormously power-hungry process, involving as it does first melting the alumina and then electrolysing it to release molten metallic aluminium. Electricity in Iceland (90% of it hydroelectric still, apparently, although geothermal is increasingly popular) is cheap enough that bauxite is brought all the way from Australia for processing. The pant is co-owned by the Icelandic government and Alcan, whose activities I remember well from the period in my extreme youth when we lived in Jamaica, where open-cast bauxite mining is a major industry. My dad was working then for the Overseas Development Administration, seconded to the Jamaican Government to be their psychiatrist, working in the famously salubrious Jamaican prison system. He also had patients in the leper colony - and I'd like to just mention that I made no progress on the Covenant books while I was in iceland. I was kept far too busy. The other major aluminium company active in Jamaica at the time was the firm Alpart, of which I know very little. I'd always assumed they were from the States, but they may actually have been jamaican. My mum worked in a school part of the time we were there - teaching English has been one of her professions - that had links to or was maybe even owned by Alpart. We were certainly allowed to use Alpart employee facilities as a result. Aside from all which, the smelter's no more than a few extremely large featureless sheds by the road. Once past that, there was nothing to see except the creviced and crooked lava flows to our left and the flat grey sea to our right.

Before reaching Keflavik, we took a left onto another properly surfaced road and headed directly inland. Our first destination was most of the way across the peninsula, near some low rounded mountains that poked out of the lava plain. This, of course, is the world famous Blue Lagoon (original name, huh? Sounds better in Islenskur - Blaa Lonið). Now, some of you are probably thinking that what we'll have here is a dramatic natural spring in the middle of an unspoiled blasted plain. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but what happens here is that people go swimming in the overflow reservoir of the Svartsengi geothermal power station. I realise that this makes it sound much less tempting, but I wouldn't want you to think I was pulling the wool over your eyes.

It's been rebuilt recently, so that it looks more like a swimming pool and less like an industrial establishment. Time was it was a pool of water, pleasantly warm in some area through to really quite hot in others - right next to a large mass of pipes comprising an extraction system, a large set of heat exchangers, generators and pumps. Now the pool's been moved a few hundred yards away and surrounded by low walls and mounds of black volcanic gravel to give it slightly more ambience. The water itself still justifies the title - it's laden with silica, various salts and its trademark growth of blue-green algae. Consequently it's the pale blue of a tropical beach or a china-clay settling tank. It's also briny - the aquifer it draws on is mainly composed of seawater that's percolated in through the porous, fractured basalt bedrock, together with some rainwater that's soaked down, so it's about 70% of the salinity of seawater. It has a reputationa s being "healthy" - these things always do - but I'll certainly testify that it's very relaxing to lounge about in for a while. The silica-rich deposit from the rocks and floor has a certain reputation as a facepack, and the water itself - possibly because of the blue-greens - is apparently mildly antiseptic. Because of this, patients with various skin complaints are often advised to come and soak for a while, and I can believe that this might help some conditions. We lounged around afor an hour or so, and I have to say it was alot more pleasant than I expected. Apparently coming out in the middle of winter and sitting in water that's as hot as you can stand while the snow falls around you and your hair gradually freezes is quite an experience, but obviously it wasn't one that was available when we were there.

After leaving, we drove round the block and dropped in on a small exhibition on the local geology and the nature of the station. The water itself comes up at about 250 C, which together with the salt makes it impossible to use directly - they'd like to keep thier equipment, thank you - so it first goes through a heat exchanger to warm up fresh water. Most of it's then pumped back underground, but some is released onto the surface for the general delectation. The fresh water is used to generate about 16MW of electricity, which I think is roughly enough to power the peninsula including the airport and NATO base (but it's going to be increased to about 40 soon anyway, apparently). The water, still fairly hot, is then pumped through red pipes over the surface of the peninsula to the nearby towns, where it's used for heating.

From Svartisengi we drove east past some of the low cones (one of which had several antennae on top) that dot the plain to the town of Grindavík (past some USN VLF antennae). Grindavík was a small fishing village until the harbour was improved by blasting a hole in a protective spit some decades ago. Since then it's grown as a fishing port, and there's a fish processing plant there too. When it's operating it can be detected on the breeze all around. The locals call it "the smell of money", which (interestingly) means that money in large quantities smells just like fish fingers. We stopped there for a quick bite. Kate said her soup was great, but I wasn't really hungry. Maybe it was the smell of fish that did it. We left after a while and drove west along the southern coast of the peninsula. The area immediately arounf Grindavík is just like any other part of the peninsula - low, basically flat, basalt slabs, boulders and gravel with a little grass and rather more moss. Not a little bizarrely, though, someone's devoted what must be a very rare bit of relatively fertile ground to a nine-hole golf course. Apparently golf is popular in Iceland. There's no accounting for taste. The drive further along was much the same - the occasional house, lots of flat ground, and the sea. Off in the distance the island of Eldey is visible. This is the remaining basalt plug from an eruption in the 13th century, which seems to have been an interesting period in the local geology. The volcano's cone has all been eroded, but the stub that's left sits, very square, out to sea. It is, apparently, the largest gannet colony in Europe, and the home of the last known Great Auks, immediately before they were economically harvested.

In the late sixties this are at the end of the peninsula - and another in the island's interior - were used for trianing the Apollo astronauts to walk in their lunar equipment. I can say that if you took the few blades of grass away and ignored any colour in the sky, there's a definite resemblance to Nasa's alleged moon photos. Apparently after returning, Armstrong was asked what the moon was like, and he replied that it reminded him of Iceland. Actually, at the time the moon was a better holiday destination because it had better drinking laws, but it lost that advantage towards the end of the eighties. The very end of the peninsula has Rekjanesviti, a lighthouse built on a small but steep hill. It replaced an earlier light built on a crater wall that has largely eroded away. It's an interesting feeling standing on a shore, looking south, and knowing that there's no land between you and Antarctica. There's not much sign of civilisation apart from the lighthouse. In the distance there's a cloud of steam from a salt works (potassium-rich - better for you than ordinary salt, but tastes horrid), and a few vehicle tracks, but that's your lot. The roads around here - everything you'd call a B-road, in fact, in the whole country - are compacted volcanic gravel. They do surprisingly well. A lot of people drive apparently unmodofied vehicles over them quite happily, obviously including tour buses. There are a lot of 4x4s in iceland, obviously. A fair number are the various Land Rover models, but most of them are the Japanese things. A reasonable proportion (and yes, this includes some of the Landies) are modified for greater ground clearance. I guess these ones belong to the people who use them for their intended purpose.

Reykjanesviti sits on a hill in a small rift valley. Once more, we were in the middle of the mid-Atlantic ridge's aboveground course - roughly in the middle of its landfall, apparently. There were the usual obvious crags either side of the sunken slab we were standing on.

So after a few minutes in this magnificent desolation, we re-embarked and drove on to Keflavík airport, where we stopped at the Leifur Erikson Terminal Building to drop off those who were flying out that afternoon. Then it was back into town, past the NATO base and the aluminium smelter and back to the hotel.

By this time it was late afternoon again, and time to think about the evening's activites. Our ma was to fly out really unconscionably early, so the idea was to have some food and a quick drink and then some sleep. Kate suggested asking after some whale-watching trips in the morning, which struck me as a bit dubious, but I agreed that we might as well ask. After ambling arund town for a while we walked up to the astonishing Hallgrímskirkja (Try saying that when you're drunk. I should point out that the double-L is apparently similar to the one you get in Welsh words. This is too many consonants in a row for me), which dominates town from a hill overlooking the city centre. Apparently it's not finished yet and the ongoing saga of its construction is allegedly very involved. It's got a huge organ, apprently (no sniggering at the back) and the steeple looks like it's going to take off. Nearby, handily, is Eldsmiðjan, which by reputation sells the best pizzas in Reykjavík. I had one, and I wouldn't care to deny that. They also serve the fastest pizzas I think I've ever come across. And then put us under no pressure to eat fast or leave. I like this place. My sister had the house red (Slovenian, and called "Quercus" for no readily apparent reason) and recommends it. We got some garlic bread and hardly touched it. The pizzas arrived really quickly and were very filling. After that, back to the hotel.

By the time I was up on Monday me mam was well away. She was on a plane about eight, so she had to be away from the hotel before six. The first thing Kate and myself did was to see whether any of the whale-watching outfits were planning trips that day. One of them was, and I felt a lot keener about it than I had the day before. It was going to be a small boat, because there were only apaprently us and two or three others interested, so we were told to be at reception at nine . . . and then at about twenty to we were told that their minibus was there. I managed to be down in five minutes, but Kate had been taken rather more by surprise and took a few minutes longer. We got driven down to the harbour by a relaxed and laconic middle-aged bloke who turned out later to be the skipper. He was taking the smaller of thier two boats out - it's hardly high season this late in the year, and many of the tourists there are think twice about spending a few hours on the northern fringes of the Atlantic. Their boats were tied up across the quay from four large black-painted boats with "H" on their funnels - the Icelandic whaling fleet, which has been tied up there for years. Officially Iceland is a whaling nation. In fact, they've abandoned the moratorium but haven't decided whether or not to actually send the boats out or not. It would be a controversial move internationally and in the past boycotts have been quite damaging to fishing - still their major export industry. Also, the increasing success of their tourism (including whale-watching, of course) perhaps could do without the bad publicity. So they're considering it thoroughly. We hopped out of the van and the skipper gave me a quizzical look. "Have you got suitable clothes?" "I hope so", I replied - I was only in a Tshirt, trousers and boots at this point, but I had a few other things with me. By the time we were down the jetty I had a shirt on, and after boarding I put on the wooly jumper and hat and the hiking jacket with the fleece zipped into it. I reckoned this would be enough for a couple of hours, and indeed it was - just. I started to feel the cold around the time we returned to harbour As I said, the boat was about 30 or so feet long with an enclosed cabin, which had a hatch onto an open deck above. Once we were out of the harbour, we popped upstairs to enjoy the view around. It was nearly an hour before we were far enough out to start stooging around looking for stuff, and we spent it looking at scenery and wondering what would be around. This late in the year, in that area, apparently only dolphins and minke whales were likely. Various other species can be found in icelandic waters, but the larger ones don't come as far inshore. If you're prepared to drive north a few miles to Snæfellsness, you can go out to the best waters in the world for Blue Whales (and allegedly stand quite a good chance of seeing one), but not so late in the year. High summer's best for that. Anyway, soon we were stooging about and the skipper was explaining what we should be looking for - groups of seabirds, fins, dark patches and, if we were lucky, spouts. It didn't take too long for some small dark fins to appear fairly close to the boat - only about a hundred yards away, and nearly ahead. With the engine slacked off, we moved close and the dolphins (white-beaked variety) came over for a look. With theengine cut completely, the boat wallowed in the swell, and the waves made odd slapping noises against the hull. These dolphins are a lot smaller than the bottlenoses that are popular with aquarium-owners and film crews, and more timid. They swam around and under the boat, breaking surface to breathe and have a quick look without ever stopping. After a while the engine was started and we moved off, slowly at first. The dolphins followed, keeping an eye on us. As our speed got up, they started to porpoise occasionally. Eventually they decided we weren't interesting enough to be worth keeping up with and sloped off - in search of dinner, I assume. I'd climbed round the cabin to the foredeck, where I'd been joined by Kate and a couple whose nationality I couldn't place. The woman next to me sounded incredibly Lancastrian, but I couldn't make out her actual words. The man she was with I couldn't place at all. We kept wandering around looking for anything unusual, and a bit later we came across another similar family of dolphins - unless it was the same one, of course. I couldn't say. All these dolphins look the same to me. Obviously I'm just not familiar enough with their background and customs. So we stayed and let them mess about for a bit, and then moved off again. Sadly, that was it. We didn't see anything larger before it was time to head back in. I'm not complaining, though. I don't go on boat trips very often, and seeing a couple of groups of dolphins in the wild is more than I usually manage on a Monday morning. Usually it's all I can do to stay conscious until teabreak. After docking back in Reykjavík, we got driven back by the skipper, who was slightly apologetic about not seeing any minkes. I was in a cheery mood, though. We'd overrun slightly, so it was after half-twelve and our bus to the airport was at half-one. Kate went to get her bags - the staff had told her not to worry about the usual twelve deadline - and have a shower, and I hung around the lobby until she got back.

The trip to the airport was uneventful. It took us past a few of the things we'd seen the day before - the plume from the power station in the distance, the smelter, the NATO base, and we noticed that a few of the people we'd been on tours with were on the bus. At the terminal, we checked our bags in. Icelandair have an interesting system whereby the afternoon's incoming planes arrive slightly before the afternoon's outgoing ones, so people can change at Keflavík and fly on. So all the outward flights are close together and then everything gets very quiet. We had an hour or so to fill, so I went outside and took some pictures of a couple of big sculptures - I don't think I've mentioned that Reykjavík, and apparently Iceland in general - has a lot of public sculpture. I like this in a country. We could do with some more of it here. After this we had a bite to eat, sent a few postcards (most of which, at time of writing, seem to have been eaten by the mysterious ogres that live in Icelandic postboxes, and visiting the suty-free shop to buy the only thing one should buy in such places - cheap bottles of whatever the local rotgut is. After all, I don't see much Brennevin on sale round these parts, do I? I've been warned about the stuff. I can't really divulge the exact nature of the warnings, but they do involve me not drinking them near anyone called Steve.

The flight back departed on time and was slightly less full than the one over. There was an empty half-row across the aisle from us, so i popped over to watch the Icelandic coast go by. We cleared cloud near the base of the Reykjanes peninsula and had a good view about as far down as Vík, with the glaciated area of Mýrdasjökull standing out beautifully. This - the south coast - wasn't an area we'd been to at all, and I'd love to go back and have a poke around. Another time, maybe. The trip was good, and the cabin staff were efficient. The cockpit door was open at various points - presumably Icelendair don't consider themselves a premium target. We touched down at Heathrow after dark. Baggage claim was a bit delayed, and I noticed that the couple whose origins I hadn't been able to place had been on the flight, as had a woman on crutches that we'd been on the Golden Circle tour with on Saturday. Customs was a walkthrough and thenw e were on the concourse. I didn't get to say goodbye to kate, because she'd got a ticket for the Heathrow Express, whereas I was going toslum it on the tube. We got to the lift for the Express and I realised at the last minute that it wasn't the way to the tube, so we had one of those stupid moments with the lift doors closing between us. Never mind, that's what telephones are for. I'll be seeing her tomrrow anyway. Following which, i caught the tube then the train back to Cambridge and walked home. And so to bed.

It was work the next day, of course. As I've mentioned, my old boss has been replaced with a new boss because she's off to do a Master's. She was in the next afternoon, though, to sort a few things out. I'd been considering sending her a postcard, but not for very long because I didn't have her address. As she was there, though, I pulled out the cards I still had and asked her which she liked, wrote a quick best-wishes on the back and handed it over. And which one did she pick? Yup, the one I'd got for myself, of the kids playing football on the snow. She's got good taste - it was definitely the best photograph - but I was a little surprised. What with the others going walkies, it looks like she's the only one who'll get an Icelandic postcard from me. I hope she feels suitably privileged.