My flight from Minneapolis was about a week ago today, and while I've done a fair amount of sightseeing and taken a good deal of pictures, I'm going to dedicate this entry to the wonderful (terrible), beautiful (hideous), bountiful (barren) country of Iceland!
Iceland Air offers extremely cheap flights to Europe if you can tolerate a long layover in the Reykjavik airport, and it's definitely worth the value if you have any interest in a little sightseeing. My flight over was pleasant (although the air over Greenland is extraordinarily, even frighteningly, windy) and it was much shorter than I expected. I sat next to a nice Icelandic man who looked like "Larry the Cable Guy" with a better grasp of the English language. I'd say he was smarter in general, but he was really enjoying "Night at the Museum", so I couldn't be entirely sure.
I landed in Iceland at 6:30am local time last Saturday, with 10 hours to kill and an adventurous spirit. I missed the bus to see the Blue Lagoon, which is a local tourist hotspot where you can swim and relax in the hot water. I could've stayed inside and slept, but I knew this would likely be the only time I would ever be in Iceland. Unwilling to accept defeat, I did what any sane person would do in Iceland: I started a Sigur Ros album on my iPod and walked out the doors of the airport.
The instant I walked outside, I was completely shocked by the cold. When I left Minnesota, the temperature was in the upper 70s. Iceland was 40 degrees and extremely windy; thankfully my parents had made me wear my sweatshirt to keep me warm on the plane rather than pack it in my checked luggage.
The first thing anyone looking at Iceland (or the southwestern tip, where I was, at least) will notice is that it is an extraordinarily flat, barren-looking country. The ground itself is extraordinarily bumpy, and it's virtually impossible to walk across the "grass" without keeping your head down to watch your footing. At one point I stepped on what I thought was a solid mound of grass, only to fall about three feet in and really hurt my ankle.
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(Click on the thumbnails to go to my Flickr page with higher resolution photos. Once there, click "all sizes" above the image to view them at a better resolution)
After walking around for a while, I started getting extremely tired from the wind and lack of sleep. I knew that carrying my plastic bag from Target full of snacks and my DS was wearing me out. I needed to lighten my load. I found some rocks to sit on and bravely reached into my bag and opened the bag of Gardetto's I had brought on the plane and the beer I had bought from the convenience store in the airport. It was a hard sacrifice to make, but I knew my survival depended on it.
The Iceland airport is extremely small, seeing less than a dozen or flights a day, so by the time I was two miles away I definitely felt like I was outside its immediate vicinity. I stumbled upon a building which I first suspected was some kind of abandoned barn with its walls and roof stripped off, or maybe one of the recreated Viking villages in the area, because there was also some kind of grass hut nearby that looked to go with it. Nobody was walking around, though, and the signs for the Viking villages all said it was 20km away, so I decided to approach carefully.
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When I stepped inside and examined the gray leaves hanging up in the back, I realized it was actually a building for hanging and (presumably) drying fish carcasses! It didn't smell until I got up close, and then I couldn't get it off me, even after I had walked a good distance away.
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The next area I walked into was a horse farm. I couldn't tell if they were horses or cattle from a distance, because these were big, fat, hairy, and entirely stationary animals. I suppose at 7am it's not best to spend energy moving if you live outdoors in Iceland, but they didn't move at all and I couldn't even tell if they were real animals or just some weird rocks at first.
The horses were very curious to see me, and they eagerly ran up to the fence to get a close look at me and smell my hand. I held it out and they carefully smelled for food. When they realized I didn't have any they reluctantly let me pet their noses. They were extremely nice, although when the full pack was there they were on edge because of my camera, and two of them bumped into one another and began fighting, which scared me way more than the rest of the horses, it seemed.
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After seeing the horses, a hailstorm blew in right on top of me and I was forced to put my camera away. It passed almost as soon as I had done this, and I tried to walk a bit further onwards, only to realize that the high hills on the horizon, the objective of my entire trek, were fenced off and I wouldn't get a chance to climb them.
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As soon as I got close enough to take a picture, another hail storm blew in so I decided it was time to walk back to the airport and try to find some food (Protip: If you're a vegetarian, don't even go to Iceland; you'll get laughed at). Three miles, two sore ankles, and at least four independent instances of painful hail hitting my face later, I was back at the airport trying to find somewhere, anywhere with free internet and reasonable food.
Once again, check out my Flickr set with 59 excessively high-resolution photos. There are a lot more to look through than I've posted here.
Iceland is definitely a very unique place. At least it seems that way coming from Minnesota and going to England. I don't think I've ever seen a place that looked so barren and empty, but it was also very beautiful in its own way. I can't claim to say that I've seen even a fraction of what it has to offer, but if the rest of the country is anything like the area I visited, I can understand how the sense of community Iceland has came about. The cold got better throughout the day, especially as the sun came out, and I really appreciated how quiet everything was. There weren't many planes coming in, and what made the land largely inhospitable is also what makes it so peaceful. The biting wind, difficult terrain, and empty landscape are all huge parts of the beauty of the country.
Just kidding. Iceland is terrible and you should never, ever go there.
