In August 2014, Lea and I bought plane tickets to visit Iceland the following January in order to see the Northern Lights. Just a few days after booking our flights, the Bárðarbunga volcano erupted. Thankfully, this wasn’t a monster ash-spewing eruption like the Eyjafjallajökull event that shut down air travel over Europe in 2010, but seriously. Come on.
(Prior to this, Lea and I had a track record of causing heat waves, freezes, torrential storms, and major floods by the simple act of reserving a camp site. We’d grown to expect natural disasters, but this felt like a case of the universe trying to one-up itself on us. However, the eruption would add an extra layer of awesome to our experience. More on that to come.)
This trip was prompted by a deal we saw on Groupon, but we didn’t use the Groupon. Vacations advertised on Groupon are not necessarily cheaper than those you arrange yourself, but they can give ideas for itineraries and destinations. Plus, booking everything on our own gave us flexibility that we wouldn’t have had on a packaged tour.
Another reason to go to Iceland at that time was the peak of the eleven-year solar activity cycle, which made it a prime year for viewing the Aurora Borealis. In 2015 we would be catching the downslope from the peak, but it would still be (we hoped) a relatively strong time for viewing the Northern Lights. Armed with a spanking-new Canon EOS Rebel T3 DSLR camera, and having recently crammed the book Canon EOS Rebel T3/1100D for Dummies into my brain, we flew into the Great Frozen North in the dead of winter, lava flows notwithstanding, to take magnificent photos of amazing, fantabulous, and spectacular aurorae!
So of course I forgot to pack the tripod.
Reykjavik
Early in the morning of January 15, 2015 we landed at Keflavik International. I say “morning,” but in Iceland concepts like morning are theoretical generalities not strictly tied to things like, say, daylight. A former U.S. military base, Keflavik is a long ride from Reykjavik itself, and after our all-night flight the first thing we had to do was find our Airbnb and crash. We woke in time for sunrise (around noon?) and used our few hours of daylight to walk around Iceland’s capital. But first, breakfast!
Directly across from the Hallgrimskirkja, the giant church that looms over the city, we found a little brunch place called Café Loki. We also discovered that we wouldn’t be able to eat out much during our stay. Breakfast for two – Lea bought a bagel with salmon and I went with the “Icelandic Sampler” – cost about $50 USD. As you’ll see in the picture below, the Sampler came with ham on toast, salmon on toast, and mashed potatoes on toast. The white thing behind the Icelandic flag that looks like some kind of pastry is actually fish jerky. That bowl of cubes the flag is sticking out of – that’s the fermented shark.
Y’all. I highly recommend going to Iceland and trying the fermented shark. It is the single most foul thing you will ever put in your mouth, short of drinking bleach. In fact, that’s kind of what it tasted like, with an added whiff of ammonia. Fermented shark ranks way above such paltry culinary delights as durian fruit, frost-blackened potatoes, and stir-fried intestines, all of which I’ve also tasted. Seriously, go and try it. Afterward, your mouth will be grateful for any other meal you eat that isn’t fermented shark.
After that adventure, we tooled around downtown Reykjavik and enjoyed two really interesting museums. The first was Reykjavik 871±2, also known as the Settlement Exhibition.
In 2000, when clearing the ground for a new hotel, excavators discovered the well-preserved remains of a Viking longhouse from the tenth century and other relics from even earlier. The settlement is one of the oldest man-made structures ever found on the island, and can be dated so precisely because of a layer of ash that was deposited in 871 from a volcanic eruption. Once the site was unearthed, they simply built the hotel above it, leaving the excavated longhouse in place in a basement museum.
By mid-afternoon, what we would consider the “hot part of the day” in the southern U.S., the sun had already set. We still had time to visit what is possibly the most fun museum anywhere in the world: the Icelandic Phallological Museum. This small exhibit space is dedicated to the science and art of all things phallological, and it’s impossible to walk through it without a goofy smile on your face. For example, here’s a photo of Lea standing next to a… specimen… from a male whale.
First Night
Tours to see the northern lights leave every evening from the main Reykjavik bus terminal. Since they can’t guarantee the ability to see the lights, or if the lights will even appear, you get a free ticket for the following evening if your initial trip is a bust. Before arriving in Iceland, Lea had contacted a guide who led smaller, private tours, but after arriving we weren’t able to get in touch with him. For our first evening, we elected to follow the tourist cattle call. After all, it would at least be good practice to try out our new equipment.
Back home we’d practiced using the Canon Rebel T3 by going out at night and taking pictures of the stars in near total darkness. While walking around Reykjavik, we shelled out $130 USD at a camera shop for a tripod to replace the one I’d forgotten. This turned out to be a good investment. The one I bought in Iceland was strong, sturdy, and heavy enough to hold still in the fierce northern winds. The aluminum tripod that came with the camera would have blown right over had we tried to use it.
As for what to wear on an Iceland winter’s night, we weren’t taking any chances. We each wore two layers of underwear – one of which was military grade thermal long johns, and heavy-duty thermal socks. We brought jeans that were a size too large to make room for all the extra padding we were wearing underneath. We wore sweaters, high-visibility winter coats, gloves, glove liners, toboggans, masks, and long, wind-resistant raincoats. My gloves were specifically designed so that I could pop my fingers out for short intervals to operate the buttons on my camera and then stick them back under cover so as not to freeze them off.
All of this gear proved necessary on that first night of sky watching, as our bus took us straight into a blinding snowstorm. Three buses, carrying about fifty tourists each, pulled off at an old country church where the whole teeming mass of us waited in the lee of the building for the snow to break and the skies to clear. They didn’t, so back to Reykjavik we went. It did prove a useful trial run of setting up and stabilizing our camera in adverse conditions. It also reinforced my commitment to never live anywhere north of the Alabama-Tennessee state line, at least until global warming really kicks in and the South becomes an unlivable desert.
Bárðarbunga
So, I mentioned that a volcano erupted after we bought our tickets. The eruption was still going strong in January. Bárðarbunga is a “subglacial stratovolcano,” meaning it was erupting under and through Iceland’s largest ice sheet. Unlike the Eyjafjallajökull eruption that sent enough ash into the air to shut down airports all across Europe, Bárðarbunga was spewing out Mount Doom levels of hot red lava.
(Let me pause for a moment to mention that I strongly suspect the Icelandic people of pranking the rest of the world with their language. I think there’s a real, secret Icelandic language in which geologic features have names like “Mount Bob.” I refuse to believe that “Eyjafjallajökull” is an actual word.)
I should also mention for those new to the blog that Lea is a professional geologist. She considered volcanology as a field of study until, as she puts it, she realized that every major eruption takes a volcanologist or two with it.
When we learned that instead of spoiling our vacation plans, we could buy tickets on a charter flight to view the volcano from the air – well, we had to go. It was expensive – really, really expensive – but when was the next time we were going to have the chance to fly over an eruption of this magnitude? Possibly not in our lifetimes. We were sold.
So, on Day Two of our visit, we spent our few meager hours of daylight making our way to Reykjavik’s small, regional airport and boarding a turbo-prop airplane that could maybe hold twenty passengers. The plane took us out over a landscape reminiscent of the planet Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back. The snow and ice went on forever until BOOM – eruptions of molten lava spewed into the sky amidst an enormous field of fresh, black igneous rock.
The red was so red it didn’t look real; it looked like a special effect. As high as we were, the eruptions were clearly enormous. Since we were constantly in motion, I set my Canon on rapid-fire mode and took several hundred photographs as our plane circled the volcano multiple times, giving us a variety of angles and views. It’s hard to get across the sheer sense of scale in pictures, but here you go:
In terms of thrills per dollar, that was some of the best travel money we’ve ever spent, and it completely made up for the whole fermented shark thing.
Second Night
We still hadn’t heard from the guide we’d been hoping would take us on a private tour, but since our first evening on the Mass Tourist Excursion had been for naught we were entitled to a second ride for free. This night was crisp and clear with nary a snowstorm in sight. This was a blessing and a curse. Whereas we had three buses of hopeful stargazers with us on the previous evening, there were nine tour buses this time, packed to the gills with people hoping to see the Aurora Borealis. Any time there are that many people in one place, a sizable fraction of them are bound to be idiots.
Our first stop was a restaurant on the edge of nowhere. It was far enough from Reykjavik to easily see the stars, but near enough that the city lights were still visible. This proved a benefit, because it gave me a clear horizon line on which to focus my camera. There was no aurora to be seen, but we had crystal clear views of the sky. We also got to watch the aforementioned idiots, of which there were plenty, try to take pictures of the stars with their phones.
Using the flash.
Thinking the night was another bust, we piled into our tour buses and headed back toward the city, only for our eagle-eyed guide to tell the driver to stop minutes later. She’d been watching for signs of aurorae out the front window and had spotted something. Soon all the buses had pulled off next to an empty roadside field as we watched the ghostly northern lights take shape overhead.
The lights weren’t as dramatic to the naked eye as photos had led me to believe, but they were still marvelous to watch and the color came out well with long exposures on the camera. What surprised me was that I was able to see the aurora move and change shape in real time. I had expected it to be more static, only changing form and position slowly, like clouds on a windless day. Instead it rolled and waved like a giant streamer in the sky.
I set up my tripod, focused on the horizon, then angled my camera up with the F-stop cranked as low as it would go, the ISO dialed up fairly high, and the exposure time set to ten seconds. Voila:
In many shots the landscape was overexposed, in part because of light from the street and in part because of people trying to take pictures with their flashes. But… We’d bagged our first aurora!
The Golden Circle
In the dead of winter, there’s not much of Iceland you can see, what with the country being buried under meters of snow and ice. However, it’s still possible to do the traditional “Golden Circle” tour of the three big natural wonders in the southwestern part of the island. We signed up for one of these tours on our last full day in the country. The bus picked us up from a nearby hotel early enough in the morning that we would hit the first location around sunrise and still be able to see the last of them before sunset a few hours later.
The first stop was Thingvellir National Park. (Or rather, Þingvellir National Park. I swear, now they’re making up new letters.) At this park you’re standing right on top of the North Atlantic Ridge and can see where the North American and European continental plates are pulling apart from one another.
Next was a geothermal field in the Haukadalur valley containing many active geysers. The one conveniently named “Geysir” is currently dormant, but “Strokkur” erupts every five or ten minutes. The cutest was an energetic, bubbly little hot spot called “Litli Geysir.” I’m serious. The fun thing about visiting these geysers in the winter, and by “fun” I mean “constant fear of slipping and breaking a bone,” is that all the water vapor finds its way back to the ground and freezes into a perfectly smooth, slippery layer of ice everywhere you might want to walk.
Last on the list was a sunset view of the Gullfoss, or “Golden Falls.” The walk to the falls included much hiking up and down through tightly packed snow and then, for the stupid people like me who wanted a closer view, ducking under a chain marked “no admittance past this point” and a nerve-wracking stroll along a narrow, snow-covered ledge to get right up to the falls themselves. In my defense, no one was paying attention to that sign.
Third Night
Lea finally managed to get in touch with our private guide only to find out that he’d been sick but had hoped to get well by the time for our tour. No such luck. Not willing to give up, Lea searched and contacted several tour agencies and at last procured us seats on a nighttime excursion into the wilderness, away from the crowded tour spots and big city lights.
We were picked up in a 4×4 and joined a convoy of four vehicles carrying maybe fifteen sightseers plus drivers and guides. Once we left Reykjavik, our drivers took us off-road back into Þingvellir National Park, following trails into the hills with snowbanks two or three meters high on either side. At first the night wasn’t as clear as the previous evening. We stopped at several hilltops and ridges, pausing for half an hour at each location and watching as the aurora struggled to take shape. The sky grew clearer, but the northern lights were still hazy and indistinct.
In the end we pulled up to a lake ringed by snow-covered hills, with the lights of a road and a handful of houses on the far shore. And the sky above us exploded.
The lights we saw from that lake were phenomenal: brighter, more active, and more complex in form than those on the previous night. Because we were on the shore, the lights were also reflected in the water. I could gush forever, or I could just show you:
Because we were with a smaller, more serious group, we were able to watch the splendor of the lights in relative silence. Those of us taking pictures used tripods, long exposures, and in general knew a little more about what we were doing. There was still some flash photography and “light painting” going on in order to take pictures of people in front of the lights, but it was minimal. As the night drew on and got even colder, our guides served hot chocolate – with vodka. As frigid, starry nights go, it couldn’t have been more perfect.
The Blue Lagoon
No, not the Brooke Shields movie. On the road from Reykjavik back to the airport, there’s a geothermal spa called the Blue Lagoon which is probably the single most visited tourist spot in Iceland. The lagoon began life as a reservoir near a geothermal power plant. The water is rich in minerals from the surrounding lava field, and is blue because of the silica that also forms a grey mud on the bottom of the pool. You’re supposed to spread this mud all over your face and skin for whatever magic “fountain of youth” properties the spa fairies imbue it with.
Though the air was a solid zero Fahrenheit, the water was a balmy 100 degrees. Lea and I paddled around happily in nothing but swimsuits while spa staff walked around the pool bundled up to their noses. The tricky part was the dash from the shower room to the pool itself. For that brief stretch, you have to make it barefoot across slippery, ice-crusted decking without busting your butt before you get into the water.
And that was it for Iceland. After drying off, buying gifts in the gift shop, and digging out pain meds for Lea (who stubbed and probably broke her toe on a silica stalagmite in the pool) we took off on an evening flight to YYZ and a grueling slog through customs before returning to the States.
There are so many places we want to see in the world that there are very few on our “Go a Second Time” list. For me, Iceland is the place I’d most like to return to. However, next time we go we’d like to see it in summer, rent a car, and drive the ring road all around the island. The country is incredibly expensive, but its natural beauty makes it worth the cost, whether you have twenty hours of daylight to enjoy, or only four.
Safe travels, everyone! In a few weeks, for Día de los Muertos, The Escape Hatch will feature a quiet city in southern Mexico where the dead come out to play.