Iceland... at last.

Iceland was amazing! I would like to go back some day... when I'm rich. I searched for a place to stay a few days before arriving and the best value I could find was a bed in a room with 19 other beds in a hostel for about $70 a night. This actually turned out to be a good arrangement though. When you're travelling alone, it's easy to meet people when there are 19 of them sleeping in your room...

Economically, Iceland is interesting. Everything is around double or triple the cost of the equivalent in the U.S. The entire country has a population of about 300,000, but I read that about 400,000 tourists visit every year. That, no doubt, has a profound effect on the main city and the economy. Reykjavik, despite it's small size, has an abundance of shopping and restaurants and whatnot. The main street, called Laugavegur (which is actually very hard to pronounce), was primarily where I hung out for the first two days. I walked up and down it at least ten times. It's lined with jewelry shops, designer clothing, cafes, bookstores, and lots of tourist shops that sell all manner of overpriced Icelandic trinkets. The popular belief is that everyone that actually lives in Iceland is middle class and technologically savvy. I don't know how true that is, but I didn't see anything that looked like a poor area of the city and I didn't see any homeless people. I did, however, read in a local paper that this isn't entirely true - that there is a significant population of impoverished Icelanders. I don't remember the details, but it was presumably farmers and shepherds and more of a rural problem... Regardless, I wouldn't be able to survive there for long. With all the tourism, the prices were very high.

The language of Iceland didn't come up very often, other than insanely long street and city names. Everyone spoke English first. I have black hair, which I think is a rarity among natives, so that could have been the reason for that. I wish I'd tried harder to learn the language though. I didn't look at my phrasebook at all because of the ease of communication.

During my stay in Reykjavik I collected many tourist pamphlets. I really wanted to take a tour of the island, but they all had only one departure, usually very early in the morning, and they were very expensive. For example, a bus tour to the glacier lagoon on the southeastern side of the island was around 16,000 krona, which is over $230! I was undecided on what I wanted to do. Renting a car seemed out of the question as well, because of the rental expense and the cost of fuel... So I tried to check out some of the city since I seemed to be stuck there. I wandered around to various churches. I went to a cool restaurant/museum/tourist shop called the Perlan on a hilltop overlooking the city with Kelsey (a fellow American that I met at the hostel). I went to some old man's home theater for the "Volcano Show" - two hours or so of volcano footage that he and his father had filmed during their lifetimes. That was actually pretty neat! Iceland has a fascinating history with all the volcanic activity. Read about Surtsey, an island that arose from the sea in 1963 and grew larger over four years of constant volcanic activity. And check out the story of Eldfell, a large volcano that erupted on the island of Heimaey, nearly destroying the entire city!

After exploring the city for a couple days, I had seen pretty much everything I wanted to see, and I really wanted to get out into the wilderness. So, I came up with a brilliant idea... a fairly obvious idea actually, but brilliant nonetheless. I put up an ad on the door to my 20-bed bedroom asking if anyone wanted to split the cost of a car rental and gas and take a road trip to see the geysers, waterfalls, and glacier lagoon. At the hostel, there was an ad to rent a car for a day, unlimited mileage, for 9000 krona ($130). I talked to the Hostel Receptionist Guy (I believe that's his official title) about it and booked it. That night, I took myself out to my one and only nice dinner in Iceland. I wanted to get a fish dinner at Ristorante Caruso, a lovely, very romantic, fantastically delicious restaurant right off the main street. I ordered a screwdriver with Reyka vodka (a very tasty Icelandic vodka that I first discovered at Twin Liquors in the Hancock Center in Austin!) and main course of the fish of the day - trout I think. It was the best fish ever! It was really, really good and I don't normally like trout or whatever the hell kinda fish it was - it was a kind I don't normally like... Anyway, I truly wish that Andrea had been there. I had a very nice, candlelit dinner alone in a foreign country and despite the fantastic atmosphere and food, I was sad because I couldn't share it with anyone. Living the most adventurous, fantastic life you could live would be hell if you had to do it alone... So, I got home, partied with a bunch of U.K. dudes and drank their booze, and then went to sleep.

I awoke and assembled my road tripping crew... which turned out to be a total of three people: me, a French guy named Anselme, and Kelsey. The Hostel Receptionist Guy said that lots of people had asked him about it, but I couldn't find any more of them that morning. Oh well. 9000 krona divided by 3 is still a hell of a lot better than 9000 krona divided by 1 - plus I get to direct this tour now! Wooo! So, we got in our little VW Polo and took off... in the wrong direction. We travelled through this crazy tunnel under the ocean for about 5 minutes, paid a huge toll, decided we weren't sure that this was the right way, pulled out a map, realized we screwed up, sped a lot in a different direction, and then got pulled over by the local fuzz. It wasn't the best start, but hey, I'm not a professional. I had no idea where we were or where we were going. The cop was fairly friendly. I had been doing 110km/hour in a 90km zone - not really speeding that much... I handed him a Texas driver's license and started bawling like a little girl. Just kidding - that only works for women. I did mention that we were lost and sidetracked him into to giving me directions and helping me find my way back - he didn't give me a ticket. He knew that I'd just leave the country and never pay it anyway... He did emphasize that I should "keep my mind on the road!" He repeated it several times, hehe. I told him I would...

The first stop on the road trip was the geyser area - a popular tourist destination. It was incredible! A field of steaming holes that occasionally exploded into the sky. Nothing between you and a boiling death but a thin piece of rope. And not even that in some places - one wrong step and you'd be human stew. You doesn't realize how much America caters to the lowest common denominator until you travel the world. We have "caution: hot beverage" warnings on our coffee, but they didn't even have a "watch out for the open pit of boiling water" sign or a fence to keep you back. Slightly scary, but at the same time, slightly liberating. Anyway, check out my Flickr photos from Iceland for pictures - they say more than I can with words.

The next stop was a bit further away. We travelled for a few hours down the main highway, Ring Road. Looking out the front, rear, or right window, you see mostly wide green fields of lava rock or moss. Looking out the left window you see mountains and cliffs with occasional glacier-fed waterfalls. Every once in awhile, there is a little ranch or farmhouse at the foot of these mountains. I took a few photos of them. Very scenic. The drive was very peaceful, but not boring. You have to stay alert because there are long stretches of road that pass through grazing areas for Icelandic sheep. The sheep are hilarious with their huge fluffy butts and stubby legs. They're like caricatures of normal sheep. And yet, despite their silly appearance, they are amazing mountain climbers. Every once in awhile you will see little cotton puffs halfway up a cliff, and it's the sheep grazing on moss. I have no idea how they get up there. After passing through this beautiful scenery, we reached the highlight, Skogafoss. Again, the pictures in my Flickr account speak for themselves. The colors around Skogafoss area were amazing - such vibrant green on the hillsides!

Our final stop on the road trip was the glacier lagoon, Jokulsarlon. The drive from Skogafoss to Jokulsarlon was desolate - overcast skies with light rain, completely devoid of human and sheep life - we drove through a long stretch of nothing but black lava rock. I want to say it was depressing, but it wasn't really. It was just... empty... Maybe it was sort of fantastically depressing... or impressively depressing. I don't know. We raced to get to the glacier lagoon before sunset and arrived just in time to see the sun go behind the mountains. There were no signs for some reason - we ended up just turning down a gravel path and driving until we hit it. There was only one other car there and it left shortly after we arrived. We were alone... It was so quiet... For awhile, we just stared at it all and took pictures. Then we started skipping rocks and seeing if we could throw rocks onto some of the floating icebergs. The only sounds were the plops of stones into ice cold water... At one point a few other people showed up around the side of the lake - they were the size of ants from where we sat, but it was so quiet that I could hear the crunch of their boots on the gravel. Quite possibly the quietest place on Earth...

The drive back was four hours of rain and darkness. Actually, just before nightfall we picked up a hitchhiker. It was raining and there were three of us - we felt safe in numbers. Besides, I had heard that hitchhiking was fairly common in Iceland and I could see why after just driving across the country. His name was Viktor - he actually e-mailed me after I got back to the U.S. I need to send him a link to this blog. He was a cool guy. He gave us lots of recommendations of bars to go to in Reykjavik and other random info. It was nice just to have some conversation in the car. We ended up driving with him for maybe an hour - I don't remember how long - towards a small town called Vik. He was on the way to meet his family. As it turns out, they had a huge bus, and we just met them halfway. We pulled off the road, turned on the hazards, and just hung out and listened to some music while we waited for them to reach us.

Somewhere in middle of the night, on the way back to town, I decided to see just how dark it really was - we had been driving through black, rainy nothingness for hours. So, I pulled over, turned off the car, and had a moment of pitch black darkness. Pretty awesome. On a road in the middle of nowhere with thick cloud cover and rain, the light pollution was almost zero. Kinda spooky.

We got back at around two in the morning and I slept. I woke up, packed, and checked out my last stop in Iceland - the Blue Lagoon. The Blue Lagoon is world famous for it's massive outdoor hot spring. I'm not really that interested in spas or homeopathic stuff, but I couldn't leave without seeing one of more popular tourist attractions - and besides, it was fairly close to the airport. I'm funny - on the bus there, we passed a beautiful area with blue water and moss that was very picturesque, so I actually hiked about 10 or 15 minutes back down the road from the Blue Lagoon spa to go take pictures there... Inside the spa, I received a wristband that I used to lock and unlock my lockers. They had a very high tech system: you put your stuff in a locker, close the door, your locker number beeps on an LED display, you put your wristband in front of a sensor, and your door locks. To unlock it, you just put your wristband back in front of the sensor. Once inside, I went into the big pool and just floated around for an hour or so. It was very nice. I can't say that I felt any magical healing effects from the obviously magical steaming blue-white water, but I wasn't really ailing when I entered. It was, however, very relaxing. Afterwards, I took a bus back to the airport and caught a plane back to The States...

That's it. I hope everyone's enjoyed reading this long-winded blog. I hope you folks keep on reading my day to day stuff. I'll try to keep it interesting. It's good to be back, but I hope I can travel again soon.