One nice thing about visiting a small-ish country: it requires a lot less rushing around.
After a late night peering out the window, hoping for a glimpse of the Northern Lights (no luck: moon, clouds, city lights), I woke at the eminently reasonable 8:30. I cobbled together a breakfast of bread, jam, and an apple—someone had consumed my yogurt, cheese, and orange juice, which I’d left in the shared kitchen—and headed out to see one last major touristy spot in Reykjavík. I’d seen it on top of a hill across the city at some point, but hadn’t gotten to it yet: the mirrored dome of Perlan.
Perlan used to be a collection of hot water tanks, but has been converted to a museum, complete with glacier and ice cave exhibits, a restaurant, and a crazy expensive gift shop. By night, it’s beautifully lit; by day, the two-way glass of the mirrored dome is fully reflective. I got there at dawn, so the lights were less impressive in the growing light, and the dome was only half reflective.
It nonetheless has a wonderful observation deck, from which I watched Reykjavík… well, I was going to say “waking up for the day,” since lights in the buildings were being replaced with daylight. But, of course, it was 10:00 by then.
I strolled back toward the Airbnb room—there was no rush because check-in at the next place wasn’t until 4:00, and Google told me the drive would be about 4 hours—and discovered a pedestrian tunnel whose walls were completely covered in street art.
I also discovered that I wasn’t far from Hallgrímskirkja, the big church where I’d seen the fireworks. This filled in another section of my cognitive map of the city.
Jimmy (my Suzuki Jimny) was packed and on the road by just after noon. It was a beautiful drive—uneventful, as far as road conditions were concerned, but with constantly changing scenery: roads threading among volcanic mountains, winding along the fjord, or just running arrow-straight across snowy plains.
I had a moment of panic at the Hvalfjörður Tunnel, the only toll road in Iceland. I somehow (stupidly?) found myself about to enter the “eTag” lane (this is like California’s FasTrak). To the obvious dismay of the growing line of cars behind me, I had to back up and get myself into the lane that allows payment. Embarrassing.
The tunnel is an almost six-kilometer jaunt under the Hvalfjörður fjord. (Saying “the Hvalfjörður fjord” is a bit like saying the Crater Lake lake….)
I turned off the main highway toward Skagaströnd, where my next Airbnb guesthouse was located, at just about 4:00. By the time I’d found the guesthouse, met the owner, toured the place, and strewn my belongings across the second bed, it was mostly dark.
(Click on a photo to open the gallery)
Skagaströnd is a small fishing town on the east coast of Húnaflói Bay. I went out to explore both nights; aside from some night workers at the tiny wharf, or working in the market, I saw very few people. And, like many of the Airbnb rooms I stayed in, the owner did not live in the guesthouse, so after the initial tour of the home, I never saw her again. The introvert in me rejoiced, as this meant I didn’t have to feel bad that I wasn’t gregariously interacting with locals. But even I felt a twinge of disappointment that I wasn’t meeting people.
The first night, after my brief exploration—primarily to pick up simple food for dinner (frozen Pad Thai from a Norwegian company…adventurous!)—I took a nap until around 11:00 pm, and then drove out to a parking lot overlooking the bay, once again hoping to catch the Northern Lights. I gave up around 2 in the morning; the moon was still pretty bright, though it was at least no longer full, and the leading edge of a storm was starting to roll in.
On the recommendation of my host, I drove the next day up the peninsula’s coast to see the lighthouse at Kálfshamarsvík. It was my first experience driving on an unplowed road. Very nerve-wracking, both from the car’s tendency to slide to the right whenever it hit deeper snow, and from the fact that I saw only one car the whole time. I had visions of me freezing to death in ditch. But I made it.
A quarter-mile-or-so road led down to a cabin that sat behind a locked fence. Since Jimmy had four wheel drive, I probably could have muscled over the snow drift at the end of that lane, but given the remoteness of the place, as well as the fact that there were no tire tracks from any who’d gone before, I decided to park and walk the last half-mile down to the lighthouse. It was a good choice, as the walk was beautiful—a touch cold, but nothing like the cliff at Dyrhólaey a couple days before.
There were a few sets of footprints, so others had been there since the last snowfall. But for the whole time I was there, I was on my own, anxiously peering at what seemed to be enormous storm clouds to the north—though, in fact, they didn’t actually come any closer for the couple of hours I was there.
The lighthouse just sits there, stolid, on top of an outcrop made up of basalt columns. The cliffs in this area consist of a collection of these black columns of rock, flat-topped and uneven, jammed together. It’s not easy to see in winter, thanks to the snow, and I’m finding it hard to do justice with words. But the travel blogger Regína Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir has a post with great pictures of the area, sans snow. (Scroll down to about the seventh photo.)
(Click on a photo to open the gallery)
The drive back to town took much less time; I guess I was getting used to driving in the snow. The approaching storm was still a ways in the distance, and there was plenty light for a stroll around town, along the wharf, and up into a wildlife preserve, where I clambered up the sides of fairly steep hills in, at times, thigh-deep snow. I slept well that night.
(Click on a photo to open the gallery)
(Incidentally, this was also the day I figured out—finally!—why I never felt like there was a sunrise, and why sunset seemed to take so long. Driving out of town that morning, the sun was directly in my face, squatting right on the horizon, on a road that heads just a tiny bit east of south. That night, it set just about directly southwest, having taken an arc that never got higher than a sunrise/sunset level. It was disorienting never to have the sun actually overhead. But the light was always beautiful.)
The next morning, I packed up, swept the snow off Jimmy, and headed out to Sauðárkrókur for another two-night visit. The snow storm had moved on, though it left some fairly severe winds to buffet my car around as I drove on as-yet unplowed roads. It made my nervousness on the previous day’s drive to the lighthouse seem quaint.
Surprisingly, the winds died down as I reached the coast of Skagafjörður, the fjord on which Sauðárkrókur sits.
I pulled into town around 3:00, a couple hours before check-in at my next Airbnb, so I stopped for lunch at the eclectic but friendly Hard Wok Cafe. Feeling welcome and well fed, I drove the streets randomly, winding up a curvy road to a cemetery at the top of the hill.
At 5:00, I found my way out of town and around to the farmhouse where I was to spend the next two nights. It was the only place I went that Google Maps didn’t know about—but it was also the only place, lights blazing in the growing darkness, within kilometers on the long, narrow side road. It was easy enough to find.
My room looked out on Sauðárkrókur, a string of lights in the distance, across a pitch black expanse.
I unpacked and unwound, curled up on a comfortable reading chair, and listened to an audiobook while my host family binge-watched Arrow in the next room. And somewhere in there, it began to snow again. There was much less drama with this snowfall—not nearly as much wind—but it actually dropped more snow, creating a beautiful scene for me to awaken to the next morning.
This is one in a series of six posts about a 10-day trip I made to Iceland in early 2018. The first four describe the actual trip; the last two reflect on my experiences:
- Iceland: New Year’s in Reykjavik
- Iceland: South and back
- Iceland: A Taste of the north
- Iceland: The last leg of the journey
- Reflections on my Iceland trip, part 1: Some good choices
- Reflections on my Iceland trip, part 2: Some room for improvement