our iceland trip
We have been reading this
awesome blog, and think that now we have to start writing the
diary about our Iceland trip before it falls into the
oblivion. However, we did not sell our house and quit our jobs before
the trip. It was only afterwards that we leased our apartment, and
moved to the other side of the world. We got married 4.5 years ago,
and have had honeymoon ever since.
There are some issues that we find characteristic of Iceland, some
of them very subtle, some of them outstanding, and we are not talking
about the hot springs and sulfur, but some things that took us by
surprise or left us outraged, or just amused.
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Wind
windy in iceland
pouring rain
heat wave
No one told us that it is so windy in Iceland. We have been to windy
places before, such as Wyoming, where we got the constant strong wind
that we just had to push against at lowest gear in 5km per
hour. Iceland is nothing like that. In Iceland the wind is strong and
gusty, and it makes riding sometimes totally impossible. It makes
walking the bike impossible --- quite honestly, it makes holding the
bike on the ground quite impossible. We get tossed off the road to the
ditch several times, especially Tomi with his bike having more wind
surface. We encounter some very dangerous situations when riding on
the Highway #1 with a lot of heavy traffic. Sometimes we have to take
the dirt trail that runs along the highway in order to avoid been
thrown into the traffic. Sometimes, we just have to wait.
We get both extremes of the Icelandic Summer weather: pouring rain
in single digits, and then abundant sunshine in toasting heat. On the
positive side, we are also there during the heat wave, when the
temperatures reach the record high of +27 degrees of Celsius. Oh, the
sunshine makes the landscape look so different, even the most dramatic
scenes are so radiant and pretty.
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Bicycle lanes
sophisticated bicycle/pedestrian trail system
Besides the wind, Iceland is not particularly bicycle friendly
country, partly because of missing bicycle lanes and partly because of
missing signage where ever the lanes do exist. Especially, the capital
Reykjavik is hard to approach ... and leave on bicycle. The city has a
sophisticated bicycle/pedestrian trail system, but with very few maps
located from four to five kilometers apart, it is not very usable. It
gets cognitively quite burdensome to keep all the turns and twists in
mind.
Like in Alaska, the bicycle lanes suddenly start and end
in nowhere, or they leave the highway without warning, and start
following a minor road. Upon noticing this, it is very difficult to
return to the highway.
One could argue, that Iceland is not particularly accessible for other
sorts of vehicles or travellers either:
not particularly accessible
either
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Food
olis
kfc
Now to our favorite topic! Olis (meaning 'would be' in Finnish) gas
station chain saves us several times during our trip: it provides food
and beverages, shelter from rain, restroom facilities to change
clothes, and a place to fix a flat tire. And all the gas station
cafeterias are heated!
The most common food we find at the gas station cafeterias (there
are not many other options: we are really lucky if we find any place
to eat in small towns with the population of few hundreds) are hot
dogs (that's what the local people eat) and burgers, but some places have
pizza, too. Burgers come with fries. However, the fries do no come with
ketchup but with
cocktail sauce. Only kids get ketchup with their fries.
There are also several American chain restaurants we have not seen
anywhere else in Europe, such as Domino's pizza, and several usual
ones. The KFC franchise
in Njardvik
is probably the most fancy one we have seen. We don't know if the
place is open yet. We have a couple of finer dining experiences in
our trip, though: in Holmavik we have puffin, in Hraunsnef we have a
traditional Icelandic menu with shark (more on that later), and in
Njardvik we have some nice cognac flambered scallops and shrimp (more
on that later, too).
fine dining
Breakfast is the same everywhere in Iceland, whether in a hotel, a
motel, or a hostel: coffee, tee, juice, selection of cold cereals,
yoghurt and skyr (skyr
is not yoghurt but sort of fresh cheese), bread, butter, cheese, and
cold cuts. Some places even serve fruits. Nothing warm, whatsoever, is
available anywhere: no hot cereal, no scrambled eggs and sausages, no
bacon, no pancakes.
One more anecdote: most food is served on Ikea plates with Ikea
silverware, and beverages enjoyed from Ikea cups and mugs, and
glasses.
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German tourists
everywhere
They are everywhere. They crowd breakfast buffets, and they cut in
lines. They crowd the scenic points and take pictures of us without
asking permission. They are arrogant and obnoxious. They
seemingly think they own, if not the whole world, at least Iceland.
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Signs
by accident
Icelanders do not do very good job in advertising or giving
directions. For instance, some hotels are marked on the map and
listed in tourists guides (with the address), but there are no signs
on the roadside directing to them. They may be located on the
side road instead of the main highway, but that is hard to spot on the
map. So, we probably miss a lot of these places, and end up riding
painfully long and wet days looking for the next place. Some other
places we just find by accident, like the place on the left in
Bordeyri.
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Golf courses
rocky
lava bed
There is no such a lava bed or rocky slope that one cannot have a
golf course on. There are golf courses everywhere, and apparently golfers, too.
Even some churches have their own course.
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Animals
horses
sheep
Everyone knows Icelandic horses. There are about 75,000 of them in the
country. However, who knows how many sheep there are in Iceland?
There are many, that's for sure. Sheep are everywhere. They often
cross the roads, but sometimes they even keep running, jogging,
galloping in front of our bicycles. They are kind of stupid in that
way: they can't just step aside and let us pass, but they stop and
when we are approaching close enough, they start galloping again.
Wikipedia tells there are about half a million lambs in Iceland.
Then there are the birds, some sort of waterfowls that are all
around us except on the highest mountain passes. We don't know if it is
a hatching season or if these birds are just maniacs, but some of
them follow us for kilometers shrieking and squealing, or whatever
that noise could be called.
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Huge vehicles
vehicles
Icelanders drive humongous cars, or decent size cars with humongous
tires. On top of that there are a lot of RV's on the roads. We wonder
where people get them from: are they rental cars or do people fly them
over?
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