One of the many little touches that make this whole trip a masterpiece of travel planning is that I came to Iceland a few days after the regular transport links to sites around Reykjavik stopped running. Without a car, I had to take a bus tour.
One good thing about these tours is that you end up with photographs that make it seem like you trekked to all sorts of wild and beautiful spots, when, as a general thing, you actually leaned against a rail and snapped a photo while twenty other tourists all around you took exactly the same picture. It would be very easy to misrepresent the amount of effort involved in getting these photos.
I don't like bus tours. Mostly, this is because I prefer to cling to the laughable idea that I'm too cool for them; but it's also true that the things you want to see, you can't, and the things you do see, you may not care to. My tour had a stop at a geothermal power plant. The plant was set in a surreal volcanic landscape. Mountains of steaming black rubble, patchily covered with moss and tufts of yellow grass. It looked like they started to build hell there, but abandoned the site -- perhaps the investors dropped out -- and let it become shabby and overgrown. But we were only there to see a Powerpoint lecture on geothermal power generation. Afterwards, the bus trundled obliviously on through the rest of the area as the guide made some further observations on the merits of geothermal power.
We also saw Haukadalur, a small, sulfurous valley of geysers (including Geysir itself, the geyser that started it all) and hot springs. What happens at a geyser is that people stand around a bubbling pothole for ten minutes or so with cameras held to their faces and their fingers on shutter buttons, like gunfighters waiting for a signal. Curiously, there was a hotel and a set of cabins adjacent to the valley. The whole area is quite small, and a geyser really only entertains the first few times you see it. But there are definitely Scandinavian notions of holidaymaking that I don't understand. The tour operator pointed out some Icelandic summer homes, which were small houses scattered across a featureless rocky plain, spaced about a hundred metres apart. I tried to think of what you would do for a summer in such a place, and the question seems like a very hard one.
I might also have been alone in not having much enthusiasm for geology. The most excitement of the day on this bus was occasioned by the announcement that we were at the spot where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet. I'm not sure whether the other tourists were fanatically interested in geology, or whether they expected more than they got (there's sort of a large depression, and then a few small fissures). This was also the site of the original Althing, which seemed more interesting to me. But the site is marked only by a flagpole at the base of a cliff, and the real reason buses stop is so you can wander about at the top of the cliff (generally behind a sturdy railing) and snap pictures of the admittedly stupendous views.
The Blue Lagoon
Between the airport and the city are fields of jagged black volcanic rubble covered in thick moss. These go on for miles, out to the slopes of the volcanos that presumably made them. In the middle of one of these fields is a geothermal power plant, and beside this power plant, there is a spa. The spa was built by clearing away much of the rubble, carefully landscaping the rest, and piping in saltwater that's been heated by the geothermal plant. This spa, the Blue Lagoon, is one of the country's big tourist draws. It's essentially an enormous open-air hot tub surrounded by mounds of volcanic rock, with an attached gift shop and clinic, which try to sell you overpriced beauty products and dubious medical claims, respectively.
I went on the way back to the airport. And it is an interesting place. The water is an odd milky blue and is supposed, in some way I don't understand, to be good for your skin. There are tubs of white mud here and there that you're supposed to rub on your face. I did this, though I don't know enough about these things to know what it accomplishes. I would say that some people are helped by it, and some aren't. But then they clean it off after a few minutes, and are back where they started. There's also a small but powerful waterfall you can stand under to get a kind of heavy, thumping massage, if you can squeeze in between the Russians who generally hog it.
Leaving the spa (exit through the gift shop) is a bit of a shock, as you're suddenly exposed to the freezing winds that blow in unobstructed off the North Atlantic. These are winds you have to lean into in order to stay upright; if the wind suddenly slackens, which it rarely does, you stumble. It's worth mentioning here that the shuttle passed a golf course in a very similar setting. 9 short holes of greens and fairways somehow, and for some reason, constructed in one of the roughest, most shelterless, and least hospitable spots you could think of. The Apollo astronauts famously trained in Iceland for the moon landings, and this course makes you wonder whether it was for the moon golf they played during Apollo 14, when the public began to get a bit bored of just landing on the moon and astronauts started performing zany stunts to keep things interesting.
Other things
Iceland is clean. You could eat off any surface in Iceland. If you caught a virus here, it would probably be something that clears up your skin, resolves any mental health problems you may have, and then respectfully stops reproducing and dies out. I wonder how India will compare.
Number of people to said hello to me in Iceland for no reason: 2. A woman with a baby in the cemetery, and a girl leaning out the window of a slow-moving car.
What's on Icelandic television on a Monday night: A news program in Icelandic, BBC news, BBC Wales, CNN, another American news program, and two American sitcoms (USA 4, UK 2, Iceland 1).
