The standard icelandic breakfast having been consumed, I waged a short war on the phone with ALP car rentals about the foolishness of parking on meters without telling their clients. The cost of the call was probably higher than the 2/3 of the fine that they agreed to pay, but at least I felt better about it! We packed up the car and decided to walk into the city before leaving for a tour of the peninsular. The first stop was the Hallgrimskirkja - a modern church which is the highest building (at 73m) in Reykjavik. The design of the church was commissioned in 1937, but it took almost 60 years to see it completely finished with the new organ console installed in front of the magnificent 5000-pipe organ. We took the lift up the tower, entertained with piped sacred music purchasable on CD downstairs, and admired the view over the city and its surroundings. When the bells, 10 ft above our heads, struck the half hour the decibels were truly deafening - I’m surprised the safety conscious Icelanders didn’t ban tower visits at midday! Back at ground level, we photographed the statue of Leifur Eriksson out front - the Icelander who found America well before Columbus did and then walked down to the park where a fountain was playing in the lake.
We recc’ed the well-publicised Volcano Show and booked tickets for the evening show prior to our departure, slightly surprised at the amateurishness of the little cinema in the rather garagey building next door to the Anglo-German Consulate. The bushy-bearded middle-aged owner, ticket seller, film-maker and general dogsbody was there to greet us and assured us that the show would start on time, unless a volcano should erupt in the meantime, which he seemed to think was quite probable.
From there we began the end-of-holiday shopping experience, which was, in some ways, easier in Iceland since there was not much in the way of local products to buy. We settled for quite a lot of books, a surprisingly expensive commodity, it seemed, with prices 2-3 times as high as one might have expected back home. We also tried on loads of icelandic woollen jumpers, both the gorgeously thick-knit hand made ones and the thinner but equally colourful machine produced ones but couldn’t quite see ourselves clad in them back home. And with prices starting from about £60 each they seemed a bit of a luxury item. Lunchtime was looming, and after a visit to the state monopoly liquor store to see if we had been ripped off for the boose along the way (we hadn’t), we bumped into our Swedish motorcyclists again in the restaurant zone. Exchanging good wishes for the remainder of our respective trips, we made our way back towards the hotel up the main shopping street, no prawn smorebrod to be seen anywhere on any menu. ....and I thought this was where they grew! A small basement coffee shop beckoned as my feet began to tire, and some wonderful-looking chocolate cake sat behind the counter. Did they have any prawn smorebrod by any chance? No they didn’t. But they could make us some... this was better! Several excellent coffees and two large sandwiches later we were eventually ready to tackle the chocolate cake, which was as good as it looked. Never mind the prices - this was the best lunch of our holiday!
We drove west on the main road towards Keflavik and the geothermal areas of the western Reykjanes and, due to road works, were forced to take the scenic route around the north coast. Eventually we rejoined the main highway and before reaching the airport, we took the road around the coast to the south and west to look at the most westerly land in Europe. Needless to say it was all lava again and quite new! Very black, foamy and in quite big slabs. I climbed up a couple of small craters about 50ft in height and was surprised to find lovely deep moss and wild flowers within them. These mini-volcanoes must have been the scene of terrible fiery eruptions some hundreds of ears ago, but perhaps nowadays on summer weekends they were full of courting couples making the ground move in a more personal way. On a sunny Monday afternoon they were completely peaceful and as deserted as the miles of lifeless waste-land around them.
Turning back towards the east, we came to the fishing town of Grindavik, which was not at all pretty, and turned back north to complete the circuit and visit the phenomenon known as the Blue Lagoon. This remarkable attraction is hidden amongst a giant field of lava boulders and is easy to find due to the plume of steam escaping from the geothermal power plant just upstream of it. Apparently, what happens is that a mixture of rain- and sea-water percolates into the porous rocks under this patch of Iceland and is raised up to around 350°C. The high pressure high temperature steam is used to power turbines which generate electricity. After this job is accomplished, the majority of the steam is condensed into hot water. However, this hot water is too saline to distribute for space heating and so cold fresh-water is pumped up from a borehole in the vicinity, and is passed through a heat exchanger with the waste water/steam from the power station. The fresh water, now at 80°C, is pumped along a 300km network of pipes and is used to heat the majority of buildings in Reykjavik, 40km away. The cooler aquamarine-coloured saline water is discharged at 70°C to form the Blue Lagoon - billed as a healing spa due to the high level of silica, salts and other dissolved solids such as dead algae. Last year saw a major new 2-storey building with restaurant, mini-hotel and tourist shop opened where formerly stood, by all accounts, a modest wooden structure of changing rooms and bath-house.
We should have gone in, but we didn’t. Our excuse is that we didn’t have enough time, but to be honest, I wasn’t entirely keen to feel the squidgy white silica mud between my toes or dry off with alkali-metal chlorides crystallising all over my body. So I popped out onto the terrace to take some photos of braver souls. The camera malfunctioning, I popped back in to sort it out, and then back out again while R shopped. “Aren’t you going to take a photo of us then?” asked the follically challenged but generously proportioned male with his lady-friend under the little footbridge. “Yes, of course, if you would like me to”, I replied, thinking that this might be a usual sort of conversation with Icelanders in blue lagoons, but wasn’t entirely the sort of thing met with in English swimming pools. As I took the photo, I lamely gave my shortage-of-time excuse for not joining the couple, who were clearly looking for company in the steamy swamp. Back at the shop, I suddenly realised who they were - it was the Swedish motorcyclists once again! With my clothes on and theirs off, they had a distinct advantage on the recognition front! I penned a card and fixed it to the speedo on the Swedish lady’s BMW, and maybe it will result in an invitation to a sauna party in Stockholm next year! If so, I guess I’ll have to go on my bike!
We arrived back at the Volcano Show with 10 minutes to spare and, with 20 or so other customers, were shown to our seats in the little auditorium. Our host, Villi Knudsen (not at all an Icelandic name), put us at our dis-ease with a series of deadpan deliveries about earthquakes shaking the building during the show and how, even now, he was at any minute expecting a call to go and fly over an erupting volcano not a lava-bomb throw from where we were. He and his father Osvaldur had, in their time, recorded on film every eruption in Iceland since 1947. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to me to have learned the secret of smooth edits and a progressing storyline, since interminable sequences of flying tephra or flowing lava were punctuated with shots of Greenland eskimos and inactivity on Icelandic lakes. Every now and then we cut to ‘my cameraman, on stand-by near the wild shores of Lake Myvatn’ or to aerial footage of a volcano that might just be about to erupt, and one kept expecting a Hollywood style sequence where the primary explosive eruption happened right on cue. Unfortunately, it never did, the camera never being quite in the right place until several hours or even days after an eruption began. For me, the most spectacular shots were from the eruption under the ice of Vatnajokull glacier in 1996, when huge volumes of ice were melted by the volcano, and trapped by the glacier for almost a month, before a cataclysmic discharge at the edge of the glacier sent millions of tons of water, ice and rock racing down across the plain below, sweeping away every natural or man-made artefact in its path. Unfortunately this sequence only lasted a couple of minutes - I could have done with 5 times the footage of this sequence and rather less of the sticky red stuff plopping up and down. We also saw the island of Surtsey rise from the sea in 1963/4 (from every possible angle), and the harbour town on Heimaey almost destroyed in 1973. In the latter case, the plastic flow of the semi-molten lava through the town towards the harbour was halted just in time by the radical idea of pouring water on it. OK - so why didn’t anyone think of that before?
We both agreed, as we came out, that we were very glad we had been to the show at the end of the holiday instead of at the beginning of it. We learned, for example, that Hella, where we stayed for nights 2 and 6, had suffered a massive earthquake (R 6.8) 10 days before we stayed there, with more shocks expected. We also learned, reading between the lines, that if you live where nature might kill you at any minute, you definitely don’t talk about it - especially to the tourists! Did Iceland’s exchequer, we wondered, have enough booty to defend a spate of lawsuits from Americans caught in natural disasters that, one might argue, they should have been warned about before setting foot on Iceland? Should the holiday brochure have mentioned that a newly formed island on top of the world’s most active mantle hot-spot is not exactly the safest place to visit for a relaxing vacation? The young blonde tour guide at the hotel in Skaftafell was adamant that Katla, the snoozing giant under the Myrdalsjokull icecap, was a mere 2 years overdue in erupting (3% of its cycle), whereas all the geologists and vulcanologists said it was 40 years overdue for a big explosion, which they expected to happen any day! I expect we would still have made the trip if we had realised just how unstable the geology of Iceland is, since, statistically, hardly anyone gets killed by the Icelandic hot-spot ....... yet.
With all this food for thought, we made our way to the airport and the last challenge for the day - refuelling the Nissan before parking it and giving up the keys. Simple in England, this proved to be a nightmare in Iceland! Having established that there was no petrol station at the airport, we went into downtown Keflavik. At one petrol station (when we eventually found it) we sat for 10 minutes waiting for some kids to fill their car, and then found out the only way to get petrol was to feed paper currency into a machine. Having purposely spent almost all the Kronor, this wasn’t going to work, so we tried the other petrol station in the town, which had closed 2 hours earlier! The nearest other petrol at midnight being 30km back towards Reykjavik we reluctantly parked up with an almost empty tank and trusted to ALP not to charge too much for filling the vehicle for us. Fortunately, even having wasted almost an hour trying to fill up, we still had plenty of time, so queued up to check in at departures where the least helpful Icelanders we met during our stay were out in force. Our turn in line eventually came, and our two suitcases totalled 48Kg. “Do you want to pay the excess on the weight, Sir? I think it’s £20 per Kg”. The problem was solved since it was only the checked weight they were really interested in - hand baggage was not actually weighed despite fearsome notices to the contrary. Out came the rucksack and in it went shoes, geological samples, books and waterproof trousers. Eventually reaching the magic number, the suitcase was dispatched into the bowels of the baggage system and, having passed through customs and security I stumbled along under a rucksack, a heavy holdall and a PC, while Rachael gamely struggled up the stairs to departures with her handbag. Words ensued, and we next talked to eachother at a Little Chef in Huntingdon after a pretty gruelling 3 hour flight and an abortive stop at the M11 services near Stanstead, who wanted £7.50 each for a plate of breakfast.

Dammit - anyone would think we were still in Iceland!