Tag Archives: iceland

Journal

Day 17: Ice land Memory

It’s the final evening of our stay in Iceland. I wanted to write this before we left this country for good because it seems more meaningful to compose it here than to wait time far away and distracted by other things.

I want to describe our thoughts and emotions about Iceland before they evaporate, much like the snow is currently doing. I read the lonely planet guidebook to the country. The opening two pages are very evocative – as someone who writes I could even predict that it probably took them three days, five rewrites and three editors to bring that together. And in that way, we also want to capture our memories for posterity and for our family to reflect back on in years to come.

Nothing could have prepared us for the aircraft approach over Iceland. Snow fell in the UK in the days preceding our departure. I saw the amount of chaos it created. They even seemed to pause the debate on Brexit to deal with news about the snow.

Over here, I suppose that snow is an expected regular event. The have snowploughs doing their jobs and cars driving around seemingly unhindered. Everyone appears to have studied winter tyres on as well which must help. I haven’t seen any sort spreading trucks anywhere and despite that things just seem to run.

I wonder if this country will be the same in 20 years? It’s becoming more popular, and although it deals with the tourists well, one can imagine that there is an upper limit to the number of people it can accommodate. For example, we are staying in a beautiful, architecturally designed habitat in the middle of nowhere. Last night some people arrived quite late. They waited for the night and were off early this morning. They didn’t stop to appreciate the countryside around here, breathtaking as it is. My understanding is that lots of people circumnavigate the island and find accommodation en route. It’s possible to make the journey in about two weeks if you just stay somewhere different every night. But it is that kind of transience which may create challenges later with people passing through but never becoming part of what they see or letting it bond with their soul.

My Iceland has been a thought-provoking and inspiring one. I marvel at the snow-covered passes, the deep ravines, the frozen waterfalls and the fact that you can go round the corner of a mountain and all the snow has disappeared due to what must be some kind of microclimate. I marvel at the fact that all the coffee I’ve drunk here has been beautiful, and that beauty has been apparent even to me, and I’m not a coffee lover and rarely drink coffee. I marvel at the fact that things run, even though the snow is thick and the days (and nights) are cold. I marvel at the fact that the air seemed so clean and the place seems so pure, and the water tastes so great.

I marvel at the fact that I can go to the supermarket and it feels like a supermarket in any other country. The shelves are full of stuff which could not possibly have grown here but still exists on that shelf for us to buy. And even though so many things must be air-freighted into the country, things are not as expensive as you expect. And of course, how could I forget the northern lights. Those beautiful, mysterious occurrences that people say they understand but somehow seem to defy understanding when you actually stand on the ground and watch them. We were lucky to witness two shows. The first one is probably what most people will remember as their experience, the tour guide saying that it was sporadic to see it like that. But it is the second show on Friday, 8 February 2019 that blew everyone’s minds. We saw multiple colours, shimmering and twists and turns in the light that I’m reasonably confident are extremely rare. The curious thing is that our guides on the first night said that the lights get stronger as the night goes on. They said you just stay there and watch and things will only get better. But on that second night’s display, that proved it all wrong the spectacular light show was only visible for a few minutes before it petered out into nonexistence. If you’d been inside for a little bit too long or held out for it to get better as the evening drew on, then you would have been sorely disappointed. In that, I find a model for all of us. We sometimes take the advice that things will be ready in their own good time and that the expert knows best. But when you are talking about ephemeral and mysterious things then perhaps there is no such thing as an expert, and you just have to seize the moment when it comes away because life and time don’t wait for anyone.

So our journey has involved a few days in Reykjavík staying in an apartment followed by a few days out near Selfoss in the south of the country. It has had its challenges. For example, when visiting Gesir yesterday, I fell over and injured my wrist quite badly. Don’t think it’s sprained but you never know. I can move my hand at least, albeit with pain, so at least no tendon snapped. But that was caused by slipping on the ice. I wasn’t being complacent, but accidents can happen. Glad it happened near the end of the trip.

Currently, I’m sitting in the architecturally designed home that I mentioned earlier. Let me describe in more detail. Two owners called Inga and Isac have created three beautifully designed houses on the mountain escape. They have underfloor heating and lots of wooden windows and glass walls. There clean and warm and the kind of place that I could imagine sitting in all day and just gazing out at the scenery. If you know me, you would also know that there are very few things that could captivate me for so long. But this place and the vista from it are to such things. I don’t think I could live here permanently, but I doubt it is designed as a permanent dwelling. It is, however, a beautiful holiday home. 12 of us have been able to co-mingle in comfort.

Being the last evening, we took some photographs of all of us, by making use of Eugene’s tripod. It’s a lovely photograph to remember our time here, but it was the family moments that followed afterwards, but I think I will remember the most. These unscripted and choreographed moments that change lives and form lifelong memories. While I cannot say that Iceland has changed me forever, what I will say is that every experience you encounter changes you in some form or other. I look around here and like said before I’m not confident that it will be this way in 20 years. There’s a certain intransigence and disrespect for the earth, personalised by some of the politicians who are in power at this moment. The land seems more fragile than ever, and while I’m not getting on my ecological high horse, I can see that there are certain things humans do that will be very difficult to reverse or recover from. And the blatant disregard for those behaviours by those in charge makes me a little sad.

So I am grateful to see Iceland now. And perhaps one day I will return with the family. I’ve watched the scene from Walter Mitty a few times, and although that is a very different Iceland from the one that I see here, not least because that was shot in summer, I think this is a beautiful place to reconnect with nature and appreciate its rugged terrestrial beauty.

As we fly home to prepare for the next stages of our big adventure, I do not know what is to come. It looks like we will leave the UK the day before Parliament makes its allegedly final Brexit vote. The timing is surreal. But for now, I will enjoy my last night in Iceland breathing this air and feeling direly uncomfortable with my arm wrapped in a towel and strapped to a book to prevent me from bending my wrist. Heady days indeed.

Journal

Day 9: Welcome to Iceland

In The Airport

I must admit that I’m not a fan of budget airlines. Although Luton airport was fine, the line through security, As always, is rather undignified and more akin to what I imagine could be a factory chicken laying eggs. In this case, the eggs are the trays that you feed down the conveyor belt. It felt more like a battery farm than anything else.

The airport itself had things to do. Contrary to what we’d been told, there were shops, restaurants and cafés. We walked down to gate 15 to meet our plane, where the illusion of a pleasant airport finally ended. The departure gate, if you can call it that, resembled more of a large shed. There were no seats; you just had to stand in a long queue. Although we were there in good time, we were at the back of the line, so it was even more uncomfortable. The plane didn’t have enough room for everyone’s hand luggage, so they decided to take a some from us and put it in the plane hold, which was annoying – although we had been warned of this in advance.

In Flight

The flight itself was uneventful. We were on an Airbus A320-Neo, which felt was fantastic. Definitely quieter than any of the other small aircraft I’ve been on. Congratulations EasyJet on investing in such a fantastic aircraft.

Food on board

We were super hungry on the flight but had managed to stock up at Marks & Spencer with pastries, sandwiches and wraps en route to the airport. Ramani even got me a  Bakewell Tart. They used to be 70p when I came here last, but they are £1 now. I must admit that it is £1 pound of pure happiness, and if any of you ever come to the UK then I highly, highly recommend getting a Bakewell tart from Marks & Spencer’s food hall.

Final Approach

The 3-hour flight passed fairly quickly and it wasn’t long before the descent to Iceland began. The approach to Iceland is truly spectacular. You fly over what looks like a great big expanse of land except that it is covered in snow and looks amazing from the air. You can see that it isn’t a glacier because of rocky outcrops and so on, but that only serves to magnify its beauty. The plane circled a few times to line up with the runway, presumably because of air traffic control, although I didn’t really see much other action in the way of aircraft movement. I thought the landing would be more precarious than it was, given that there was no visibly clear land at all. I imagined an ice sheet of the runway with the plane touching down and skidding all over the place! But that did not happen. We braked to slow down rather than using reverse thrust from the engine, which must mean that the runway was in good form. The airport itself looked very pleasant.

https://youtu.be/DgEBdrJjW6g

In Iceland

A bit of a pain to queue and get through customs control, as only one human being was examining passports. Given that most of our group are children, we could not use the E gates (which looked like the fanciest gates I’ve seen at any airport in the world). We collected our luggage, bought a bottle of Baileys from the duty-free point and ventured into the main airport. Sadly, our hire car pickup place was not in the terminal building, and we had to rely on a shuttle bus to take us there. All this meant being outside.

This is where the romanticism ended. It was about 6pm; it was getting dark, and was bitterly cold. I don’t want to over exaggerate how cold it was, but there was a small breeze and it was colder than I have experienced in many years. The shuttle bus to the car rental station only came every 15 minutes, which was a real nuisance, as keeping three excited children and two older grandparents in line was not easy. Standing around after having been in a warm aircraft and terminal building for so long was hardly pleasant. Not least that we appear to be at the back of the line.

The shuttle bus eventually arrived but stopped nowhere near where we were queueing. So we had to drag our suitcases, children and grandmas all the way to it. As it was there nearly wasn’t room but everyone managed to squish up inside, and we got transported onwards.

We used Thrifty car hire. Didn’t think much of the service there. Although they had the exact car that we reserved, it was blatantly too small for the three suitcases and five pieces of hand luggage. Sadly, there was no other option when it came to rental vehicles, and so we had to find a way which we did eventually. Disappointingly, they knew nothing about baby car seats or how to fix them.

Driving in Iceland means travelling on the right-hand side of the road. It was dark, cold and so this was hardly a pleasant introduction to this nation’s roads. I had to admit that tiredness got the better of me and we swapped drivers after a little while. We wanted to look for a supermarket, but we were also torn with the idea of getting to the hotel and settling down.

In the end, the hotel one and we journeyed off onto the main roads towards Reykjavík. There was snow all around us, but the roads seemed generally clear, and we drove in the dark, but without incident to the hotel, which was exactly as it was described to us. The rooms were pleasant, very reminiscent of IKEA, which is where all the furniture appears to be from. We settled down for the night. The kids can’t wait for tomorrow. They snow everywhere, and promises of snowballs and snow angels are being made, and they will probably be determined to hold us to keep those promises.

So far, we feel lucky to be here. The journey has not been easy. On reflection, I don’t know if those afternoon flights are better than early morning or not. Perhaps there is no “better”. It is what it is. Either way, hello Iceland.

Journal

Day 8: going to the airport

We travel to Iceland today. When is the right time to go short haul? We used to think that it’s good to fly at night because then the kids could sleep. That’s for long haul, but what about short haul? If you fly at night, you get there then go to sleep. But then you’ve spent the whole day waiting to travel. Or do you go early in the daytime without eating up your day?

This particular flight leaves Luton at 2pm and arrives in Iceland arrives in Iceland at 5:30pm. The journey has been a little bit complicated because we don’t have a car seat in the hire car. So it means Ramani has gone in the car with four people, while I take two children on the train. We didn’t really want to split up, but it seemed the most logical choice in the end.

I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I’ve been pacing around since six in the morning doing some work and other bits and pieces. But really we are waiting for this journey, which has been somewhat tiresome. We have shallow expectations of Luton airport. My brother told me that there is nothing to do there and it’s really just a transit point, not much of an international airport. But we’ll find out soon enough.

So as it happens, we will probably get their way too early and discover whatever little there is to entertain in the airport building. It’s been a curious morning. I’ve managed to record a podcast and type up some more blog entries, do a lot of work, pack and keep the kids amused. I recommend this idea of taking them on the train. They’ve engaged with it really well. They’re looking at their world and asking questions and not even asking about technology. I hope the flight is half decent as well.

We’ll do our best to work with a budget airline and to get food before we leave and things to eat on the plane as well. The iPads are charged, and everything should be ready to go. It’s certainly proving a challenge to carry a business and being a completely different time zone as well. Most of the difficulties are dealing with un-eventuated situations that cannot be predicted. We have a lot riding on this trip and when we get there hopefully the hire car is ready, and everyone will be prepared to go. There’s hope for clear skies so that we can see the Northern lights, but even if none of that come to pass hopefully, we’ll just have fun and enjoy our time the first part of this holiday that truly will feel like a holiday.

3 year old on trains