Reykjavik
On my last big trip I had a clear goal – to find my perfect beach. I was in places I had never been before and mostly alone, but I was in a country I was totally at home in. On this trip I am in new places and with a new goal – to figure out if I can enjoy travelling totally alone. No friends to visit on the way, no cities I have ever visited before, but with one tiny cheat. Most of the trip will be on the Nieuw Statendam, sister ship to the Nieuw Amsterdam that Donna and I journeyed on from Sydney to Vancouver back in those pre-covid days. I’ll find the ship very familiar.
Began this journey super slowly. I had planned to drive down to Toronto the day before my flight, leaving the car with Darian and Michelle as usual (thank you, thank you, for buying a house with a garage). Then, three days before departure it dawned on me that the plane did not depart until 11pm and the day before would be a summer Sunday. Did I really want to travel the 400 on a Sunday in mid-summer? Turned out Darian was not at all upset that I’d skip the extra time with them with Michelle still recovering from her operation. I found myself with a whole 24 hours of unexpected time prior to leaving the house, which made sure that the cats got fed and watered, the house plants got watered, the dishes got washed the garbage got taken out to the garage. I even remembered to turn down the temperature in the hot tub. I did leave the AC on for the cats’ comfort however.
And so, on the Monday, after lunch which used the last fresh fruit, I headed off to Toronto to spend a couple of hours with the family before the taxi arrived to get me to the airport. And I arrived well before departure time so I had two glorious hours of just sitting in the constant din and crowds that is any airport other than in the middle of the night. Flight was uneventful, and I was deposited in Reykjavik at 4am, only their clocks said 8am and the sun was blazing. Well, actually not. The sun disappeared behind low clouds shortly after I arrived to leave a damp and overcast day.
Presumably there is another door where you can exit to some other country – what a place!
Photo from Guide to Iceland
First impressions? Four AM is a hell of a time to go through customs. Four AM when everyone else is wide awake is worse. But they all seemed cheerful and I found the bus to the city. A really simple system – she asked me which hotel, I told her, she sold me a purple ticket for the bus, I got on and rode to the downtown terminal where I transferred to the purple bus to my hotel. Clever what you can do in a town of only 250,000.
First thing I noticed as the bus left the airport – very flat land, obviously a lava flow at some past time, with gravel rather than soil, and wild lupines everywhere all in bloom. Plus a scattering of rocks mostly less than a half metre across and all basaltic. But the basalt was much less ‘bubbly’ than the Hawaiian volcanic boulders, with lots of flat faces. A bit like home except basalt rather than granite.
Wandering in the Reykjavik Sculpture Garden while waiting for my hotel room
Icelandic architecture is severe, like they know the weather can be lousy. The buildings have minimum eves, presumably to maximize the light getting in the windows in the middle of winter when there is hardly any light. So with minimal eves the houses are excessively block-like, solid, not like California indoor/outdoor houses. The starkness extends to the interiors also – few architectural frivolities, just walls and floors and doorways. Room was big enough for one or for two very friendly people. But the air conditioning was whisper-quiet and the blinds were exceptional, A real plus the next morning when the sun was blazing at 4am, which was still midnight for me.
Apart from early mornings the two days were overcast and drizzley (I don’t think I’d do well in Iceland long term). Still I did the tourist thing with the National Museum, which the taxi driver took me to instead of the National Gallery that I asked for, followed by the National Gallery which I walked to, followed by the Icelandic Phallological Museum because it just happened to be there and why wouldn’t one enter a penis museum. Actually kind of funny really.
The architecture is severe. The quite modern City Hall can just be seen to the far left as seen from the National Gallery. The yellow building on the right is an elementary school.
The National Gallery had two installations on water themes. The first, called Solaris, was four tall vertical screens in the middle of a room with video of water flowing down (or up) both sides of each and with audio to match. Wandering amongst them, the only person in the room, I found myself embedded in the stream. Calming and exhilarating at the same time. The second was video of a number of waterfalls, each about 10 feet wide and four feet high, with the water streaming from right to left so that the bottom of one waterfall became the top of the next all around the otherwise empty room – again I was the only person there, swept up in the flowing water.
Loop, a video work by Tumi Magnússon filled an entire room, and I was alone in that space with water running all around me. Magical.
My one night in Reykjavik I ate at Fiskfelagid, a well-recommended seafood place. Marvellous. Even eating alone.
On the second day I checked out of my room and went for a walk in the nearby Botanic Garden. A surprising diversity of plants, many in bloom including more lupins and other weeds. Had lunch in an open-air restaurant inside a greenhouse at the gardens. The place was reasonably busy and that posed a problem. The procedure was to choose your own table and then go to the counter to order your delicious, healthy, vegan food. But when there is only one of you, how do you signal that that table is yours, when you are standing at the counter. I lost my first table. Got smart and left my cell on my second choice – and stood anxiously watching it from the counter until I ordered. Memo to me – always have something less valuable than a cell phone to leave on the table as a signal that you are coming back.
Botanical Gardens, Reykjavik, was a restful place gently rolling hills and lots of rock gardens. Many plants I knew and some I had no idea about.
After lunch it was a slow stroll back to the hotel to collect my bags and into a cab to the ship. Check-in was seamless and I was back into familiar surroundings on a Holland America cruise ship.
Nieuw Statendam
The first afternoon there was a welcome reception for 3-, 4- and 5-star guests, with free champagne where I talked with a couple from Tallahassee who seemed quite nice but have not been seen since. Then I wandered off to the reception for passengers travelling solo and the PRIDE reception which were held simultaneously on opposite sides of a passageway in adjoining seating areas. No wine this time but I connected with three other people – don’t know which reception they were attending — and we had dinner together while learning how to chat with each other on the Navigator app on our phones. These three seemed to have been at the solo travellers meeting rather than the PRIDE meeting which seemed a very subdued affair by contrast. Or maybe the more interesting individuals from that group had simply crossed the hallway. (Neither event was much to write up about, not even any free wine, but the three people I met have turned out to be interesting dinner companions.)
Next morning and we are anchored off Heimaey, a tiny island off the southwest of the main island of Iceland. Towering cliffs, absolutely vertical, not far off our port side. And on the cliffs were little nooks and crannies occupied by birds. I have no idea what kind of birds because my room does not include binoculars – yet another loss due to covid, I presume. They might be puffins. Or some sort of tern. Or any of a number of other cliff-nesting birds.
Once I got ashore on Heimaey, I got to see the ship anchored offshore in the mist.
Sky was overcast and there were patches of light drizzle. So I donned jacket and tuque for my trip ashore. Had no particular plans but boarded the next available tender after my leisurely breakfast, to be deposited on shore.
Tenders shuttling passengers ashore at Heimaey – misty, drear, bleak, why are we here?
The harbor was surrounded by steep hills and I decided to head to my left on my first puffin-hunting expedition. With hindsight I suspect any puffins would have been at sea fishing in the early afternoon which was when I began my hike. More lupins, and a surprising diversity of other herbs and low shrubs, many in bloom. Trees were few, far between and exceedingly small.
Lupin were everywhere on Heimaey, as they were in Reykjavik.
And tiny trees – this was one of the largest I saw.
At one point on my walk I came across a sign reporting that I was at the edge of a several hundred or thousand hectare reforestation project that had been under way with volunteer labor from the town for decades. I blinked. And that’s when I noticed all the trees. Tiny little pine trees, rarely 50cm tall. I saw one giant all of 1.5m tall. I presume Heimaey was once forested or they would not have referred to a Reforestation project. But maybe forested is just little bonsai bushes in Iceland? It is a bleak kind of place.
Saw other wanderers as I walked (there was a bewildering mixture of roads, paths and trails forming a cobweb-like pattern stretched out over the hills surrounding the town with cruise ship passengers wandering around with nowhere else to go). Some more adventurous souls had signed up and got to join a wagon train of ATVs that raced over the cobweb of paths. A tiny few had somehow commandeered bicycles or electric scooters to whisk themselves silently around the same cobwebbery. And then there were the cars that sometimes rolled by on the roads – many of these seemed to have no particular place to go either. Anyhow I wandered, saw plants, took photos and saw no puffins.
So much to see in Heimaey!
Definitely not puffins. I guess Heimaey has a large pigeon rookery or two as well as puffins.
At one point I saw a flock of birds on the side of the road in a place that was not apparently any different to the bird-free places to right, left or behind. I approached, binocular-free, and confirmed they were not puffins. More like pigeons, doing what pigeons do, which is a very social pecking at the ground – all of which convinces me that pigeons are probably chicken wannabes. I dutifully photographed and wandered on. Finally, up ahead I saw a picket fence on what appeared to be the edge of a cliff. The fence stood proud against the sky. Obviously the puffin-viewing stand I had been hoping for! I made my way up towards it to discover only a gentle dip to a hollow rather than a cliff with the sea below, and a notice reporting that Hansel and Gretal, not their real names, had been so captivated by this little hollow that they had slowly turned it into a miniature garden, complete with miniature houses and fences and garden plots and clothes lines and on and on and a couple of miniature garden gnomes as well. To me that little work of art, that folk industry, said more about the distractions of the thriving town than it did about landscape gardening.
The car park had three cars parked (the most I had seen in one place today) plus a motorcycle, and various people who presumably had driven to this place for this purpose were examining the little garden with an intensity that suggested there was something important that I was missing completely. They were photographing intently, so I followed suit for just long enough to not be seen as somehow disrespectful. Then I beat a hasty retreat back down the trail I had come up on.
Wandering back downhill towards the dock, I was met by a young teen running up the hill with that relaxed gait that only a young teen without any aches and pains can manage. I observed and reminisced, and made my way back to the dock and the tender to the ship.
So much for Heimaey. A quiet place. A place where you would have lots of time to think. I did ask other passengers about the town, which I had ignored, and they said it was about as quiet a town as one could imagine. I imagine a tree in Heimaey would have lots of time to think very deeply about life as it huddled down among the shrubs and grasses for decades, adding a millimeter or two in height each year. As for the puffins, well, I read that Heimaey has the largest puffin rookery in the world so I guess I was just not in the right place at the right time.
I’ll long remember those amazingly vertical cliffs outside the harbor.
Part 2: Coming very soon.