The first thing, when we finally got to our hotel room after 38 hours of travel, was a bed laid out much like the one below, we did not think photo at the time. Two single beds pushed together, we have yet to see an actual double, and more oddly, two single doonas, no sheets, no tucking in just a single doona. We were both a little worried about cold tootsies and things, but it has worked out very well. As all the rooms are centrally heated we have not been cold, and apart from the odd confusion about which doona edge to pull when rolling over, we have managed admirably.
Whilst I am on accommodation, I need to talk about those oddities. The sudden growth in tourism numbers means that, if trends continue this year, it will be a tripling of numbers in six years. That means that you almost never meet an Icelander working in hotels. They have bulk imported workers from everywhere. In one place the whole staff was Czech. In one place, the weirdest, friendly French kid you could imagine. He laughed delightfully in all the wrong places in the conversation, knew nothing about the area and was a dreadful waiter. .....but delightful. They are also building more tourism places, and expanding at pace. That means they get some of the little things wrong.......the view of a green hillside is nice but not as nice as the big ocean where they have a solid wall.......given how much free rock there is around we currently have a view of a power plant. Our favourite was the toilet roll, nicely full, and beautifully fitted.....on the inside of the bathroom cupboard.......it was a little perplexing whilst sitting there considering the next move.....However I must say the beds have been uniformly excellent. We have begun rating accommodation based on:
a) the quality and effectiveness of the curtains in blocking out the bloody light; and
b) the availability of bacon at breakfast.
We loved how literate the place is....the number of wonderful bookshops is ...well, wonderful. Apparently they have 100% literacy and 10% will publish a book. Must be the long winter nights. They are also very passionate about their language and have committees to discuss usage, and new words. So they do not, for example, import English techno words, they look back on their history and literature, yes even the sagas, and reuse an appropriate Icelandic word, or make one up....so for example computer is tölva—a fusion of tala (number) and völva (prophetess) that adds up to the delicious “prophetess of numbers.”
It is sooooooooo expensive. Everything, but food in particular. We have just tried to block the numbers out and enjoy things, because otherwise we would go spare. $27 for a soup, a really nice soup mind, but a soup none-the-less, is not outlandish. Pizza and hot dogs are the go-to cheap food for the young hitch hikers. We can do a bit of that, but we are already more generous than is ideal.
Speaking of which, they have a weird takes on hot dogs, pizza and hamburgers. They taste sort of like hot dogs, pizza and hamburger but then again, nothing like them. They use all sorts different sauces that make the taste....very Icelandic. We only saw three foreign fast food chain places...a couple of Subways, one KFC and a Dominos.....no we did not try them.
Skyr is nicer than yoghurt and available at every breakfast, along with butter milk. There is so much dairy in everything that I am having to manage my intake......I love it but eventually it gets me.....By the way, they do not make hard cheeses. They have some very nice soft white ones and blues but nothing harder than a soft Havarti style. It must be the lack of a dry warm place to dry it out?
Apart from no double beds, they have very few double lane bridges, and even fewer double lane tunnels. Mostly it works really well, with very courteous drivers, a little less well on the more populated ring road, where tourists seem to outnumber locals. Single lane road tunnels particularly worried us, how do you back out 3Km after all? Well the way it works is that they have little areas marked with a blue M to pull into, these appear every few hundred metres and if it is on your right you are responsible for pulling in every time you see a set of headlights. We figured this out eventually.....luckily when we kept seeing people pulling in because we were driving in the "right of way" direction......which we also discovered was the meaning of the interesting road sign at the start of the tunnel with a white arrow and a red arrow.
They have an amazing number of museums/displays and an amazing number of very weird ones eg in Reykjavik they have the world's only penis museum, yes really. Every town seems to have at least one museum, even if it is only mad Rita's rock collection, or uncle Sven's Smurf figures.....apart from the names those are real museums.
There are more horses than I have seen before in my life. There must be 2 horses for every person. NOTE I actually looked it up, there is one horse per four people. But given that most people live in the Reykjavik area it is closer to one on one outside the capital zone. They are shorted, hairier and prettier than most horses, and you see them standing stoically still in the roaring gale, blinking at the sleet. Sadly they are not only for riding but are also a traditional menu item.
Monster jeeps......I mean monster jeeps. They have the biggest proportion of huge, elevated 4wds I have seen anywhere. It is the snow and river crossings, I suspect. They are so scary coming at you on country roads. We were quite happy with our Grand Vitara, it got us where we had to go and was quite comfy. This was a middling one.
Every town, village and quite a few nowheres have a hot pool/spring to bathe in. The Blue Lagoon is just the luxury headline grabber, a pool made from the effluent from a power station. The two in our blogs were favourites. The one with the three Belgians was merely the top end of a fjord, nothing else around but the stream and a pool. Awesome.
The sheep seem to ignore fences and can be seen almost everywhere, they seem to own all the common land. They are such a different species with a range of colourations and seem to travel in small groups, generally one ram and a couple of ewes. Apparently they, Icelanders not sheep, ride horses up into the highlands for a couple of weeks to muster them, sheep not Icelanders, before the snows hit and the whole central highlands becomes one giant glacier.
The sagas.......Marjan a techno-savvy, world traveller, had downloaded a few Icelandic bits (podcasts) onto the phone so that we could bluetooth (or in our case bluegum) them through the car when travelling. Well, we got sort of hooked on this series retelling some of the Icelandic sagas. We soon came to dread meeting any descendants of these folk. They were sociopaths......do not relieve yourself on my mountain or I will split you in two with my axe....and he did! Do not ride my horse or I will chop your head off! Yep!. I want your woman......... take that sword to the throat! We have run out of fire, I will swim 8km back to the mainland to get some coals......don't steal my sheep! Or else! Apparently, it was not really murder if you tidied up the body and reported your actions to the nearest person. You'd face a court case at the Thing, or Allthing in spring and get fined. If you did it a few times they might 'outlaw' you...forcing you to kill more people to steal from and keep you alive. There was one saga that apparently had some parallels to Robin Hood, well let me tell you, if Robin Hood was a violent, slavering, psychopathic, mass killer then maybe. Laura DO NOT read Icelandic sagas to the boys! Your mother agrees!
We dared not.
Mostly though a just stunning place....well organised.....very civilized...apart from the sagas.....and very very beautiful
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