One of the things that we constantly saw come up as a recommendation for an Icelandic experience is doing the Inside the Volcano Tour. The tour takes you inside the magma chamber of a volcano (i.e. the place through which lava moved during an eruption). Iceland is the only place in the world where you can have this sort of experience. Getting to the basecamp required a 45-minute hike across a foggy plain. After arriving at the basecamp and warming up with some coffee and tea, we got strapped into harnesses and helmets, and then strapped into a window cleaning lift that embarked on a 7-minute-long descent into the volcano.
The inside was pretty spectacular. Up-lights were set up along the walls so you could see the crazy patterns that various minerals formed over the years, and it was easy to see the various layers of rock. Even though we were very deep underground, it seemed to be raining. Our guide explained that it was due to the water from above-ground filtering through the layers of volcanic rock, and ending up in the cave below ground.
After we got out, we were fed Icelandic lamb stew (which warmed us up for the 45-minute-hike back to our starting location).
Since the volcano experience took up most of the morning and afternoon, we decided to visit another highly suggested location and go to a restaurant called Dill for dinner. We lucked out by getting reservations only a few days in advance - apparently some people wait months for a reservation! The menu included things like freeze-dried reindeer heart, tusk (a fish), dung-smoked trout, wild goose, tomato with buttermilk ice cream (a dessert-y thing), and broken blueberry pie. The meal was quite expensive, but very much worth it! Especially since each course had a wine pairing.
As we were finishing our meal, a group of British girls sat next to us. They were trying to decide between the 5 or 7-course option, and Matt suggested the 7 course since most of the courses were only a few bites. The girls asked us if we felt stuffed. Not at all! We even had a few rounds of bread. They then turned to each other and remarked "oh, but they're Americans..."
October 14, 2016
A big part of the reason we went to Iceland is because we wanted to see the Northern Lights. It's a pretty big item on most people's bucket lists! A lot of places mentioned that since the Norther Lights are hard to forecast more than a few days in advance, trying to focus the entire trip on this experience might be an exercise in fuitility. We saw a lot of amazing things in Iceland and greatly enjoyed ourselves (and the food!) but we were both holding out hope for the Northern Lights. We even got an app installed on our phones that told us when auroral activity was high!
One night was forecast to have high auroral activity, but we weren't sure the clouds would cooperate. As the band of orange "high" activity crept along the map on the app, we got more and more excited. We decided to go outside to see if we could spot anything, and walked around our hotel. Right as we were about to head back inside, we thought we noticed a faint green glow (but it was hard to tell if it was actually something or if our brains were trying so hard to see something that we we imagining it). But it was the Northern Lights! We had a very lucky break in the clouds, and got to watch them for about 30 minutes, and even catch a few pictures!
October 15, 2016
Getting There
Whether it was from excitement, or just from it being too early, both of us had trouble sleeping on the 7-hour flight. We were very lucky to get bumped up to IcealandAir's "Saga" class which is their First Class. We had fancy tablet TVs, and free drinks/food. We chose to forego the food and drink trying to reset our internal clocks by eating breakfast when we landed in Iceland at 6am local time. It didn't quite work out that way! We landed to very cold wind and darkness. There was no jet-bridge into the terminal, just a (covered) staircase to the ground. We ran inside, where we quickly got our luggage and found our puffy winter coats ASAP! After that we rented a car, and started the adventure. Our first stop was a little coffee shop where we had 2 cups of coffee and welcomed the gloomy dawn while looking out over the harbor.
Feeling a little more alert, we embarked on what's called the Golden Circle. It is a route of popular tourist attractions in Iceland. Included in the Golden Circle is the Gullfoss waterfall, the Geysir Hot Spring Area (that's right, the Geysir after which all geysers were named), and Thingvellir National Park rift valley. Although we managed to kill quite a few hours driving around, we were still getting quite sleepy (despite multiple stops for energy drinks along the way; thankfully those were plentiful at gas stations). The constant drizzling rain and fog didn't help wanting to take a nap! Matt needed to pull over and get out of the car every 15 minutes or so and do some jumping jacks to wake himself up.
The first hotel we stayed at was a nice little house that had a kitchen, and a hot tub right outside our door. Needless to say we promptly took a nap! The restaurant we visited for dinner that night cooked all its food using geothermal power, which was pretty cool. We spent the rest of the night watching some British TV, doing some more planning for our trip, and turning in early since we were both quite tired.
October 10, 2016