Iceland wasn’t my idea. If I’m vacationing in late winter, trying to bridge that last chilly chasm of March, my thoughts tend toward the Caribbean, where Lee Anne and I have spent many warm, sunny hours doing nothing much at all on beaches in the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and the British Virgin Islands. But we didn’t have anything planned this year, so when Amanda asked us if we wanted to join her merry band heading to Iceland, Lee Anne and I were in. Given the direct flights out of Stewart Airport, it seemed like everyone I knew had been to Iceland or planned on going. And besides, I’ve always wanted to meet Bjork.
So, like any good 20th-century tourist, I went to the bookstore and bought a Lonely Planet guidebook to Iceland and painstakingly mapped out a jam-packed itinerary for our four-day whirlwind tour of the land of fire and ice. It was a near-perfect (IMHO) survey of all the natural wonders within two hours of Reykjavik, with time left to explore the city. And then, just for funsies, I fed a prompt to ChatGPT asking it to come up with a similar itinerary. It produced a more-perfect survey of tourist attractions. I shared ChatGPT’s findings with my fellow travelers and we prepared to leave on Wednesday evening of Holy Week.
Play is the name of the low-cost Icelandic carrier that flies out of Stewart. How low cost, you ask? So low-cost that there was no WiFi on the five-hour redeye flight. I had to read a book(!) and then content myself with admiring the Northern Lights out the window for the last half hour of the flight.
Once we made it through customs, we headed out to pick up our van, which was on the far side of a very windy parking lot. I didn’t have an anemometer (look it up) on me, but let’s say the wind speed was 60 kilometers per hour—we were in metric territory, after all.
This is not to say that the vindur (wind) was limited to the parking lot. It turns out, the whole of Iceland is a relentlessly windy place. Which not one person with whom I spoke to about traveling there warned me of. Although when I texted my friend Lynn about it, she replied, “Oh yeah, forgot about that. It was windy AF.” Lonely Planet Iceland makes no mention of it either. Not even ChatGPT gave me the heads-up.
Unsurprisingly, there are over 130 words for wind in Icelandic. Here are just a few. Hvassvidri: gale. Allhvass: moderate gale. Farvidri: hurricane-strength. Wherever we went, from the foss (waterfall) to the jokull (glacier) to the hofudborg (capital city), it was blowing somewhere between a hvassvidri and an allhvass. Which led me to suspect that the reason the streets of Reykjavik were as clean as those of a Canadian city had to do with the wind. There’s a chain-link fence somewhere on the edge of Reykjavik just pasted with refuse. On the one day a year the wind isn’t blowing, the entire city comes out in communal celebration to pick the trash off the fence, eat svid (boiled sheep’s head), and drink Brennivin (schnapps made from potato and caraway seeds). A real parti.
After a restorative midmorning nap at our Airbnb in downtown Reykjavik to soothe the red-eye jitters, I awoke to hear Amanda say, nonplussed, “There are Spaniards in the hot tub.” Looking out the window, I did indeed spy a couple in the backyard enjoying the bubbly water. I had to take Amanda’s word on the Spanish bit as their passports weren’t visible and they weren’t eating paella. But it seems that our Airbnb, listed as having a hot tub, failed to mention it was a communal hot tub, sometimes occupied by Spaniards.
The other thing I could see from my window: An Easter egg hunt taking place in the yard next door, children tearing ass rooting out the eggs and parents standing around, chatting and drinking like it was a summer afternoon garden party even thought it was late March, two degrees Celsius, and the wind was a touch hvassvidri. The Icelanders remained unfazed. (It wasn’t shocking to learn that Iceland was settled by the Norse, who arrived in open boats in the 9th century. The country is the only place colonized by Europeans where no Indigenous people were displaced.)
We went out for lunch and landed at a traditional Icelandic restaurant across the square from the Hallgrimskirkja, the church that dominates the city’s skyline. Among other delicacies, I ordered hakarl—fermented shark, which Anthony Bourdain referred to as “the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing” he had ever eaten. It smelled of feral animal urine and gasoline with a hint of silage. There was a lot that had happened to this shark since it died to impart this complexity of flavor to it, and none of it was good. The texture was slightly chewy, a little tripe-ish in its flex, but that was mostly lost in the aroma of a raccoon pissing in my mouth while I huffed a five-gallon can of unleaded on a compost heap. The one thing I’ll say in defense of hakarl—it’s served with Brennivin.
We spent the next three days traveling from geyser to waterfall to glacier to black sand beach, being blown off our feet by varieties of vindur in the astonishing geological theme park that is Iceland. We also saw a very sad film about Iceland’s jokulls at the Perlan museum. You might want to hurry if you want to see a glacier.
In sum, here’s my capsule review of Iceland: Easy to get to yet suitably foreign, food was consistently good across the board (the hakarl was a self-inflicted wound), cute road signs, clean streets, everyone speaks English, massive landscapes for days, geothermal pools are good for hangovers, and active volcanoes are cool. Iceland packs a wallop. Four out of five stars, the one-star deduction for the wind, which, to be honest, felt personal after a while. You think it’s a bug at first, but it turns out to be a feature. If anyone from the Icelandic Tourism Board is reading this: You might want to think about throttling back the wind a bit. Just saying.
This article appears in May 2024.
