The Iceland airport is completely different from any other airport I'd ever been in; hardwood floors, very modern looking fixtures and furniture, and (at that time in the morning) very desolate. There's no McDonalds, no Starbucks, not even a vending machine. It was really really refreshing to know that I wasn't going to get bombarded with American consumerism for at least another 3 days.

Our usual plan of attack of obtaining foreign currency in the Iceland airport was foiled. Usually, whenever in a new country, I just hit the cash machine and withdraw a few hundred dollars worth of local currency and avoid all the conversion fees. I couldn't find a cash machine anywhere, but luckily I had some US cash on hand, so I converted 50 bucks worth. Iceland uses Kroners, which worked out to 1 Kroner = 1 cent. It was fairly easy to translate prices, as all you had to do was imagine all prices are listed in pennies. A cup of coffee was then 200-300Kr. Once we did find a cash machine, pressing the button that said "20.000" was really kinda scary. That's a big number in almost any currency! Icelandic notes are funny. There are stodgy looking men with bushy beards and huge mustaches wearing silly hats. Each bill was a different color or so I recall. Iceland's coins all have fish on them, and they are in the same denomination as USA's coins except they have a 100kr coin too. (Ok, we have $1 coins, but they haven't caught on yet)

Prices overall in Iceland were actually Inexpensive, which was the exact opposite that we had been expecting. We'd heard horror stories of buying a drink in a bar and paying the equivalent of $12 or higher. We never went into any bars, but it wasn't anything like that. A drink in a restaurant was maybe $3-4.

It was surprisingly easy to find vegetarian food in Iceland. I'd think any vegetarian fish eater (a vegaquarian as I've recently learned!) would be in absolute heaven there. Almost all restaurants had menus posted outside, printed both in Icelandic and in English too. There seemed to be many restaurants that were simply called "hordenskolic (or some other Icelandic word) vegetarian restaurant" Many places even had vegan food.

Food too was cheap. Katie and I typically ate for around $10-15 total. We never really learned if tipping is customary in Iceland, but I left a couple 100kr coins with the bill just in case.

The temperature in Iceland was about 45-50F in mid May (sorry all you Celsius folks reading this) which was sweater and jacket weather, but nothing major. We learned that Reykjavik's nearby mountain range shelters the city from almost all severe weather, and mixed with the Atlantic currents and a touch of geothermal energy, never really gets much below freezing all year round. It also never really gets much warmer there either, so I think everyone has a sweater handy. The weather changes almost constantly. One of the days we were there it rained a couple times, but only for 20 minutes or so. The day we took our day-trip it rained off and on all day, but only for a few minutes each time. You could see clouds constantly hitting the mountains outside of Reykjavik, then separating to let the sun shine in, then cloud over again, then rain for a bit, then repeat.

The airport is about a 45min ride away from Reykjavik. The landscape between the two is really quite hostile, as the airport is in an old lava bed right at the edge of the ocean. The ground is extremely rocky, dark brown-black in color and there is almost no vegetation. It was very much like being on the surface of another planet (or so I assume!) As we traveled further north, you could start to see the mountain range surrounding Reykjavik and the ground slowly gave way to more grasses and taller plants. Houses in Iceland are rather small and plain, but often painted with very bright colors to contrast against the soil. Roofs and the sides of buildings were usually a corrugated tin, because it is cheap and stands up to the weather nicely. There are almost no trees on the entire island, as they were all cut down years ago by the first settlers. Whatever trees that are visible are often a scrubby pine or cedar based tree, and none of them were much taller than 30 foot.

Reykjavik itself is a small town of about 180,000 people and is situated on a natural bay, which is used as the main shipping line. Downtown is clean and friendly, with almost no signs of Americanism except for a McDonalds, which was wedged in-between a nightclub and a bank. There's one main street in downtown Reykjavik which could be fairly well explored in about 1 days time, however most of the shops there kept strange hours. Typically a store was open from 11am to 6pm, but some stores didn't open until 1pm and still closed early. "Early" is a strange term in Iceland between May and August, as the sun doesn't really ever set during those months because of the high latitude. At about 11pm, it still appeared to be about dusk, or 8pm here in Minneapolis. During the longest day, the sun comes down to the very horizon, kisses the ocean, and rises again. It was somewhat difficult to sleep at night, as even at 3am, it was still light enough to read. We found ourselves walking around for hours on end without really having as much of a tired feeling. Certainly, the clean air and strange surroundings helped boost our energy level as well.

All through Reykjavik, there was this interesting smell in the air; the locals we asked thought we were talking about sulfur from the geothermal water, but we insisted that it was a pleasant smell, similar to cedar trees or some wood based incense. Other tourists that we talked to also could smell it, but we never found out what it was. We finally settled on "it's just the smell of clean air". In one part of town, the strongest smell of what we could only describe as
"the worlds largest sugar-cone factory" came to our noses. It was heavenly, but we never were able to locate the source of it. To be fair, parts of Reykjavik also had that fishy-water smell, that most fishing cities by the sea have, but the cedar smell prevailed in almost all parts of town.

Some facts about Iceland: There are 280,000 people living there. 180,000 of them live in Reykjavik. Iceland has virtually a 100% literacy rate, and the highest per capita usage of the internet. All children schooled in Iceland are taught Icelandic, English and Danish languages. Upwards of 95% of the power generated to heat homes and provide electricity all comes from geothermal power. They have so much extra heat from geothermal energy, that city streets and sidewalks are all heated in the winter months, so even if it does snow, it all melts away. In the next 10-15 years, all the gas burning automobiles on the island will be replaced by fuel cell vehicles, making Iceland the 1st country to be completely fossil fuel independent. Tap water in town has the same purification levels as most bottled water. Hot water is provided by the city; your shower is geothermally heated. It does have a slight sulfur smell to it though. There are very few bugs in Iceland. Some very small spiders and some flying gnats. No ants, no cockroaches, no mosquitoes, no creepy crawlies, no snakes. Likewise, there is very little animal life. Rabbits were
introduced a few hundred years ago, there's the occasional fox, but every other animal has been imported. Icelandic horses are very treasured. They are smaller than normal horses, but have 5 different methods of walking, trotting and running, as opposed to just 3 in other horses around the world. Breeds in Iceland are all pure. It is common to see housecats walking freely in the streets of the city. In one afternoon and evening's walk, we counted at least 13.  Grocery stores in Iceland are very small, and the selection is no where what we're used to here in the states. It was very interesting to see the soft-drink isle; it was filled entirely with Coca-Cola and Pepsi. No mountain dew, no root beer, no TAB, no selection at all really. Most products still seemed fairly reasonably priced, and the veggies seemed fresh.

Our day tour was $40 each for a 6+ hour guided bus driven tour. I think the price is way too low for what you get! Since we were there in mid May, tourist season wasn't quite at full capacity, so there were only about 20-25 people on our tour, which worked out in our benefit, as we got extra attention and additional stories from our tour guide, who kept us constantly entertained with facts and legends about the sights we were seeing. We headed out of Reykjavik onto the "ring road" which is a 950 mile road that outlines the entire country, and may very well be my destination for a bicycle trip sometime in the future. Within a few minutes the scenery of the landscape changed again from green grasses and pastures to darkened yellows and brown fields filled with lichen and moss. Higher up we could see the mountain range that surrounds Reykjavik, and behind it, a HUGE glacier, the 2nd largest one in Iceland that was at least a mile thick.

Our first stop was the edge of the American tectonic plate. The American and Eurasian plates both meet in Iceland, and they are separating by roughly 1 inch per year. You can stand on the edge of the American plate and look down some 200 feet into this long, wide plateau, the plateau is where the plates have been dividing over the last million years or so, and is now filled with small fields and a river. The rocks at either edge of the plate are extremely rough and filled with crevices big enough to small you up. Our tour guide pleaded with us to be extremely careful when walking over to the lookout, as any poorly placed step could send you 25 feet into one of these sharp crevices. It was then that I realized that Iceland has either a lot less concern for your safety than anywhere in the states, or they believe that people are actually smart enough to think for themselves to not fall and hurt themselves. Very advanced!

We hopped back in the bus and crossed over to the Eurasian side of the plateau for our next spot. Here again was a very rough, rocky terrain, but this time between a small section of the rocks was a stream that flowed from the melting glacier several miles away. The water coming up from the underground stream was several degrees below freezing here, yet the entire stream never freezes because it is always moving rapidly. The water itself is pure and contains no oxygen, which means that anything thrown into the water never rusts or decays. A small bridge crosses the stream, one side of the bridge the water is some 10 feet deep, the other side the water is over 40 feet deep, yet you can clearly see the bottom of the stream bed.

This site has been a sort of wishing well for hundreds of years. The folk tale says that if you ask a question at this spot, you can receive your answer in the following way: Take a silver coin, throw it over your shoulder and quickly turn around before the coin lands at the bottom of the stream. If the coin lands on a ledge and you can see it reflecting back, the answer to your question is yes. If the coin lands on its side or in a way that it isn't visible on the bottom, the answer is no. Coins have been thrown into this spot for hundreds of years, and because the water is pure, there is no tarnish on *any* of the coins thrown over. Our tour guide says that the layer of coins on the bottom of the stream is well over 4 feet high and probably contains several thousand dollars worth of change. Official divers exploring the bottom have found coins that have later been identified as being extremely rare and priceless. Naturally, removing coins from the bottom of the stream is illegal, so none of these artifacts has ever been excavated.

After the falls, we headed off in the bus again, this time our tour guide pointed out various lakes with mirror smooth, crystal clear water, some of them with islands in the middle, as we headed toward the most geothermally active portion of our tour. Our guide pointed out a mountain in the distance named Hekla, which has been known since ancient times to be the "gateway to hell". If you've ever told someone to "go to heck", you've told someone to go to Iceland.

The highlight of our tour was clearly the geysir (Icelandic spelling) fields. The one we stopped at on our tour was fairly small, but contained 2 geysirs, one erupting every hour to two hours, and one that erupts every 10 to 15 minutes. As we pulled into the parking lot for the geysir field, our tour guide gave us a stern warning that we should, at all costs, stay away from the water and steam rising from the ground. He said that the water jetting out of the geysir is close to 300C and the steam is over 400C, and that every summer they end up taking a handful of people to the hospital with burns because they got too close. It was a scary warning, and in true Icelandic fashion, there were no fences, no barriers staying "keep back", not even a defined pathway to walk on. Only a thin twine-like rope attached to tiny posts that were no more than 2 feet off the ground was the only thing keeping us from falling right into the mouth of the geysir. As we walked along in the fields, you could feel the heat from the earth rising into the air and we could smell and taste the sulfur on the wind. We slowly walked along, hoping to see the big geysir blast off, which unfortunately never happened, but the smaller of the two, which "only" blasted water some hundred+ feet in the air (rivaling old faithful in Yellowstone) erupted about a half dozen times while we were there. This particular geysir has several tiny "teaser" eruptions, only reaching maybe 15 feet into the air. We spent a good deal of time photographing the other features in the field, the mud pots and bubbling pools of clear-blue water that hissed and steamed from deep below. As our group of tourists slowly drifted back to the pickup point on the bus tour (a small, touristy shop with food and gifts) there were about 5 of us waiting near the active geysir, hoping to get a good picture of it erupting. After a few more teaser eruptions, we slowly got closer to the mouth of the geysir since it was in our direct path back to the pick up point. Suddenly, with almost no warning at all, this geysir erupted with more gusto than we had seen all the time we were there. We were so close in fact that once the water reached its peak and started heading back toward earth, you could clearly see that where we were standing was directly in the path of the drops of falling water! With the tour guide's hospitalization warning echoing in my head, I yelled out "RRRRRUUUUNNNN!" and we bolted out of the direction of the oncoming storm. Katie and I managed to escape the downpour, but two people from our tour group, one who just happened to be in a wheelchair, and the person assisting him, were both drenched by the water. After the steam cleared away, I half expected to see a melted wheelchair and a crumpled pile of clothes and perhaps a filling from a tooth, but instead the guy in the wheelchair was laughing his ass off and screaming "again!" Apparently the cool air had gotten the temperature of the water down enough that it was nothing more than a warm shower.

Several years ago there was a rock concert on a huge float in the middle of this lake.   Bjork was one of the people who played!

Continuing our tour, we saw an extinct volcano with a very blue lake in its center silhouetted against the blood-red sides of the volcano. Much of the stone in this area is red from iron oxide in the ground which was churned up from volcanic activity thousands of years ago.      We drove past a very steep mountain bluff that had major rock-slides in the past. Some of the boulders that had fallen down the side of this hill were as big as houses. Other smaller ones had rolled down the hill, past the very road we were driving on, and ended up in a lake on the other side. One brave individual has actually placed his house directly in the center of the boulder field that littered the base of the hill. It's been there for years, and no rocks have fallen on it directly, but he did lose his outhouse once. When asked why he built a house directly in the path of all these rocks, he claimed "I built it for my mother-in-law to live in."

Our trip ended at a rather touristy place called "the Garden of Eden", which is essentially a greenhouse which uses geothermal heat to actually grow bananas and other tropical plants. The owner often gives the bananas away instead of selling them because he's only growing banana trees in Iceland as a matter of proof that it can be done, not a means for living.

The following day, a little exhausted from our trip, we boarded our shuttle bus back to the airport and we said goodbye to Iceland for a little while anyway.

-jeff!

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