It’s winter now. When I looked up Reyjavik weather online just before Christmas, temperatures were in the 20s and 30s, with snow and rain. Sunrise was at 11 am and sunset at 3:30 pm – very short days.
I’m glad we were in Iceland in the summer, during the time of very short nights. I remember thinking beforehand that we’d have insomnia. That wasn’t the case, though. Everywhere we stayed had blackout curtains at the windows. The problem was that we got up every morning at 6:30, and we were still eating dinner at 10:30 that night. After all, the sun was still out, floating without direction in the sky, giving us the illusion that it was not yet time to go to bed. I never saw a sunset; I wonder if there was one.
Some places Art and I have traveled, we’ve gone on our own, without a group and a guide. We like the schedule flexibility, the personal contacts we’re able to make with the local people. It’s more work to plan an independent vacation – questions of air and car and train travel, of lodging and meals and banks and pharmacies and laundromats all have to be resolved by us. This kind of travel is easier, though, when the inhabitants of the country we’re visiting speak English. So we’ve done Ireland and England on our own.
Now that we’ve been to Iceland once, we could return on our own. But I’m glad we were with a group the first time. Icelandic roads are not always paved, sometimes rutted, never wide. Food is expensive because most of it is imported. Lodging in the summer is hard to find because of the short tourist season and the many tour groups from Europe, exploring this increasingly popular destination. It was wonderful to have all arrangements made; our only responsibility was to be at the van with our luggage at the designated time.
And, though Brjann claimed that most Icelanders speak English, we would be hard pressed to communicate if we ran into an exception. Icelandic is, I would say, an unnecessarily difficult language to read, spell, speak and understand. Left on their own for nearly a thousand years, the Icelanders’ language did not change with the intermingling of other cultures. I’m told that an Icelandic child can read Beowulf, an Old English epic poem, in the original language.
One of our group members, Russ, said to me, “If you want to know what Alaska used to look like, go to Iceland.” Indeed, the interplay of fire – the volcanic origin of the island – and ice – the movement and transformation of water – is spectacular, even to someone like me who has seen both volcanoes and waterfalls before. Difficult to describe in words, barely adequate to display in photographs.
If we go back to Iceland, I’d like to arrange a series of farmstays around the country, where we can linger a few days with a local family before we move on. We’ve seen the broad sweep of the country; it would be good to experience the character of the people and the culture.