Jake
Strata Poster
As well as PRAWN RINGS, £1 Iceland has a lot to offer.
So I've just got back from a last minute trip to Reykjavik and the surrounding areas. I was there for 5 days, but will split this into three parts.
Part 1 - Days 1 and 2, stuff in Reykjavik
Part 2 - Day 3, Hveragerði geothermal area and stuff around it
Part 3 - Day 4, The 'Golden Circle', one of the more common coach tours (waterfall and geyser).
On day 5 I was just hungover and gross, so didn't really do anything!
Days 1 and 2
I arrived at the main/only international airport in the whole country at about 10am, not having slept the night before because the flight was so disgustinly early. The airport was really silly - arriving passengers get spat out into the same lounge the departing passengers are waiting in, then you have to find your way out of the airport by going against all the passengers coming in. I don't think departing and arriving passengers should ever be able to bump into eachother until after immigration, cus it just gets confusing.
Anyway, I turned up at the Hostel, but had a few hours to kill before I could check in, so I dumped my luggage and headed for the church. It's pretty ugly and bland, but the view from the top was cool.
I then had a bit of a mince...
These new buildings were quite fab, but were sitting empty. We were later told on the coach tour thing that most of the new buildings and housing estates in Reykjavik were sitting empty/unfinished (Iceland only has a couple of banks and both had to be bailed out).
Viking boat thing...
Viking beer!
Iceland is expensive. Some things they just buy from UK retailers and sell on. This is a good example... they were selling it for around £2, and this was in their really budget supermarket.
It was now around dinner time, and I found somewhere reasonably priced to try a bit of Whale meat, which came in a jar with potato and mustard.
It was pretty nice... sort of like beef but a bit softer, and kinda chewy at the same time. It was odd.
This is about as dark as it got.
My hostel room. There were no curtains, which was the ultimate worst. It was like this all night. I complained, but they did fack all. They're getting a bad review.
The next day I was meeting a couple of people for a drink in the evening, and we were thinking of doing some sort of day trip the following day, so I went for another local walk to a salmon river which runs out of the city. It took about an hour and a half to walk there, then I walked another hour and a half up the river before turning back.
First stop was 'Metro', a chain of 3 fast food restaurants. They were all McDonald's franchises until 2009 when the agreement failed. Basically, as a McDonald's franchise there are strict rules on who you can buy ingredients from. In this case, stuff was all imported from Germany, so even though McMurder was popular, it wasn't financially viable anymore. Anyway, the owner stayed open with pretty much the EXACT same menu, but changed the names of everything. It was really weird to have something that was just like McDonald's without actually being it.
I love how it's SUCH a McDonald's drive thru building too <3
All junk fooded up, I walked the rest of the way to the river. It was pretty. Here are some photos.
No salmon, but I guess they only mince up there once a year or something...
I then sashayed back down the only stretch of proper motorway in the whole country...
... and met up with my two new trip friends for a few drinks. I dragged them back to the Whale place to try more stuff. This time I had Puffin, which was pretty gross. The girl had the Whale, and
the guy had a Reindeer Burger. He also ordered the fermented (rotten) Shark meat. The smell alone made me heave, there's no way I'd ever put that filth in my mouth. Ugh.
Puffin <///3.
It was now bed time as we'd arranged to meet early in the morning and hire a car. You'll see what we ended up doing in the next part!
