It’s been a long weekend and there hasn’t been much time for updates as our fingers and faces have been frozen over for most of the time.
Ironically, one of the most memorable Iceland experiences has been our driving through it from the bum-heated seats of our teeny little SUV; our trusty Suzuki has travelled over 360 km with us across some of the most maddeningly cool landscapes either of us have ever seen. The closest I can compare it too is a mix of driving into Steamboat and driving across Mars. The sunrises, which conveniently pop up around 9:30-10:00 AM, look like Magic; cotton candy pink everywhere you look reflecting off blinding white, uninterrupted snow and casually allowing a few streaks of peachy oranges and yellows to peep in every now and then until the sky turns fully blue while the snow stays Magic White.
Another unique aspect of our Iceland story from this weekend is that we happened to arrive on one of the coldest November weekends that Iceland has seen in years, during one of the earliest snows that Iceland has seen in years. Thus what should have typically been a 40-degree-ish, fall grass-y landscape was in fact
a 27-below freezing snow world.
This allowed for many “my face is burning and I can’t feel my fingers!” screaming fits whilst petting wild horses and basically any time we exited the car for more than 5 seconds for anything at all, and it was especially exciting during what I’m pretty sure is the worst idea either of us have ever had in all of our travels: jumping into a freezing tectonic plate divide and snorkeling in it for god knows what reason.
In a divine comedy of errors in which Rebecca thought I was dying to go and I thought Rebecca was dying to go, we both signed ourselves up for the $160 opportunity to strip down to our thermal undies, put on rubber suits, nearly freeze to death for two hours before even getting in the water, and then plopping ourselves into 33-degree ice floes to float face down for half an hour and check out tectonic plate things. I am a woman of many words and I seriously cannot properly describe how cold this experience was. Pros: you can see 300 feet down because the water is so clear and it looks like the magical Kingdom where The Disney Merpeople lived when it has become all quiet and empty because everyone is at the royal concert that flakey Ariel misses; our cool guide Stefano. Cons: Everything else. At one point my glove froze to the railing I was using to get out of the water (finally!) and it took a Hulk display of human force to disconnect myself at which point two bystanders started clapping for me.
Also, a fun souvenir from the ice bathing excursion was that our already wrecked blue lagoon hair became further possessed and it froze into a combination of Arby’s curly-Q French fries and never ending MC Escher right angle hair mazes. I looked like Beetlejuice.
Cut-to trying to warm up 40 minutes later in Geysir with some bowls of traditional Icelandic soup that cost $20 each (if you plan on visiting Iceland, my general advice is to hunt your own lamb because otherwise every meal will cost you your week’s paycheck) before heading across the street to check out the town’s namesake: crazy geothermal geysers that bubble around and groan for 5-8 minutes before shooting up 50-foot plumes of boiling water spray and almost evaporating into steam mushroom clouds before very slowly disappearing. I’ve heard that Old Faithful is way cooler, but seeing as I’ve never gotten to see it and also I scarcely believe it can immediately evaporate into a cooler smoke cloud immediately after bursting out of its blow hole, I’m going to say that the Geysir geyser is the coolest Geyser ever.
I’m a bad Icelandic visitor for saying this, but Gullfoss Falls, the last stop of our day trip, was kind of underwhelming. This is near sacrilege as it’s one of Iceland’s most prized National treasures and everyone who visits it generally and rightfully so freaks out about it, but it was probably a combination of not being able to see much because of the mist and still being braindead from being so cold. We later discovered a lot of insight that would have helped us appreciate it way more, including the fact that millions liters of water are still plowing down the falls underneath the ice casing that has formed on top, and that Gullfoss Falls has some major conservationist history and folklore attached to it. All the more reason for us to come back in the summer to appreciate it once again.
Tomorrow we Suzuki it on over to horse, horses, Reykjavik, and basically more horses – stay tuned.