July 21 Iceland - we’ve arrived.

Such a relief seeing our cases bumping along the carousel towards us

We - and our luggage, arrived in Iceland about 4pm after a two hour flight from Bergen. Once we had collected our hire car, we headed off post haste because although we’d gained 2 hours on the way over from Norway we had a 3-4 hour drive ahead of us to our first stop. 

Over the next 10 days we would be covering a couple of 1000 Kms by which time Lindsay would be a pro at driving on the wrong side of the road! Our first few hours, however, were tense particularly in the built-up areas around the airport and Reykjavik and to top it off it was ‘peak hour’ and raining off and on. What a challenge! Lindsay did a fantastic job while I took the navigator’s seat and helped keep him on the right (and correct) side of the road.  Six decades of motor patterns can’t be overridden quickly. The hire car, a RAV4, had GPS but finding the right destinations - all written in Icelandic - on the fly, proved rather challenging. Fortunately I had my trusty MapsMe offline app (never leave home without it) and it eventually got us exactly where we wanted to go - the village of Stykkishólmur on the magical Snæfellsnes Peninsula.

The beginning of the trip was a little surreal as we were driving passed lava fields partially engulfed by pale lichen - I’d forgotten how much of Iceland is lava flows. As a matter of interest the lichen infiltrates the hardened lava breaking it down to make soil - clever little organisms. 

This is the entrance to the Hvalfjörður Tunnel, a road tunnel under the Hvalfjörður fjord. It’s almost 6 km long and reaches a depth of 165 meters below sea level. Quite an experience.  We would encounter many tunnels as we drove.

The Snæfellsnes Peninsula in the north-west of Iceland and on the way to Westfjords, is home to the glacier-crowned Snæfellsjökull Volcano (not my photo). We visited the Peninsula 3 years ago and it seemed to have a very special energy about it; we promised to return. Like us, Jules Verne 170-80 years ago was captured by this part of Iceland and chose to make it the setting for his science-fiction novel ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’. In his novel he described Snæfellsjökull thus:

“I was thus steeped in the marvellous ecstasy which all high summits develop in the mind; and now without giddiness, for I was beginning to be accustomed to these sublime aspects of nature. My dazzled eyes were bathed in the bright flood of the solar rays. I was forgetting where and who I was, to live the life of elves and sylphs, the fanciful creation of Scandinavian superstitions. I felt intoxicated…” —Journey to the Center of the Earth, Chapter XVI, “Boldly Down the Crater” 

This was to be our route through Westfjords - approximately.