After we’d arranged all our 2018 cruises we realised that we still had a few days left over with which to take some time off work and the sensible time for us was late November or early December. We always work over Christmas as we don’t have children, don’t particularly like being around other people’s, and we aren’t religious in the slightest so the rituals of the season don’t factor into any of our planning. We did toy with the idea of a weekender cruise as P&O had some options but in the end opted for a quick flight to and long weekend in Iceland, a country we’d visited before and loved immensely. We found a good deal, booked it, and at the end of November stayed overnight in Crawley before a short drive in the morning to Gatwick and our flight with the now-defunct Wow Air.
There’s a tradition when we’re flying out of the UK somewhere and that’s to have a drink in the airport before we take off. My wife is a fan of a Bloody Mary in these situations whereas I hunt down whatever’s closest to a darker ale especially if it’s one I’ve not tried before.
Breakfast eaten and Start of the Holiday Drink drunk we boarded the plane and were heading northwards for the few hours’ flight to Iceland soon after.
It’s not a great photo but we did like the air sickness bag provided by Wow Air.
We’d been keeping an eye on the Icelandic weather before we left so we knew that there had been occasional drops of snow in and around the areas of the country we’d be visiting for the few days there. In the main, though, the temperature was expected to be well below zero and subsequently too cold for it to snow much. It was lovely, therefore, to dip under the clouds on the approach to Keflavik airport and see the landscape looking white and frozen. There’s nothing quite like travelling and instantly thinking to yourself “I am somewhere very, very different from home.”
We had one issue in the airport on arrival in that we somehow managed to walk straight past where we needed to pick up our ticket for the bus transfer and ended up outside the building on the opposite side to where we needed to be. Eventually, though, we worked out what we needed to do, grabbed our tickets, boarded the bus, then were whisked off on the fairly short drive to the capital, Reykjavík.
On the way we were pleased to recognise Hafnarfjörður where we’d stayed during our previous visit to Iceland in 2015. We’d really enjoyed that stay but wanted something in the city rather than on its outskirts so this time we had chosen the CenterHotel Plaza located right on Ingólfur Square. Our room was spacious – perhaps bordering on the spartan but appropriate for the Icelandic aesthetic – and on the top floor of the hotel, and would have provided some lovely views over the buildings across the bay that formed the northern edge of Reykjavík to the mountains beyond if it wasn’t mid-afternoon with an already fast-fading light along with a chilly drizzle in the vicinity.
Our plans for this Friday evening in Reykjavík weren’t particularly exciting. We wanted to get something to drink, we wanted to get something to eat, and we wanted to just get our bearings ahead of a full day exploring to come. Probably the main road that any tourists to Iceland’s capital will wander along is Laugavegur – it’s off that road that you can find most of the shops and bars and things of likely interest to a first-time visitor – and with Ingólfur Square being at the western end of that road and a few minutes north of the large lake, Tjörnin, getting our bearings was pretty easy. We had the benefit of having been into the city on two occasions before so some things were instantly familiar too plus you can’t really get lost in Reykjavík anyway; it’s ridiculously small.
We didn’t wander very far from the hotel as we already had a place in mind to check out so after braving the bitter wind and unpleasantly persistent spitty rain for less than twenty minutes we quickly made for the Icelandic Craft Bar on Lækjargata. My wife was on a quest to have a cocktail in Iceland for some reason but I stuck with what I know and love: a local, red ale.
Of course, with this being Iceland those two drinks cost us a small fortune: somewhere just north of £20. Still, we’d known all about the country’s staggeringly high prices before we came and this was only mildly shocking.
We’d already spotted a number of places that could satisfy our food cravings, all of them very close to our hotel, and checked the map on the phone to pick one of them and a route. That’s when we noticed another place in the vicinity serving up local craft ales – the Skúli Craft Bar – so heading back past the Christmas decorations for the Yule Cat we made for the bar and exchanged money for alcohol once again.
We loved the glasses here and we had a decent talk with the barman who was happy to explain the various types of ale they had available.
After that it was time to get some food in us and the place we ended up choosing was the Sæta Svínið Gastropub, mere metres from the entrance to our hotel. We weren’t sure we would be able to eat in it at first as the place was absolutely rammed and standing room only but after asking a waitress about the possibility of dining we were led up the steep and narrow set of stairs to the first floor where in a nearly equally-rammed location we were seated at a small table and handed menus. Like several other people there we needed to use the torches on our phones to read the menu as it was stupidly dark but we picked some drinks and food, admired the star effect on the ceiling, then enjoyed everything that turned up.
The photos are about twice as bright as everything really was and there was a lot of guesswork as to what else I was eating with my Ling. Price-wise it was about par for the country, which is to say that we paid restaurant prices for slightly better than pub quality meals back home. That’s Iceland, though, and that’s what you’ve got to be prepared to do when you visit.
We finished the evening after the meal with a short walk to see if anything caught our eye but ultimately decided to simply head back to our hotel room to warm up and get a decent night’s sleep after about fifteen minutes of that chilly activity. A final, somewhat eerie sight of the night was this sculpture that wouldn’t have looked too out of place in an episode of Doctor Who.
Our plan for the Saturday was to hit cultural sights in Reykjavík and to take an aurora-spotting trip out on the water at night, all of which will be covered in the next post.