For our first stop in Iceland during our 2022 Sky Princess Norway and Iceland cruise we’d taken an excursion to first look around an impressive turf house, then to enjoy the impressive Goðafoss And Geitafoss Waterfalls. The final part of this tour returned us to the port of Akureyri with a short visit to the botanical garden located just to the south of the main town.
If you’ve read the previous two posts in this particular series then you might just be expecting some photos of the Icelandic landscape as seen from the bus as we travelled between stops, and I’m feeling in the sort of mood where I don’t want to disappoint you, so here, to start with, have some more.
We particularly liked the views up the fjord as we crossed over it just to the north of the airport, getting a great look at our ship, Sky Princess, and also the Silverseas ship, Silver Whisper. The difference in sizes between the two ships, the low-lying town, then the flat-topped mountain range, all combined to form something incredibly pleasing to the eye. I understand that not everyone likes the look of cruise ships, particularly against nature’s backdrops, but the important thing to remember here is that this site and its owner does, so tough titties.
Akureyri Botanical Garden opened to the public in 1912 following the founding of a park association a couple of years earlier and the granting of some land for use. Located towards the southern end of the long Eyjafjörður, the area is protected from the worst extremes of weather and temperature, and it therefore provides a good microclimate in which to grow not just local flora typical of the latitude just outside the Arctic Circle, but also more temperate varieties and mountain varieties of plant-life too. Of the approximately seven thousand types of plants grown in the garden, the overwhelming majority – around six thousand, six hundred – are not native species.
Should you wish to visit Akureyri Botanical Garden, then it’s open and free to enter from June until the end of September. It’s not a long walk from the centre of town, but it will involve a little bit of an uphill stroll towards the end as the garden is in an elevated position which does provide for a few nice views outside its boundaries.
Our visit to the garden was unsupervised but we were given some guidance about the best route to take as well as the time to meet back at the bus. There were some groans as this information was imparted because we weren’t given very long to explore at all. We accept that if you’re on a tour then you can’t please everyone – some people may have had no interest at all in the botanical garden, for instance, and considered what time we had there excessive – but with our ship not due to leave for several hours this felt like too short a period for no good reason. In fact, had we properly realised how close the town was we might have asked to make our own way back on foot, but you know how it is: first time in a town in a foreign country and you don’t want to be that person who has to phone the captain and cry because you’re lost and you’ve heard there are trolls.
I can’t really tell you much about the flowers, bushes, shrubs, or trees in Akureyi Botanical Garden because when it comes to this part of nature I’m more a know-what-I-like person than a know-what-I’m-looking-at person. I know that I liked the flowers in the garden.
We met back at the bus at the time we’d been told to meet back at the bus, as did almost everyone else. Almost everyone else. Two women clearly agreed with the majority of people that they’d not been given nearly enough time to see what they wanted to see, but differed in that they reasoned the bus and everyone else would simply have to wait for them rather than giving any consideration to fellow tour passengers. Did they apologise as they boarded the bus nearly ten minutes late? Did they fuck.
In the next part of this cruise travelogue series I’ll cover some photos from around the waterfront area of Akureyri as we still had plenty of time after the excursion to take a walk around. But did we also find a pub in which to have a drink? That’s the question!