Our long weekend break in Iceland came to an end as these things always do. The Monday morning saw us check out of our hotel early after another good breakfast and brave the temperatures outside in the capital city. Our flight from Keflavík wasn’t until the late afternoon and our transfer to the airport would be at 12:30 from the BSÍ Bus Terminal. With the restrictions in place in Reykjavík for larger buses this would mean that just like our South Coast Tour pick-up with Gray Line we would need to meet outside City Hall half an hour before that to be transferred by minibus to the bus terminal. This gave us plenty of time to have a walk into the city centre to see if any last-minute shopping opportunities presented themselves. Several did, I’m pleased to say, and we were very happy to pick up a Christmas present for our niece while we were there; it’s always nice to find something unusual that you know simply won’t be found back home.
My main camera was packed away in our carry-on luggage for the flight so the few photos taken on this cold morning in Reykjavík were on the phone and required very swift removal of gloves, composition, and snaps because of the weather conditions. The strong winds that had accompanied us on the previous three days had dropped completely but the Feels Like forecasts we had seen put the temperature at -12 degrees Celsius. That’s pretty chilly.
With money spent and no room to store anything else we might have considered splashing out cash on anyway we decided to head back towards where we’d need to meet our minibus a little earlier than we needed to. Reykjavík’s City Hall, or Ráðhúsið, is on the northern edge of a large lake called Tjörnin and I suggested it might be nice to take a walk around it in our last half hour or so in the Icelandic capital.
Before we’d left for our tour of the southern coast on the previous day we’d seen some other people trying to crack the ice that had formed on the pond at the entrance to City Hall. It was easy to see the appeal as we came back on the same place. Ice just looks like it wants you to break it.
The sun never climbs very high in the sky in Iceland in December but those late morning sunrises are spectacularly wonderful with the crisp, clear air. We began our anti-clockwise circumnavigation of Tjörnin enthralled by the warm-looking yet decidedly not warm-feeling sunshine glowing on the southeastern horizon and reflecting off the lake. The reflection was bright enough that despite what you might see from the photos and video below it wasn’t clear to us that Tjörnin was completely frozen over. We could see what we thought were patches of ice on its surface but it took until we got nearly halfway around and the sun was behind us that we realised the extent of just how cold the lake was and how far that ice had spread and how thick it was.
In the photo below you can see how the wind from the previous days had joined with the plummeting temperatures to create frozen sheets of ice then push them onto and over one another to form spiked waves. I’m reminded of a hairstyle I used to sport.
In the picture below it looks almost like a snapshot of the crest of a wave and that one side of the surface of Tjörnin is frozen while the other remains in liquid form but that’s an illusion. Both sides were frozen but the right-hand side had been disturbed enough by the wind and water motion at some point to have fragmented a little more with flakes of ice then piling up to form a natural dyke.
You can’t go very far in Iceland without stumbling upon an odd art sculpture and in the month before our visit to the country a new one had been installed in Tjörnin. In case you haven’t instantly grasped that this sculpture represents democracy (what is wrong with you?) and you’re wondering just what this pink, erect thing jutting out of the lake in the centre of Reykjavík is then in the artist Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir‘s own words when speaking to mbl.is:
A sausage, sitting like the Danish mermaid on a small bread bun out in the pond, erect and happy, a small marine sausage without arms, a strange being that doesn’t realise it’s own power. It’s also a bit creepy. […] It’s both a mermaid, usually female, but also a penis, because it’s difficult to make a sculpture of a sausage that doesn’t resemble a penis in some way. But I don’t think that’s bad.
As we completed our circuit of the lake – really only the top half of the lake as we didn’t have quite enough time to cross the road and complete the full loop – we found a gathering of birds. Over forty species of birds frequent Tjörnin but of the few that were present in this small area that had resisted freezing through a combination of shelter from the northerly wind and water feeding the lake via pipes the one that stood out was the Whooper swan which was there in large numbers. They are noisy buggers.
I grabbed one last shot of the Reykjavík sunrise over frozen lake Tjörnin before we found ourselves back at the bus pick-up point and huddled together for warmth until it turned up. A quick transfer to the main terminal followed by a painless run down to Keflavík airport and by late evening we were back home.
This concludes our second short break to Iceland. All of the posts relating to this visit can be found here – December 2018 – and the posts from our first trip to Iceland are here – November 2015. It’s a fabulous country with landscapes and seascapes and night skies and a general way of life that you will find yourself totally absorbed by, and if you’ve not been there before then you really need to. Just save up a little before you make the journey. No, more than that. Maybe double that amount.