Hello, friends! I’m here! I arrived in Reykjavik on Saturday morning, met up with my friends (one who also flew in from the US and who will be coming with me to Monza, the other who is a local), and started getting our bearings. Naturally, we arrived on the day of the Reykjavik Marathon and the annual Culture Night, so many roads were closed and there were stages with music and stalls selling candy and things everywhere. (On the bus from the airport to our hotel, we asked the bus driver what culture we were celebrating–he said, “drinking culture.”) With how difficult it was to get around town and how crowded most places were, we focused on getting food and rest, only doing a bit of wandering around the National Museum, the Pond, and the downtown neighborhoods.
For lunch, we ate huge, greasy, delicious sub sandwiches (mine was called the Bull).
On Sunday, I had booked a horse-riding and whale-watching tour!
Icelandic horses are well adapted to the local climate–small, sturdy, hardy, and very strong for their size. They have beautiful fluffy manes and wonderfully soft coats, and they come in every imaginable color–white, grey, chestnut, bay, black, buckskin, dun, dappled, pinto. I was the only intermediate rider in the group–my friends had limited experience, and the other group on our tour were experienced riders from Germany–so I was given a sweet gray gelding who wanted to RACE.
We took about a two-hour ride through the beautiful Icelandic countryside, occasionally stopping while our tour guides shared facts about the horses and the culture surrounding them.
The first Icelandic horses were brought on ships by the Vikings who sailed from Norway. There are no contagious diseases that affect the horses here, so the horses don’t need to be vaccinated–but this means that no horses can be brought to Iceland from other places, and any that leave cannot be brought back! It’s also said that horses can see the trolls, elves, and other mystical creatures that are invisible to humans, which is why they sometimes appear to spook for no reason!
We had lunch and coffee at the hotel by the stables, and then it was time for whale watching! We boarded a boat that set out on a long loop around Faxaflói (Faxa Bay, on which Reykjavik is situated). Here, many species of porpoise, whale, and other marine life come surprisingly close to shore to feed in the shallow waters, rich with phytoplankton that photosynthesize in the long summer days.
We saw a harbor porpoise for a moment too brief to photograph, then followed a lone humpback whale. After that, there were no more large mammal sightings, but plenty of sea birds–fulmars, gulls, and the large and beautiful gannets who dive so far and fast into the water that their splashes are mistaken for the spouts of whales.
Meanwhile, the volcano near the town of Grindavík was still erupting in the distance.
Next post: Sky Lagoon!
