These ports are some of my favorites in all my travels on the ship. So much of the landscape begs to be explored on foot. There are mountains around, and particularly in the fjords of Norway, the landscape is made exclusively of mountains.
Iceland is two sea days away from Southampton, England, our home port. I am in fact, currently, beginning the first of those sea days on my way back to Iceland as I write this. We’ve had a Baltic cruise in the interim, but I and my hiking friends are very excited about getting back to where the land is the main attraction. Iceland is unique because it is so richly volcanically active. I took a couple tours the last time I was here and saw steam vents, bubbling mud pools, hot springs, and crazy lava fields that had only moss growing on them because there is no soil.
Both days in Reykjavik I took a tour to some of the natural areas near the city. The scenery was pretty spectacular, but the tour was a bit heavy on riding in the bus for my taste.
This is where Iceland built its first parliament building (the white building). I believe they convened once a year. How sensible.
This small hill is the home of hidden people; elves, trolls, fairies and the like. The road building machinery stopped working until the road was rerouted around the hill.
A large portion of Iceland’s energy comes from geothermal sources. Heated water comes from this power plant and is run the Reykjavik, about 20 miles away. The temperature only drops about 2 degrees while travelling through this pipe.
This is the blue Lagoon, a naturally heated pool where people go to soak in mineral water. The color comes from naturally occurring sediment in the water.
The next day in Akureyri was all about hiking. My friend Justin and I got off the ship as soon as we could and headed toward the closest mountains we could see. We picked out a ridge that we thought we could make it to, but we then met a couple locals when we were walking by their horse farm that drove us a couple minutes to a trailhead and told us that it was only a couple hours to the top of a mountain that we never would have guessed was in our range. So we hiked and jogged to the top and then ran back down, seeing some great views and snow on the way. When we got back we convinced a newlywed couple who had been out hiking for the last couple days to give us a ride back to the ship. It was a supremely successful adventure.
See the ship?
We were on the leftmost high peak in this picture, taken from the ship as we sailed away.
