Aqualung, my friends

Before I even set foot outside my Reykjavík hotel, I had made some great friends, who would make my Reykjavík visit into the ultimate insider experience. But I had no inkling of the coming adventure when I walked down to breakfast in the restaurant of the Hotel Holt that first morning.

The Holt is an old, slightly decadent hotel just enough outside the center of Reykjavík to be quiet, but close enough that the city center is minutes away. Wood everywhere, and dark. It’s old, but everything in the hotel functions flawlessly. Doorknobs turn soundlessly. My room, which is next to the elevator, was quieter than a Roman crypt, day and night. (OK, the only crypt I saw in Rome was filled with loud drunk men – see “the United Nations of Bader”)

After a short but solid sleep, I dressed and went to breakfast. The dining room is paneled richly with dark wood, and the walls are filled with the art of well-known Icelandic painters from throughout the 20th century, most famously Kjarval. The breakfast buffet was fantastic. A nice mix of breakfast foods appealing to Americans/Brits (fruit, toast, cakes, coffee, just, cereal, sausages), some Euro-standard breakfasting (rich sour yogurt, muesli, cold cuts, cheese plate, chocolate biscuits), and some Icelando-Scandanavian treats (pickled fish, egg custard, shot glasses of chilled cod liver oil [!!]).

At breakfast, I chatted briefly with a friendly Britisher family at the table next to mine. A nice contrast with other “B&B” experiences in which people sitting at adjacent tables in Italy and Israel maintained a monastic silence during breakfast.

Full, happy, I headed to the front desk to seek help with planning my week in Iceland. While I was talking to the staff, a member of the family I breakfasted next to came up and interrupted us to invite me to join their private family tour of the area. Of course, I jumped at this, running upstairs and grabbing my gear for a day out in the countryside.

Trundling into one of the two SUVs being piloted for a drive around the “Golden Triangle” area near Reykjavík, I got introduced to everyone, and slowly took in their names. Maga, Daniel, Ian, Shona, Gael, James, Andy, Tilde. As we drove on and got to know each other, I slowly realized who I was with. Maga and Daniel are a young Icelandic couple, and our guides for the day. The rest of the crew are a family, surname Anderson. The Andersons are in the music business, and they do a lot of recording, performing and road shows. What kind of music, exactly? Aha. That Ian Anderson. I never know who famous people are. Maybe that’s why they invited me along?

We were headed for Thingvellir**, a national park. A vivid realization of the mid-Atlantic rift, in which you can see the newly formed land faulted and dropped abruptly as the tectonic plates inch apart. On the way, Ian wanted to stop by a little roadside landmark and look for a tree. There are hardly any trees on the island, having long since been burned for fuel, land-clearing, and charcoal creation. But this is a small grove, a “friendship” grove, in which noted people from other lands are invited by the Icelandic government to come plant a tree in friendship. Several years back, Ian had been invited and came out to a planting and dedication ceremony in a driving, horizontal snowstorm. Today, the sun was shining. Sunscreen weather. We were in shirtsleeves, and I wore the same hat that I needed to protect my alopeciatic skull in August’s sunblasted Rome and Jerusalem heat. Ian couldn’t find the tree, but we admired the plaque that explained it all, and mentioned Queen Elizabeth II and her planting. I can find no trace of this landmark on the web. It’s kind of nice to think that some things are not immediately Google-able. Except now that I’m writing this, I’ve just changed that !

Thingvellir contains the original democratic house of Iceland, the Althing, which is many hundreds of years old. Didn’t go there. But we did go see the geyser that gave geysers the name “geyser”. It’s called “Geysir”. Well, the one that actually still spouts is called Strokkyr, which sounds like an 80’s metal band. It’s great to stand next to these geysers, because there is no one to tell you how close to get, and there are no warnings as would be ubiquitous at something like a geyser in the US of A.

We rolled onto the very impressive nearby Gullfoss waterfall. It’s a tremendous waterfall, made even more wonderful by how approachable it is. You can stand on a bit of green-covered rock above the most violent convergence of the falls. As I did. One step back and you’re in the glacier runoff soup. I heard that people die here regularly, but I don’t believe it. There just aren’t enough visitors that come here to have many deaths. At this point, I deviated from my life-long avoidance of photography and started snapping random and poor pix.

Most interesting of all was the visit we made to Maga’s family’s farmhouse just down the road. I’m not sure exactly what relations they were (parents? grandparents? uncle/aunt?). They really live on a farm. There are many farmers in Iceland, and in fact, sheep ranching appears to be the main thing to do for a living outside Reykjavik. Maga’s relatives were very gracious with the horde that piled into their honey-colored wood cabin style home. They built it (I think!) themselves, and it’s across the road from their horse stables and part of the farm. As you look to what I think is the south, you see the expanse of the plains of Thingvellir. Maga’s relatives had prepared a spread for us – a kind of late afternoon tea. Everything they served us to eat, they had made themselves. My favorite was the smoked lamb. Smoked lamb? We also had homemade butter, and home-dried haddock (or was it cod?), steam bread, and I don’t know what else. It was a kind of tea, so everyone ate lightly, but I found myself wanting to clean all the plates. At 46 years, though, I’ve learned to restrain myself. Kinda.

It was a wonderful mix: the Icelandic farmer family, the world-hopping Anderson/Jethro Tull musician family, and a random American, thrown in like a bay leaf into a stew.

After tea, we walked across the road to the stable, and Maga and her (mom? aunt? grandmother?) rode impossibly idyllic-looking Icelandic horses. Icelandic horses are something else. They have a strange, slanted look to their eyes that makes them look sly. And they are small. But they are very pretty and spirited. They are very different from our big, broad horses. I guess they’re island-sized? I couldn’t really believe I was there on the Thingvellir plain, watching these beautiful Icelandic women trot horses around the corral, luck bringing me into this traveling family and their Icelandic friend’s farmhouse, with a double rainbow emerging to the south…

We retired to the Holt, and I talked some of the crowd into a drink in the 70’s style library/den/bar off the lobby of the Holt. Andy and James talked me into eating pizza and drinking a bottle of wine in James’ suite afterwards. “Spelt” pizza? None of us knew what that was, but we ordered it anyway, and ate it on the carpeted floor of their suite. Andy re-taught me backgammon (why can’t I remember the rules?) and beat me over and over. I vow to defeat him one day. A jokey, fun time. Good men. Gael joined us at the end, after little Tilde went to sleep in Andy & Gael’s suite.

Only the next day did I learn that Andy is a famous screen actor. Once again, I failed to recognize a famous somebody. I didn’t care. This is the experience I was hoping to have on this trip.






** In Icelandic, this name actually starts with a letter that looks like “P” with a slash through it. Microsoft does not have any international font/character corresponding to this character, but it most closely sounds like a “th”.