Wild nights, wild sights
Filed Under Shower Curtain | Posted on April 6, 2008
First, catch a Greenland shark. Bury its toxic carcass in the ground for six months until all the cyanic acid has drained away, dig it up, cut it into pungent little cubes, pop it in a bag and head for a night on the razzle in downtown Reykjavik. The putrified fish is said to provide the perfect complement to an excess of alcohol and there is plenty of that sloshing around in Iceland capital, where the locals knock back frighteningly expensive beer and down Icelandic schnapps, before falling out on to the street. In midwinter, they can drink the night away and still stumble home before the sun rises over the 渓and of fire and ice?at 11 o檆lock in the morning. Like those mead-drinking Vikings before them, Icelanders love to party. Prohibited from buying beer until 1989 and still forced to buy their alcohol through state-owned liquor stores, they seem determined to make up for lost time. Their reputation as revellers has been attracting waves of visitors just as interested in a bar-hopping weekend as in exploring the grandeur of Europe youngest country, formed 20m years ago astride tectonic plates that are still tearing the place apart. Whatever their motives, all are made equally welcome by a tough, hardy but tolerant people, though there are rising concerns that some of the worst elements of drink-related anti-social behaviour are being imported by tourists and adopted by some of the locals; so far at least, weekends in Reykjavik remain generally free of aggression, if not broken glass.For those who quickly tire of noisy nights in the shabby, graffiti-scarred capital, Iceland can provide an altogether more gratifying kind of wildness. The island is a geological treasure trove, an ever-shifting, steaming land mass sitting a few kilometres south of the Arctic Circle on a part of the earth crust just one-third its normal thickness. Beyond the sliver of habitable coast lies a wilderness of rugged mountains, inhospitable alpine desert, icecaps and glaciers. So far north, by rights the country should be permanently smothered in ice and snow; but a bed of molten rock deep beneath a highly active fault line has delivered an evolving landscape of volcanoes, steaming geothermal pools, geysers and lava fields. Winters are bearably cold, though shrieking winds and blasting blizzards can quickly turn an afternoon stroll into something more akin to a polar expedition; summers are short but the days are long and mild.The big decision to be made, therefore, is when to go? May and June are the driest months and June the warmest, when the sun sets after midnight and reappears three hours later. In its summer coat, Iceland is infinitely more accessible and benign. Trees seem as rare as trolls but wild flowers bloom under big skies; vast grassy lowlands graced with wild orchids give way to rolling uplands dressed in white arctic cotton and yellow primroses. The riverbeds are rich in arctic fireweed and remote paths are decorated with harebell, daisies and saxifrage; brightly-coloured fungi spread to the horizon while lava flows encourage quilts of vivid green mosses and lichens.Summer means bird-watching ?and that has to include puffins, the clumsy, comic creatures that look much happier perched on a cliff top than on a local restaurant plate ?or watching whales from an oak-hulled boat in what is probably the best place in Europe to see minkes and humpbacks. Throw in horse-riding, hiking, sea kayaking or a spot of wallet-shrinking salmon fishing and there will be no time left to brush up your Old Norse and get stuck into one of the many bloodthirsty, black Icelandic sagas. But the truth is that Iceland in summer is for wimps. The only time to go to a place that has 20 words for snow is in winter, when it fully lives up to its name and visitors confront the sort of moody, white wilderness that shrinks the human form into subservience and celebrates raw nature at its most powerful. I am not sure which memory will endure the longest: the towering curtains of pistachio-tinted ice that hung above the monumental waterfall at Gullfoss, or the wretched lines of floppy-fringed, highland horses, their back-ends snubbing the easterly wind as they stood patiently in the drifting snow waiting for spring. Maybe it was being blasted in the face by a horizontal hailstorm as the rest of my body sought shelter in a geothermal pool of warm water; or the first sight of the Strokkur geyser at Haukadalur, huffing and puffing away just a few metres from the dormant Geysir, which gave all other geysers their name. And what would be the point of going to Iceland without catching sight of the aurora borealis, the green and magenta curtains of light carried on solar wind to dance away the winter night in a dungeon-black sky? They do not appear by command in a place where you can never second-guess nature, so the hunt ?one eye on the heavens and the other on an icy road that may suddenly disappear under drifting waves of snow ?can be a treacherous affair. Whatever you are up to in an Icelandic winter, do not even think of hiring anything but a 4×4 or a car with studded tyres.Back in Reykjavik, head to one of the caf-bars , or try an upmarket eatery eager to serve you a seabird entre, a plate of porbeagle or, if your conscience permits, a whale steak. Expect to pay anything up to 30 (鈧?0) or more for a main dish while food in the growing number of ethnic restaurants is no cheaper. Whatever you choose, when you get back home you can always convince your friends that you caught your dinner through a hole in the ice……………………………………Where to stay101 Hotel, Reykjavik www.101hotel.is/Radisson SAS 1919 Hotel, Reykjavik www.1919.reykjavik.radissonsas.com/
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