A Cold and Hostile Land
Written: Mar 26 '01 (Updated Mar 26 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Clean air! The Blue Lagoon! Fresh fish!
Cons: Yecchy-foodstuffs; imminent danger; crazed populace; crazy currency. Wacky day/night confusion.
The Bottom Line: Only suitable for barbarians, the tough-skinned and the young at heart.
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| Kallisti's Full Review: Iceland |
"We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.
Ah-yah-yah! Argh!"
The Immigrant Song,
Led Zepplin (Page/Plant)
After a visit to Iceland I achieved a greater understanding of Bjork's music. Her music is a lot like her homeland. Strange, beautiful, spacious, depressing, weird and cold.
When Neil Armstrong returned from the moon he was asked what it was like. "It's a lot like Iceland" he replied. In fact, NASA used to send astronauts-in-training to the lava fields of Iceland.
If going to another planet for a vacation is your cup of tea, I would certainly recommend Iceland. But you should be reminded that the extraterrestrial-looking landscapes of Death Valley would at least be warm.
FOOD & DRINK
One of the worst things I recall about Iceland is the terrible coffee. It's terribly bitter and they really don't seem to know how to make it. Perhaps it's just not a native drink, but a good cup of coffee would have made the bitter March Icelandic chill much more tolerable. The natives seem to prefer a cold can of carbonated "Egil's Malt Extract" to hot coffee which is something like "Goya Malto" but thicker and sweeter. The Egil's brand is the company that seems to be responsible for many Icelandic beverages, including the beer. While the idea of a Viking Beer may sound tempting -- those Vikings would probably appreciate a good belt of beer, right? -- I can assure you that the US does not import Icelandic beer for a good reason. It's as awful as the coffee.
While discussing the noxious nature of the essential Icelandic beverages, I would be amiss to fail to mention the local hard-liquor. It is known as The Black Death -- a type of schapps that reminds me of Danish Akavit, but which is even more unpleasant. (Note: This "Black Death" should not be confused with a certain beet vodka that is marketed in the US.)
Uncanny Icelandic culinary crimes compete with the cretinous drinkables from this cold climate. Particularly atrocious is a putrified shark-flesh that smells and tastes like a stinky cheese. One might well mistake it for cheese altogether if it weren't for the foul fiberous texture of this disgusting dish. It is prepared by taking a shark carcass and burying it below ground for three months. After this treatment the sharkmeat is then hung in the open air for another three months. The result is revolting, but edible. Surprisingly -- and hopefully -- these terrible tidbits will not make you throw up or kill you outright.
Other examples of cruel and unusual Icelandic food would be fire-roasted head of goat eaten in the entirety (sans brain, fur and eyeballs); fried seal flippers ; whale blubber and testicles of ram marinated to the consistency of pus in a bowl of soured milk.
Good fish is plentiful in Iceland. Unfortunately the cooks will find a way to make a good piece of fish into another dreaded Icelandic dish as I witessed at one of Reykavik's most popular nouvelle-cuisine restaurants -- Apotek. The salted cod was the finest example of fresh cod flesh as I have ever seen. It was, however, salted to the point of obnoxiousness. The overabundance of salt was compounded by the addition of a slice of bacon.
Sodium ad nauseaum!
THE LANGUAGE
The Icelandic language is an archaic form of Norse -- an anachronistic tangle of ancient alphabet, gutteral grunts and thick-tongued "th-gh" sounds. Their Vs are apparently mixed-up with their Ws and, unlike it's evolved Norse counterpart, the Icelanders haven't gotten around to dropping redundant rolls of antiquated syllables at the ends of most of their words -- making it all even more confusing. With such a language one might expect the Icelanders to commonly use English or French, but this isn't the case. You'll do better speaking Russian. They are culturally bound to this language just as they are bound to ancient recipies from the days when their ancestors had to burrow for grubs for lunch.
CURRENCY AND ECONOMY
Their coins are as annoying as their cuisine. Their pennies look like dimes; their dimes look like dollar coins; their half-dollar equivalent coins looks like a nickel. Their "dollar" (Icelandic Kroner) is more like a penny (trading at about 90 IKr to the $1.00 at the moment) so that one is always dealing with at least two redundant zeroes and the natives are forced to discuss new car
prices in the millions.
The economy is somehow linked to the Scandanavian economy, so that almost everything is quite expensive. Supplies of everything except fish, 4WD monster trucks, snow and lava seem to be somewhat limited, so the market for goods may be somewhat tight. even with economy lodging (Iceland does feature great budget lodging in the form of Youth Hostels and Guest Houses) a visit to this hostile land may prove to be somewhat costly.
CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT
Endless fields of lava. Jagged, ugly black rocks as far as the eye can see. If it snows -- and it probably will 10 months out of the year no matter what the guide books say -- the endless fields of jagged, ugly black rocks will be endless fields of snow-capped jagged, ugly black rocks.
It's cold. Damn cold. But it warms up in the summer when the sun forgets to set for a couple of weeks. In the winter -- when the cold is enhanced by a seemingly endless night -- it's even colder. And when it's windy (often) it's even colder than that.
The whole place might blow up at any moment. It's s floating on top of magma like a zit on the face of the earth that could burst any time. It's smack dab on the world's biggest fault line. There are active volcanoes everywhere and earthquakes are frequent. Glaciers have been known to jar loose from volcanic activity, sending tons of ice, giant lava bounders, boiling hot mud and and entire cubic kilometers of floodwater anywhere the deadly debris wants to go. There is no significant tree-life. What few wild,
outdoor trees there are are scraggly and slow-growing or dwarfed and weak.
SAVING THE BEST STUFF FOR LAST...?
Okay, so I'm talking about Iceland as if I didn't enjoy my trip, but I did. But then again, I may be a masochistic traveler. I like Dutch staircases and enjoy danger and craters. With the rest of the reviews recommending Iceland highly, I think some warning is in order. I have yet to mention that the severe environment, bad food, confusing money and depressing disorder of day and night seem to have deranged a significant segment of the sparse population, nor have I mentioned the lack of a police presence to protect the unsuspecting foreign visitor from the whims of an occasional sociopath. A fairly profound anti-American attitude is also to be detected among some of the natives.
The highlight of my trip, however, was enough to make up for the above-mentioned Icelandic hassles. This was a trip to the facility known as the Blue Lagoon -- a by-product of the geothermal heating industry.
BLUE LAGOON
The Blue Lagoon is a spa that features a remarkable thermally-heated pool. The pool is neither natural, nor is it an intentional man-made creation. It is an unusual and surrealistic pean of serendipity. It was created by a geo-thermal powerplant (civilized Iceland is geo-thermally heated, thus creating another great boon of incredibly clean and fresh air). The water run-off from the plant was designed to be fed back into the lava-encrusted earth. The engineers were surprised to find that the hot
water from below the earth's surface sealed the porus lava owing to it's mineral rich content and unusual algae. Unable to absorb the water due to the mineral-algae-sediment build-up, the water pooled. The natives soon found that a dip in this ersatz spa was quite nice and so they designed a high-tech spa facility and restaurant around it. Another stroke of luck and blessing of nature was soon discovered. The mineral content combined with the heated, underground sea water and the natural elements of steam, lava, &c. fostered an unusual algae in the pool. This solution was soon purported to have beneficial effects on the skin. Sceince then confirmed the beneficial results of this bath-water on problems such as psoriasis and eczema.
I hope this will prompt the reader to research the Blue Lagoon phenomena on the Internet and view some of the striking imagery of this remarkable facility. A Google search of Blue Lagoon and Iceland should provide one with further interesting reading.
Recommended:
No
Best Suited For: Couples
Best Time to Travel Here: Jun - Aug
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Kallisti
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Location: Stick a fork in it.
Reviews written: 149
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