Trip to Iceland 2010: Day 1

I arrived at the Keflavik Airport at 10:30. The view from the plane was already quite stunning and luckily, the weather was nice and sunny. The first impression when I went outside the terminal and during bus ride to Reykiavik was both stunning and a little disappointing. I’m not sure what I expected, but what I saw was a barren land of rocks with the sea and some mountains on the horizon. Still, it was quite an interesting view, especially when I noticed a golf course among the rocks. That was a really unusual sight.

Golf course on the rocks between Keflavik and Reykiavik

I bought a ticket for flyBus (2500 ISK) that would drop me off at the Reykiavik campsite. The campsite cost me 1000 ISK for the night, which is not bad considering that it’s not that far from city centre. After putting up the tent, I went to see the city. I bought a 1 day bus pass, which is 600 ISK and allows me to travel with buses for the whole day. Normally, a single bus fare is 280 ISK and is paid to the driver when entering the bus (no change, you gotta have exact amount of money), so the BusPass is a good solution if you wanna tour the city. I took bus number 14 and arrived in the center in 5 minutes.

Now, the city itself has a nice feeling to it. There are no skyscrapers here, the tallest structure here is a Halgrímskirkja church. The church tower is open for visitors.

Halgrímskirkja church in Reykiavik

The city architecture is quite varied, although you should not expect anything special. However, there is this feeling of openness here, but that just my subjective gut feeling, your will probably vary. Also worth noting is that there is quite a lot of trees here. ‘That’s nothing unusual’ you might say, but for Iceland, it is unusual. Once you get out of Reykjavik, you will not be seeing too many trees (if at all).

The city centre is a nice place, especially around the Tjörn lake. I heard there are actually wild birds nesting on a small island in the center of that lake. There are lots of parks around with benches to sit and relax. There’s a modern City Hall at the shore, and there’s a relief model of Iceland on display there, neat stuff.

Tjörn lake in the center of Reykiavik, you can see Halgrímskirkja church tower

Reykiavik City Hall at the shore of Tjörn lake

What really struck me was the amount of statues around. I've never seen so many statues on such a small area. And it's not only in the city center, where you can find the statue of national hero Jón Sigurðsson. There's plenty of them around Tjörn. I even saw one by a video rental place, and few more from the bus or car when traveling through the city.

The statue of Iceland's national hero
Jón Sigurðsson first Nordic settler Ingólfr Arnarson in Reykiavik

One of many statues around Tjörn lake in Reykiavik

And another statue, this time by a video rental store

Anyway, I wanted to buy a road map for my travels in upcoming days. I naively asked about it in Tourist Information Office. Sure, they had one. For a 'mere' 4500 ISK. So I ended up buying one at the campsite for 2600 ISK. That was not the best choice either, I still overpayed. I later on found a book store that had plenty of maps to choose from with prices varying from 1200 for ordinary paper map to 5000 ISK for a detailed road atlas. But more about that in another  post.

Generic view from the shore

Anyway, nothing really spectacular on the first day. I came back to the campsite, took a walk around and went to sleep quite early. And here's the nasty surprise. It was friggin cold at night. It was ok during the day, maybe except the strong wind. But it's gotten really cold and windy during the night. That was annoying, I ended up not sleeping that well.