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Iceland 2017: Sept 24

It was grey and rainy and miserable again on Sunday so I walked down Laugavegur with a plan. It wasn’t early but being a Sunday, the only shops open were the tourist shops and the occasional cafe. That surprised me – as far as I’d seen, Saturday and Sunday opening hours were much the same. They definitely were at the swimming pool I was headed for, I’d checked. I planned to walk but it’s a long way from the city centre (and as it turns out, I didn’t actually know where it was) so I turned back & got the bus from Hlemmur instead.

There’s never bad weather for a trip to the pool. Laugardalslaug has an outdoor 50m pool, an indoor pool split in two halves, four hotpots, a seawater spa (a salty hotpot), a sociable pool, a play pool and a lagoon pool, not to mention saunas, steam rooms, slides and play equipment. I swan ten lengths of the outdoor pool, splashed around the play pool & sampled the cooler hotspots – 40° is more than enough for me. The sun came out. The rain bucketed down. The sun came out. And so on.

I took the bus home and had a late lunch, then I went into central Reykjavik for a bit of shopping & sightseeing. I’d eaten all the cheese so I replaced that but it wasn’t until I was walking home, enjoying a husky paddling in Tjörnin, that I realised I hadn’t got bread. Never mind. I didn’t need it for breakfast and it would only be another thing to carry out to Hafnarfjörður to pick up the campervan.

Iceland 2017: Sept 23

I woke up stupidly early again – too many people in the guesthouse slamming doors & spending forever putting their shoes on outside my door (sounds ridiculous: you can’t know how noisy this is until you’ve experienced it at 5.30am.

Eventually I had to admit defeat and get up. Breakfast was on offer at the mothership around the corner – no hot fresh rolls sadly but there was toast and real butter and the usual sorts of meat & cheese and cucumbers (who eats cucumber for breakfast? This is not a thing!) and hard-boiled eggs and so on.

Back in my room I was still plaiting my hair and trying to delay going out in the wind and the rain when housekeeping let themselves into my room. 9.30 is a bit early but I’ll bear it in mind for tomorrow.

I went down the road to the far end of Tjörnin, saw some nice dogs, decided I did need my waterproof trousers on after all (learnt that they’re warm & windproof too!) and went down to city hall where I watched ducks dabbling in the moat. I always like watching the birds in Reykjavik. Tourist information is now in city hall so in I went, only to find a huge relief map of Iceland on a table. It’s so interesting! To see where the mountains really are, to see how flat the south is, you can actually see the line of Laki craters, Herðubreið in the middle of nowhere. It was also very hot inside in full waterproofs.

Walking out of city hall, past the new (new! 1881!) parliament building, there’s not a hint to be seen that the Icelandic government has collapsed in the last week and that for the next month, until the snap election on October 28th, there’s no one in charge. Anywhere else in the world there would be anarchy & riots. Iceland? No sign anything’s wrong. Read about how that all happened for yourself.

I crossed Ingolfstorg, saw that the old TIC is now a boutique and went over to the Old Harbour. Unsurprisingly, given the weather, all the whale watching trips were cancelled bur moored were two actual whalers – whether current or previously, I don’t know. I tried to imagine a dead whale on the steep deck. How would you even get it on board?

The subsequent mental discussion about whaling and therefore the 17th century Danish trade monopoly took me down the road, through the roadworks & into the famous flea market. I’ve never been in there. It’s a lot like Wimborne market with more ring-necked jumpers, lava jewellery and dried fish.

Stopping in all the tourist shops on the way, I headed home. I was being picked up at 1.30 to go to the Blue Lagoon and I needed lunch and to pack. Figuring they were easier to put on damp feet than boots, I wore my sandals and nearly froze to death waiting for the minibus in the howling gale. I enjoyed the effect it had on the bushes, though. The top layer has turned a bright red. The lower layers are still yellowish-green. When the wind blows and the leaves turn, the entire shrubbery changes colour. It’s quite magnificent.

First job at the Blue Lagoon was exploration. It’s been expanded since I was last there. The in-water bar has moved and now the silica mud masks come from a facial bar rather than a wooden crate, there are two new bays and part of the cooling basin has been drained, leaving a kind of white silica beach. Other than that, there are minor changes, like a facelift. It’s not unrecognisable but “there used to be a kind of beach somewhere around here”, “why does this feel more open?”, “I think the bridges are new” – and most importantly, they’ve cleaned the floor! No more don’t-think-about-it sludgy hairy bottom. Very little gravel. It needed doing. I’m glad they’ve done it. I took ridiculous selfies and a greeter took & emailed photos of me too.

 I had a blue slushie and later, to stave off starvation pains, some crisps and the thickest richest hot chocolate ever. But as the evening wore on, it became harder to ignore the wind and the rain, especially as the sky grew darker. Soon, lying on your back in hot milky crackling water, looking at a heavy black sky with your nose & ears nearly frozen off in an outdoor pool, you start to question why you haven’t gone home yet. I gave in half an hour before I planned too, before I punched a tourist who was proudly declaring “Viking was disappointing” (it’s a tiny wool-making village which happens to have a black sand beach and a petrol station, what were you expecting of it?) and “Geysir doesn’t fire anymore. Why would I care about seeing it?” (I can’t even).

There is no clock at the luggage store where you shelter from the weather while waiting for your bus and I’d deliberately left my watch behind. Buses park opposite but you can hardly see what company they belong to, let alone the card destination signs, not in the dark with dazzling headlights on.

We came into the back of Reykjavik, past Harpa all lit up in blues and purples. Much to my surprise, we didn’t go to the bus terminal and get doled out into minibuses for once. Today the full size coach was taking us home, even up to bus stop 8 in the narrow streets around the big church.

I have asked all the gods, Norse & otherwise, for better weather. I may die in the campervan if this keeps up.

Iceland 2017: Sept 22

It’s ridiculous to leave home at 7am for a flight at ten past one. But by the time I’d got petrol, battled rush hour in Winchester and sat through four-way temporary traffic lights in Billingshurst, it was getting on for 11 before I arrived at Gatwick’s Summer Special car park. I have never liked leaving my car in a waiting bay & handing my keys to a stranger but this was official parking & it was right next to Long Stay, with barbed wire fences & gates and… it would have been a much better use of space to just make a traditional car park out of it.

I took the shuttle bus to the airport. Checked in, whizzed through security without getting searched, had a late breakfast of toast (toast with cheese wasn’t available until 12) in a pub actually literally packed to the rafters with men drinking pints of lager and yelling the Drunk Man Cheer.

At 12.25 my gate was announced. I fled & found my plane was Bláfell, Blue Mountain, a flat-topped volcano in northern Iceland. My favourite thing about Icelandair planes is the entertainment system, which I’ve never encountered on low-cost short haul European flights but my second favourite is that all the planes are named after volcanoes.

We were late boarding. We were late moving. We sat for twenty minutes on the edge of the runway – I was watching The Matrix & also watching the time counter on it. We were half an hour late landing at Keflavik, after heading right across Reykjanes and circling over Faxaflói back to the airport through heavy rainclouds – it had been beautiful clear sunny weather all the way to the south coast of Iceland & the couple next to me clung to each other all through the descent. We were late disembarking – staff shortage to operate the jetbridge. Has Icelandic tourism grown too much too fast? Ooh, I don’t know!

I got the bus into town. On the north side was a very bright double full rainbow the likes of which I’ve never seen before. On the south side was black sky & a window so heavily streaked with rain that you couldn’t see out. We stopped at Greyline’s terminal, tumbled into minibuses & went off to our corners of Reykjavik. They now deliver to a dozen tourist bus stops rather than to hotel or guesthouse doors. I’d booked bus stop 6 at the Culture House thinking I might want to have a look at Reykjavik on my way to my guesthouse. In the rain, carrying luggage. I hopped on a different minibus & went to bus stop 8, my actual closest.

Guesthouse Andrea is really an annex of Guesthouse Aurora, which is where I had to go to check in & collect keys and where breakfast is served. Andrea is a basalt-grey fronted house on a residential street in Asgard – the streets around the distinctive Hallgrímskirkja which are named after Norse gods. I’m on Njarðargata, named after the father of the Vanar, Frej & Freyja, if I remember rightly. I may not.

First stop after dropping my luggage was shopping. I was horrified to find my favourite big book/tourist shop has become a Hard Rock Cafe but Eymundsson’s is still intact, fortunately. Other things have changed – there’s something hugely different about the square outside the Greyline office too but I can’t put my finger on what.

Down at Tjörnin, the pond is still water rather than ice so the ducks, geese & swans are not confined yet to the one unfrozen corner. You’re also now requested to not feed them between 15th May and 15th August to help protect ducklings from seagulls.

I was getting hungry by now and it was raining so off I went to 1011 for food. Iceland is getting rid of plastic bags this month – I had my big bag and I’d also brought my Svalbardbutikken shopping bag. I have a mini kitchen in my room – well, I have a sink, a fridge, two hot plates & a couple of cups – so juice, cheese and bread were top of the shopping list. And star crisps, although I had to settle for red cheese as they didn’t have the green ones.

By the time I got back, having got lost in Asgard – Njarðargata is at 90° to Skólavorðustigur, not parallel to it – I was hot and then because the window was open, I was cold. Very cold. I’m going to freeze to death in my campervan on Monday cold. And I’d been up a very long time by then.

EdFringe 2017: Friday & Saturday

On Friday morning, with no food or drink in the room, I set out for my first show. The only reason I could do this without some form of breakfast is that it was Shakespeare For Breakfast, where they do an hour-long absurd versio of a Shakespeare play and also provide you with a croissant and coffee/tea/orange juice. They’re not the best croissants in the world but I’ve done this show twice before and I was prepared – remember the jam I requested yesterday but didn’t eat? I used it for my croissant and very good it was too. I’ve previously seen The Taming of the Shrew with the Middletons and Hamlet as a ridiculous drama student. This year was Mac-Gary as an allotment society where one of the cast died dramatically backstage every time someone said Mac-Gary.

I went shopping afterwards, just some basics to survive the Fringe, pretty much all of which I proceeded to eat by the end of Friday, so that was good.

I met Tom up by the castle (eventually) afterwards and we roamed Edinburgh a bit. We spied a poster on the wall at the bottom of the Underbelly so we went in to see Quarter Life Crisis and then we roamed a bit more before separating for our late afternoon/evening shows – Tiff Stevenson, Ed Byrne and Andrew Maxwell for me. The George Square Theatre has the most comfortable seats in the entire city and I was very happy to sit in them for two hours in a row.

We met again afterwards and went looking for a relatively quiet pub – Edinburgh is never quiet in August and particularly not on a Friday night. We ended up at the Counting House, where there was live music (good guitar, bad singing) and a pair of real life DC supervillains sitting at the end of our table.

On Saturday, we went to see Janey Godley’s podcast live. That’s right on the other side of Edinburgh from where I’d been so far, so we ambled over quite early, had brunch (cheese toastie done right – neither soft nor burnt and with yellow cheese, not orange) before we went over to the theatre. This one was unusual – Janey Godley and Ashley Storrie were already on stage when the doors opened and they kept up a “preamble” for twenty minutes before the show began, chatting together, assigning random names to the audience as they came in, reassuring them that the show’s no started yet. I’ve never seen a podcast recorded – don’t know what I was expecting really but I enjoyed it a lot.

We headed back to the Royal Mile afterwards to find the Wyrd Shop. The sky was looking threatening and we were ready to dive inside the nearest shop, cafe or pub at any second to take shelter. But all it did for a while was continue to threaten without actually doing anything so we went into the Cocktail Festival, which did have cocktails but mostly had stalls and food stands. It was just a bit too early to eat again so we hopped round the corner home for a half hour phone charging break (my phone went from 100% battery to too flat to switch on within five hours!) before goingout for food. I got a cheese panini from the nice cafe on the corner and Tom got crab bite things which didn’t taste as good as they looked (or indeed contain as much crab as they claimed to).

We parted ways again, me for Nick Doody and BBC Presents and Tom for whatever was interesting and available at the Pleasance, before the Pleasance got evacuated and he gave up and came home.

When I got back, we went out for another drink, this time back at “our pub”, Holyrood 9A, just down on the corner below us.

I’m sure the entire population of Edinburgh didn’t roll a suitcase over the metal walkway above my room in the middle of the night but it sounded like it. People are apparently still arriving with their luggage at 3am and people start leaving with theirs at about the same time so these wheels are rumbling and crashing over the metal all night long. You get maybe fifteen seconds between them and then you start wondering if you can run outside in the middle of the night to shriek at the latest one. And every single door in the entire building slams. I’m so glad I wasn’t a student here and I’m never staying here again.

EdFringe 2017: Thursday

On Thursday I got up at half past four in the morning, finished packing, drove to Southampton, had breakfast (“would you like jam or marmalade with your toast?” I took the jam but not for the toast) and then looked at my watch and found I still had nearly two and a half hours before my plane departed.

I did not actually need to get up at 4.30am.

I got to Edinburgh, took the tram into the city centre, ignored the weird man sitting at the front narrating the journey (I wasn’t the only one who thought he was weird; a woman got on at the second stop and sat next to him and then moved at the third stop, pulling faces in my direction about him and then the ticket collector came up the front to talk to his friend sitting there about how weird he is and what a regular he is) and walked down to the hostel. Only it was full of construction vans and men and tools and planks. I was utterly bewildered. Was the place closed? Had I missed an email? Was I homeless for the next six days? Then I spied the hostel reception on the other side of the road, where it definitely wasn’t last time I stayed. I went in. They told me I was at their other hostel, ten minutes away. After walking halfway across Edinburgh with a bag that Julie Airlines wouldn’t have allowed as hand luggage but Flybe do, I didn’t want to go another ten minutes. I’d planned for being right here by Cowgate.

The other hostel isn’t so bad. It’s by the Pleasance Courtyard and its two main problems are that I can never figure out which key opens which door and that the metal walkways that join the building to the courtyard literally make a noise like a bomb going off if someone wheels a suitcase across them at night.

I went off into Edinburgh with my luggage stored safely behind reception, 11am being far too early to check in. I collected my tickets, had a good look around, reminded myself how the streets and bridges and everything works and then went to find something to watch while I waited for Tom to arrive.

I was given a flyer by Jaz Watts and I planned to go and watch that but when I got there, two queues of people turned up, looked at the room, decided it was too small and ran away and I’m not brave enough to be the only audient so I also ran away.

I sat in the Cowshed, on a pile of straw, and watched a nice man called Liam singing for a while. I sat in Princes Street Gardens and read for a while. I sat in the station and read for a while. Because of a broken-down freight train, the Manchester Airport and Euston trains were delayed and Tom finally turned up nearly an hour late. We went back to the hostel, checked in and then went out into Edinburgh.

We started with food just off the Royal Mile (cheesey garlic bread & penne a la chef) and then went up the Royal Mile, with a soundtrack of “what’s that?” “let’s stop and listen to this”, “what’s down here?” “ooh, whiskey!” and so on, made our way up to the Assembly Hall and crossed Princes Street Gardens by the Mound, stopping outside the Half Price Hut for ginger cider and to watch a busker called Alx Green (I think it was Green. It definitely Alx). Then I left Tom to head up to Rose Street to see Jay Lafferty while I went on to the EICC for the Barnardo’s fundraiser – lineup Tom Lucy, Katy Brand, The Boy With Tape On His Face, Sara Pascoe, Patrick Monahan, Jo Caulfield, Ed Byrne and Milton Jones – quite a lot of my favourites and why have I never seen The Boy With Tape On His Face before???

When it finished, I went over to the Gilded Balloon to meet Tom, who had just seen and very much enjoyed Scott Agnew and was getting a cheese toastie and we went in search of cider, which we found at Holyrood 9A, just round the corner from home.

And that was it for the day – 20 hours, 28,000 steps, no phone battery left and multiple sore patches on my feet

Tromsø 2017: Saturday

My flight was at 1.30pm so I planned to head out of Tromsø about 11 or 11.30. Yes, to get to a small regional airport two miles away. However, the moment I reached the bus stop, I took it into my head that the flight was 12.30 so was a tiny bit panicked when I didn’t reach the airport until gone 11.30.

I checked in at the machine. It didn’t like me. It ordered me off to a human and it was while I was waiting for the human that I noticed the departure board showing my flight at 1.30 after all. The human asked how many luggage to check in. My ticket didn’t include hold luggage but I asked how much it would cost – as it was a very full flight, they were delighted to get a bag out of the cabin and into the hold and did so at no charge. Free of my luggage and with an unexpected free hour, I went down to the main road to see if I could figure out how to get to the sea view. Crossing that road on foot seems impossible but I saw footprints in the snow further down. I would follow them. Yeah. They led to a waist-deep snowdrift and there was no getting over the other side of that. I wasn’t sure I was even going to be able to climb out the side I’d fallen into.

There was a child sitting next to me on the plane, a child far too young for his own phone with wraparound edges, let alone his own Snapchat account. But the wifi on Norwegian is still more miss than hit and he couldn’t use it!

At Oslo, free of luggage, I bought a return ticket on the Flytoget, successfully navigated the escalator, tunnel and Indiana Jones Death Turbine onto the platform and went into Oslo, since I had six+ hours to kill.

Oslo is cold and wet and the snow is more like rain and I got lost over and over again, chased down the street by a woman demanding money (it’s ok if they’re waving a magazine), saw the underwhelming cathedral and came back on the train, deciding I’d rather kill the time in the airport than the city.

Tromsø 2017: Thursday night & Friday

It’s Saturday morning and for some insane reason, the library doesn’t open until 11am (although I can see people inside! How did they get there? Were they locked in last night?) so this latest blog is being written on my phone in my armchair.

On Thursday evening, off I went to the Kulturhuset and I got home just after two in the morning.

Therefore, I was glad I didn’t have anything planned for Friday morning. When I got up, I toddled off through the fresh snow to the library, leafed through visittromso.no until I found something that appealed – reindeer sledding under the Northern Lights, although the heavy snow clouds weren’t promising much in the way of Auroral activity. True, that trip was cancelled in the afternoon for lack of participants but I immediately found a similar one.

I spent the day in Tromsø, taking in the sights at the harbour, popping into tourist shops & I visited the famous Tromsø Museum. I went to Polaria last time I was here and other than the seals, that was a bit underwhelming but the Tromsø Museum is supposed to be really good. 

It’s not.

The downstairs is full of slightly moth-eaten skins and stuffed animals dating back to the days when the Arctic was a hunting ground and Tromsø a jumping-off point for expeditions to the High Arctic. In 2017, we don’t look at fifty dead stuffed seals in a museum in quite the way we did in 1850. Upstairs are galleries about explorers like Roald Amundsen (local hero, since he set off to his death from Tromsø) and Fridtjof Nansen as well as Isbjørnkongen Henry Rudimentary but it turns out I’m not all that interested in museums.

By evening, the sky was more or less clear over Tromsø and the Northern Lights forecast was reasonably promising. I went down to the harbour, got in a minibus with a Sámi reindeer herder called Ken and went off to Kvaløya.

It was about a thirty minute drive and as we drove through Kvaløya suburbs, the snow started coming down again. We reached the camp and I realised we hadn’t gone as far as I thought – from our small hill, Tromsøya loomed huge in the fjord and the orange glow from the city on the other side of the island looked like a rerun of the great fire of the 1960s.

We were put on the sledges in pairs and sat there waiting for all the reindeer to be harnessed, I spotted that the sky was clearish in front of us. And was that… did I see a green band across the sky, despite the early hour and the epic light pollution? Yes, I did. And it was purple too, and it was twinkling. It was only about for three or four minutes and I don’t think anyone else noticed except the Malaysian lady I was sharing the sledge with (“Malaysia is famous for all the wrong reasons” apparently. The only thing I can think of is the plane – does Malaysia have a bad reputation I don’t know about?). The two photos I got are good – bright green lights, plus the orange glow plus a few streetlights, plus a reindeer in the foreground that you can’t see because it’s too dark.

The Lights were gone within seconds of us setting off – and that was scary because our reindeer set off at a run and the driver leapt onto the sledge unexpectedly, straight into my feet.

It was a better run than last time – we went a bit further and these reindeer got a bit of a move on. Not actually running, but certainly not the very sedate walk I was expecting. It got cold. My feet got numb.

Afterwards, we fed the reindeer. Most of them live semi-feral with the herd in summer but they know where they’re well-off in winter. We had a sledge of reindeer moss, frozen into blocks and some of the reindeer are tame enough that they’ll eat it from your hands. They’re not delicate eaters but they’re careful not to try eating gloves.

Then we stumbled down the hill and back into the bus so we could cross the road to the cabin for a bowl of Sámi soup, some hot chocolate and a lesson in Sámi culture, which included being introduced to the full gakte, including hooked fur boots and massive leather coat, and to a demonstration of the joik.

It snowed again on the way home.

This morning I mistook 7.30 for 8.30 and was packed and out and about before anything in Tromsø was up except the fjord cruise catamaran. 

I have over six hours to kill in Oslo Airport later today but there are three trains an hour that take 20 mins to get to the city centre so I’m going to have my first glimpse of the city.

Tromsø 2017: Wednesday evening & Thursday

On Wednesday evening, having almost died of hypothermia in my nice warm bed for some reason, I dressed up warm and went out to see the Northern Lights. It was Cold, about -10 when we went out and when we reached the lavvu, I didn’t fancy getting out of the warm minibus and standing around in the snow staring at the sky a bit. How many times have I been out looking for the Northern Lights and how many times have I seen something Worth seeing? Many times times and twice!

(The Norwegian computer I’m using puts random Capitals on Words and I can’t be bothered to correct them right now. Please ignore them.)

Well, last night I saw Northern Lights Worth seeing. So many lights! They started slow and dim. Invisible at first, invisible to me anyway, then a pale white cloudy band across the sky, then a hint of green and then suddenly there was a huge belt of green and Purple, twinkling, pencilling, dancing, right across the sky. I took photos – 30 second exposure plus 30 Seconds Processing, so it’s really slow and as it was Processing, a man behind me kept shouting “behind you!” so I’d take one photo in one direction, then turn, then turn, then turn. None of the photos are brilliant, nothing like thh ones I took last year, even though the lights were so much better. But it was so Cold. After the peak, the biggest Brightest display, I went back into the lavvu whimpering and squeaking because my hands and feet were so Cold. I had to take off boots and socks and almost put my feet into the fire just to get some feeling back in them.

The lights continued and were still going when we left at gone 11.30 but they weren’t as Bright or dramatic. They weren’t forecast to be good and they definitely weren’t forecast to be dramatic. And we’re not going to get them tonight because today it’s snowing.

It was -12 by the end of the night and the walk up through town back to my hostel was freezing. Really freezing. The sort of freezing where you want to jump from shop to hotel to shop to warm up every ten metres but you can’t because it’s gone midnight and everything is closed.

When I woke up today, it was snowing. The sky is Heavy and grey, it was a white-out earlier and I went out snowshoeing. I’ve done that once before and I was terrible at it. I fell into the deep snow on every other step, had to be hauled out once or twice and my shoes kept falling off. Today the snowshoes were better quality, even I could tell, With a sort of harness-arrangement to attach them firmly to my boots. Admittedly, I mostly followed the Group as we trod Down a path of slightly more compressed snow but we were encouraged to break out into the fresh deep snow, a metre deep, and I didn’t fall in there. And although it was allegedly -7 out, it was warm – snowshoeing is the most warming Activity I’ve ever done, although it does have the downside of leaving you pretty chilly afterwards. The first part was a in white-out in the wilderness but then the clouds started to lift and the Mountains around us began to appear.

We stopped at a supermarket/cafe on Kvaløya on the way back for bolle and hot drinks. Bolle are rolls, sweet ones, like buns, and these particular ones had chunks of chocolate baked into them. I also had some hot chocolate which was just cool enough to drink and Nice and thick, a bit like the very memorable hot chocolate I had in Italy once.

This afternoon’s job is going to be some Food shopping and a Nice hot shower before going out this evening.

Troms 2017 – Wednesday

I got up at twenty to one in the morning, drove to Gatwick without incident, checked in without incident, had some breakfast and got on the plane. Having been driving for most of the night, I tried to sleep most of the way but an hour and half into a three and a half hour flight, there were suddenly snow-covered Mountains outside. When they disappeared into the clouds, I went back to sleep again, only to be woken by the pilot announcing that we were now making our descent into Tromsø and to get the plane tidied up please and while we were at it, there was a view outside to admire. So I admired it.

I didn’t bother immediately leaping on the Flybuss. There was another view to admire but getting at it involved crossing a main road and that was a bit difficult. I did my best, then went back to the bus. The Flybuss, idiot! Should have walked down to the bus stop “under” the terminal and got the local bus.

In the middle of Tromsø, I found my hostel easily enough. There’s fresh snow in Tromsø, fresh enough to be problematic. There are snowploughs all over the place, people digging out their paths, people with poles knocking snow off the roof (and crows helping with this job. Do not stand under the edge of any building or you’ll get your own little snowstorm. I went into the library to borrow their wifi just to check in on Facebook, discovered my battery was pretty much dead already, did a bit of food shopping (they have the tasty crisp mixture I eat in Iceland!) and then caught the bus to the cable car. I bought a day ticket, took the 26 over the big scary bridge and through the suburbs until I thought I’d missed the stop and then suddenly the bus announced “Fjellheiset – cable car”

It’s all been renovated since I was last here, trying to spot the Midnight Sun in May 2011. It’s a 28 person cable car that goes every half an hour, unless they’ve got too many tourists to Ferry around, in which case they just go up and down until they’ve got rid of a load.

The mountain is called Storsteinen, which is Norwegian for Big Stone. It was chilly at the top but not as freezing as it was at nearly midnight in May. I found the viewing platform – you have to haul open a patio door to get out there and I think they’re using it to generate power to run the cable car. It’s so heavy and so hard to get any grip with your feet to pull it. It’s worth it for the view. It’s a good view, over the entire island and all the mountains behind it. The Pingvinhotellet is very visible at the far end of the island (there’s a special Flybuss that goes to that end, if you’re unfortunate enough to end up staying there…). I didn’t plan to stay up there for an hour and half, freezing to death but that’s what happened. I saw the view from many angles, sat inside in the semi-warm to eat the nice Icelandic crisps, went back out and then decided I’d seen Tromsø in every way a city can be seen and it was time to go down before they had to chip me out of the snow.

At the bottom, seeing the crowd of Polish tourists (in matching blue coats and shockingly orange woolly hats) heading for the bus stop, I went to the one before the Fjellheiset one, where I was more likely to get a seat. And it worked. The Norwegian bus driver didn’t recognise a Norwegian 24 hour bus ticket – he talked at me in Norwegian long past the point where it was obvious I had no idea what he was saying, told me “You have to buy a ticket every time. Don’t you know?” and I finally had to point out, in some irritation “it’s a day ticket!” before I was allowed to sit in one of the empty seats and continue my journey. I was right, there was a huge crowd 200m up the road at the Fjellheiset stop and me sitting happily in my own seat. We went round the other end of the suburbs and I got off at the Arctic Cathedral, which is in fact not a cathedral at all. I went inside but these days you have to go pay to go beyond the lobby so I thought I wouldn’t bother. Instead, I got back on a bus – the driver hardly even glanced at my day ticket this time – and came back to Central Tromsø to write a blog about half a day, check in to the hostel, charge my phone and camera and sleep for an hour or two before I go out looking for the Northern Lights until the middle of the night.

Sunday 7th: Reykjanes

I spent the first part of Sunday packing. My stuff had got scattered all over the place and even once I’d packed in the apartment, there was all the stuff that had escaped into the car. First stop was at the N1 at the end of the main road to get rid of as much rubbish as I could – I’ve been living out of the car for a week, eating most meals in the car. I’ve accumulated a lot of bread wrappers, plastic cheese wrappers and juice cartons and I haven’t been stopping religiously at a bin every day to get rid of it bit by bit.

Second stop was at the Geothermal Park in Hveragerði. I only realised yesterday that the hot river above town is a different place from the Geothermal Park which is in the middle of town and while I don’t fancy walking 40 minutes each way to see a hot river – they’re kind of abundant in Iceland – I was willing to drive two minutes up the road to visit the Park.

What’s interesting is that there’s a hot stream flowing through the Park – so hot that they sell eggs at reception for you to boil in the stream. Except not today. The stream is currently only at about 80° and it needs to be at least 90° to boil the eggs. Actually a lot of the Park was a lot cooler than I was expecting. There are two or three hot springs which have produced silica-rich bright blue pools – all totally dried up. All the bubbling mud pools, totally dried up. I did happen to catch one of the boreholes spouting – an actual working geyser! It’s too late at night now to find out how often it erupts, but I didn’t even know it existed so I’m pretty pleased to have seen it. It’s not as high as Strokkur but whereas Strokkur is one violent explosion, this one lasted quite a while and was definitely several smaller eruptions which looked like more steam than water.

The hot river is very decorative but the only things producing much steam or heat in the Park were the boreholes. Here’s the thing about geothermal areas – they move as the hot spot under the ground moves. New hot spots appear, old ones fade. And this one definitely looks like it’s faded.

Onwards. I drove to the airport via Reykjanes because the other option is to go via Reykjavik and that’s not an option. It’s one thing driving a left-hand-drive car on the open road. It’s quite another to try and negotiate a capital city, with lanes and traffic and lights and all that. Besides, I knew from yesterday that it’s one hour and ten minutes to the Blue Lagoon from Hveragerði via Reykjanes plus they always say twenty minutes from the Blue Lagoon to the airport. That’s an hour and a half. Whereas I know it’s forty minutes from Hveragerði to Reykjavik and then it’s an hour from Reykjavik to the airport. And I’m not entirely certain whether I’m counting those from similar points in Reykjavik. Either way, that’s a minimum hour and forty via the capital so my way is ten minutes faster.

Anyway. Off I went along Reykjanes in the sunshine. Stopped at Krýsuvík, where there’s another geothermal area. This one is much better. This one has its own car park and is free and more importantly, the ground boils and bubbles. It’s all red and orange and yellow, streaked with blue and green and white. I suppose it’s very ugly but in a way, it’s very beautiful. So many colours, so much heat, so much steam, so much smell. Blue-grey bubbling mud, orange and white steaming hillside, signs warning of potential steam explosions. If you’re in the south-west of Iceland and want to see something geothermal, Krýsuvík is a much better option than Hveragerði. Of course, if you’re in the north-east, Hverir, just outside Mývatn, is even better.

Off I went again, now heading straight for the airport, or rather in the direction of the airport to see how early I got there and whether it would be possibly to pop to the pool in Keflavik. And then my car pinged and a message appeared on the dashboard: loss of pressure – front left tyre. What was I supposed to do? Stop and check it but this wasn’t a road I could stop on. I slowed down and drove until I found a junction. These roads are rarely used – no one would mind if I made a quick stop in their junction. I hopped out and examined my tyre. It wasn’t flat or obviously damaged. I squeezed it and then went to squeeze the front right tyre for comparison. They felt much the same. I was 14km from Grindavík, the only settlement since Þorlákshöfn, a tiny harbour barely fifteen minutes out of Hveragerði. In other words, the only settlement for an hour. I couldn’t just sit on the side of the road. I had to get to Grindavík.

I drove slowly. I had a vague idea that sudden movements and sharp braking might not be good for my tyre, whatever was wrong with it. I wondered if maybe a bit of speed might be good for it. From what I remember of my physics, if it was warmer, the pressure would increase. Maybe if I could heat it up, it would re-inflate itself. But I decided that wasn’t a good idea and continued driving slowly and steadily. Fortunately it’s a quiet road and there were very few cars following to be annoyed by my lack of speed. I made it to Grindavík in one piece. I knew from yesterday that there was an N1 roadhouse in town and I went straight there. But this wasn’t somewhere I could get help. It’s just a café with a couple of petrol pumps out the front. I got out the car’s manual. It explained the warning light I’d had sitting staring at me for 14km and it said exactly what I knew it would say. If this comes up, stop immediately, do not continue driving. It also, helpfully, had a few things to say on the subject of tyre pressure. That if the pressure is low, the tyre will flex more and if it flexes it will get hot and it will explode. If the pressure is high, it will get hot and it will explode. In short, my tyre was about to explode. And I knew that. I’d driven 14km with two images alternately flashing before me – Richard Hammond’s 2006 Vampire crash and the lady who hit the bridge on my last afternoon at Kimco. If the tyre burst, it could go the way of the Hammond crash and that would be all kinds of bad. Or at best, it could be like the bridge lady and that would be very expensive. I’d ignored both scenarios long enough to get me to Grindavik but I was still 23km from Keflavik. I needed to do something – in a tiny sleepy fishing village on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

The N1 provided the news that three streets down was an OB petrol station with an air pump. I drove down and tried the door of the kiosk. No one in, of course. It’s Sunday and anyway, all fuel stops in Iceland are completely self-service, pay-at-pump jobbies. There probably wouldn’t have been anyone there any other day either. I wandered around and found the air at the side of the building. Ok. There was nothing visibly wrong with the tyre so I would have to assume that it was gradually losing pressure over time, as tyres do, which is why they need reinflating sometimes, and that it had simply dipped below the car’s accepted standard. I would fill it up. I consulted the manual again to find out what pressure it should be. It didn’t tell me. I flicked through several places and eventually discovered that there should be a sticker inside my door. There was but all it showed was a little picture of a meter next to each wheel, with no useful numbers. And by now I had barely an hour to get to the airport and either I was stuck in Grindavik with a non-functioning car or I had to risk an enormous crash. Not that I panicked and overreacted to this ridiculous warning. I eventually found the important sticker on the inside of the fuel flap. Three rows, two columns, three numbers in each box. No clue. And then at that moment, as I stood there with the manual in my hand, the fuel flap open, looking distressed, a car pulled up.

Icelandic men come from two moulds. One is the Norwegeian stereotype. They’re tall and slim and blondish and usually wearing a lópi. The other is the Ólafur Darri Ólafsson type – that’s Iceland’s most famous actor. He was the drunk helicopter pilot in the Ben Stiller Walter Mitty thing that thinks you can predict eruptions and that Eyjafjallajökull is next to Stykkishólmur. He was the policeman in Trapped recently. Apparently he’s in the BFG. Anyway, he represents the second mould of Icelandic Man – largeish, hairy and helpful. This man was the second kind. His other half was driving and he was half-leaning out of the window, which is why I took him to be there to help me. He wasn’t but the moment I asked him to, he did. He found the right number on my sticker, programmed the air machine, attached it to my tyre (I unscrewed the cap – I’m not completely helpless!) and it was done within a second. He also pointed out that my left mudflap was a bit wobbly, which I knew and warned me that when I returned the car, they might try to charge me for it. Immensely relieved to have my tyre fixed, I packed up my manuals and headed off.

The warning was still on but that didn’t surprise me. The manual said it would need to be reset, it wouldn’t just vanish. I didn’t entirely want to reset it in case something went wrong with it but on the other hand, if I reset it and it immediately came back on, then I’d know something was still wrong with the tyre. On the other hand, when I reset it and it didn’t come back on, it just made me worry all the way to Keflavik that I’d forced the car to believe there was no problem when there still was. The drive to Keflavik was every bit as slow and careful as the drive to Grindavík.

I paused on the corner at the airport to fill up with fuel and empty my rubbish. Everyone else had the same idea. There are three bins there – all full, plus one big industrial bin. I ended up dumping stuff in there, an armful at a time. I’d only done half of it in Hveragerði in the morning, not wanting to put a week’s worth of rubbish in one petrol station bin. And then on to the Hertz dropoff. The nice man (ODO-style) had a look at my windscreen, wandered around the car checking for obvious damage, checked the mileage and the fuel and that the tyre warning light didn’t come on and then gave me a receipt and sent me away. Not a penny for the mudflap, not a penny for driving too far (as had been in the process of happening to an American as I walked into the office), not a penny for nearly exploding a tyre. However, their shuttle bus had broken down two days ago and I had to walk to the terminal.

By the time I’d walked the 200 yards with all my luggage, I was hot and angry. There were too many tourists in the airport, not enough trolleys, not enough check-in machines and then the machine gave me a middle seat in the middle of the plane. I’m 99% sure I chose my seat when I booked the tickets – window seat in the penultimate row. It also gave me the option to change to the one and only other unoccupied seat in the plane. Middle seat, one of the last three rows. I declined and I wish I hadn’t because I was in the exit row and therefore none of my luggage could go under my seat where I like it. However, because there are now too many planes we were taken by bus most of the way to the cargo terminal where our plane was sitting on the horizon. I managed to get on the first bus and I managed to get to my seat long before most people in the vicinity which meant that for once, I had first pick of the overhead lockers. This is the problem with sitting at the back – by the time you’ve fought your way through, a lot of the lockers are full. Not that I mind sitting with my stuff under my feet.

The screens were a bit defective – on the way out, I’d watched 45 minutes of a film before we even hit the runway but today the screens didn’t even switch on until we were up in the air. The flight tracker mode didn’t work at all – the little plane sat on Keflavik for the entire flight and half the information was missing. But that was ok – I had a book to read and somehow that made the flight pass much quicker than watching a film and a couple of episode of TV that I’m not really interested in.

I found the M25 this year. Last year I somehow missed it and carried on along the M4 until I hit the outskirts of Reading. Everything else, I wasn’t quite sure which side of the M25 it was – is Slough inside or outside? Maidenhead? But I knew Reading was on the outside. This year the M25 was right there. The M3 was right there. And once I’m on the M3 I’m all good. The only thing distressing me now that I’m home is that there is nowhere on the way home from Heathrow on a Sunday night that will sell me a loaf of bread for my breakfast toast tomorrow. It might have to be the remnants of cereal I brought back from Iceland.