Vestmannaeyjar (Westman Islands) 5:30 p.m.: This is it. This is as high as I go. Lying on my stomach, the toes of my hiking shoes dig in to the earth and my hands grip the ridgeline of Mt. Haha. I peer over – it’s a straight drop some 220 metres to the golf course below.
Hikers crossing another peak look like toys on a tightrope and the island’s free-roaming sheep are calmly grazing the green pasture. Steep is their normal. Not mine.
I let go, turn over onto my back and scoot down a bit. Two days earlier, I was counting clouds – soaking in the geothermal warm waters of the Blue Lagoon. Here, the sunny panorama includes a harbor (where Keiko the orca of Free Willy was relocated in 1998), the town centre, a soccer pitch (game in progress) and, to the east, the rise of black and red lava fields of Eldfell (Icelandic for “Hill of Fire”) formed in 1973 by a volcanic eruption that lasted almost six months.
We are on Heimaey, the largest of the 15 Westman Islands, for one night only (night being relative in an Icelandic summer, in June the sun barely sets below the horizon). It’s not enough time for a boat tour of the world’s largest puffin colony, or to possibly melt the soles of our shoes treading on Eldfell’s still cooling lava.
We take the short ferry back to the mainland at noon the next day and pick up where we left off driving the Ring Road heading from south Iceland to the East Fjords. It’s rainy when we start out, sunny an hour later and windy most of the way through. With only three days left in our trip, we’ll do about a third of the road before turning back.
We chose the route for all the mega-scenery along the way. Plumes of steam rising from emerald green meadows; lupine and lichen fields and the glaciers of Mýrdalsjökull and Vatnajökull – Europe’s largest glacier. Vatnajökull covers 8% of Iceland and is the backdrop to Jökulsárlón – a lagoon where icebergs have broken from the retreating glacier. If they don’t melt first they will eventually go out with the tide. It’s like a floating museum of ice sculpture, a glacial graveyard at the edge of the sea.
And then there are the side-of-the-road surprises: the bird-watching hut that seems to have grown out of a grassy bank overlooking Stöðvarfjörður. Horses so friendly they wait at fences for tourists to stop and pat them. Steinahellir Cave in the Katla UNESCO Geopark, The cave is concealed by a wood paneled wall but there is a small door that opens to reveal, in the dim light, a ceiling covered in delicate ferns. A sign outside tells of visitors who have picked the ferns, only to be bound by bad luck for the remainder of their days. In former times, the cave was the meeting place of the local parliament. Huldafólk are said to be in the vicinity – Iceland’s mythical “hidden people” who are known to like things left untouched. Huldafólk are also said to be extraordinarily beautiful, but this is impossible to verify, given they are also invisible to humans.
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On the flight home to Canada, I ask Daughter #2 what she liked best about the trip. “No spiders.” she says without missing a beat. True, we didn’t see so much as a single cobweb the whole time (Iceland’s reputation for clean and tidy holds up everywhere we go; it does have 91 different varieties of spiders, but they are small, not dangerous to humans and I think they must hang out with the Huldafólk).
“What about the Skyr?” I ask. “The waterfall you walked behind? The Blue Lagoon? Patting friendly horses? The cookies from the bakeries in Reykjavik?”
“It was all good, Mum. Really good.”
High praise from a 14-year-old, and she’s right, it was.
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Pack: Here be waterfalls. Swallow your fashion pride and take a plastic rain poncho.
Stay: Find apartments, yurts and cabins in Iceland at airbnb.com. For the tiny town experience, including a general store and museum, Breiddalsvík (population 150) and its blue-roofed Hotel Blafell (hotelblafell.is) in Austerland (the East Fjords) is well worth a visit. #betterinBreiddalsvik
Eat: The bread, pastries and light meals at Sandholt Bakery (sandholt.is) taste as good as they look on Instagram (#sandholtreykjavik).
Splurge: The Blue Lagoon. Everything good you’ve heard is true. Wander and soak in these world-famous silicon-rich, geo-thermally warmed waters. Secure this “LFT” (cited as a “Wonder of the World” by National Geographic in 2012) on your itinerary a few weeks in advance (bluelagoon.com).
