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Iceland may be small but it is unique! As the Official Iceland Tourist Bureau says, “Iceland is an Adventure, not a destination.”
– What would a trip above or below the Arctic Circle be without the Midnight Sun? It is possible to experience the midnight sun in Iceland although the country lies south of the Arctic Circle due to refraction. It is called the “Midnight Sun” because given fair weather, the sun is visible for 24 continuous hours. Yes, that means the sun is still out at midnight. Bet your bottom dollar, the sun will come out tomorrow? Not on a cloudy or rainy day which in Iceland is more often than not. (During our visit, guides said it had rained for the past two months!)
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unique Iceland horses
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Iceland coastline
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chunks of lava on Iceland’s only pink sand beach
Twenty-four hour sunshine will definitely affect your diurnal pattern. On last year’s Spitsbergen cruise, I had bursts of nonstop energy.
– Iceland is in the Atlantic Ocean near the Arctic Circle, between Greenland and Norway. As one of the youngest landmasses on Earth, it is located on a large volcanic hotspot created by a fissure where two tectonic plates meet. The last volcanoes to erupt were Eyjafjnallajokull in 2010 and Grímsvotn in 2011 and I wouldn’t even attempt to pronounce either. Eyjafjnallajokull made headlines and created a real boondoggle for travelers when it disrupted plane travel for a month. Drifting ash closed airspace on concerns that ash can bring down an airplane. There are 30-40 active volcanos that have erupted within the last few centuries, over 100 volcanos which have not erupted for 1,000 years and a major volcanic event takes place every five years! I certainly hope we are not on the five-year event…
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Hverir geothermal area, Iceland
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map of Iceland
– Reykjavik is one of the smallest European capitals and most northerly in the world.
– Iceland is home to the home to the world’s first legislative parliament convened in 930 AD.
– Iceland is the least populated country in Europe. Almost 80% of the country is uninhabited.
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one of Iceland’s many waterfalls
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old church in Iceland
– Iceland has puffins, whales, the northernmost golf course in the world, and population of a little over 300,000 people. We saw a few of the adorable puffins in the Arctic which paled compared to Iceland with a “plethora of puffins.”
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cliffs filled with hundreds of Puffins in Iceland
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adorable Puffins in Iceland
– According to the UN’s annual World Drug Report read while there, Icelanders smoke the most pot, per capita. Approximately 18.3% of Icelanders aged 15-65 smoke marijuana, the highest per capita percentage in the world followed by the United States at 14.8% and New Zealand at 14.6%.
– One of the most unique foods in Iceland is fermented, rotten shark, eeww. Quite a few places in Reykjavik including our hotel offered this. The story about this “dish” which has been eaten for hundreds of years according to our guide is:
Fresh shark is poisonous to eat because of uremic acid in the flesh. This was possibly discovered when the first people tried to eat shark and promptly dropped dead. Years later, someone had an aha moment and may have thought, “Hey guys, let’s bury the flesh in coarse gravel (far, far away from the house), cover it with gravel and leave it buried for several months to see what happens?” During this time, fluid drains from the shark flesh and putrefies. It was dug up, tasted, no one died – do you think they designated an official taste-tester – and then imaginative person thought, “What if we hang it to dry? What would it taste like then?”
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try the fermented, rotten shark at 4th Floor Hotel in Reykjavik, Iceland
So “someone” took the shark flesh, hung it in a shed to dry for another 2-4 months, ate and thought, “Hmm, not bad.” I was given a chance to taste some and declined after hearing that it is considered the worst food ever. Look for it in Iceland’s supermarkets!
Welcome to Reykjavik…