Michael Ridpath's Blog - Posts Tagged "writinginice"

The Icelandic countryside teems with folk stories. Every village or even farm has one, and they don’t just concern elves. We have heard about the trolls, but there are also sea monsters, seals, serpents, polar bears and sorcerers, as well as assorted goody-goody pastors and saints.

There are also ghosts and ‘seers’.

Most towns still have their seers, or fortune-tellers, and many people will explain that one of their extended family has the gift. The country is also teeming with ghosts.

In general, these are more benign than British ghosts. Like the hidden people, they will offer helpful advice rather than scare the living daylights out of you.

One Icelander told me how a relative was able to communicate with her dead grandmother, who occasionally warned her of impending disaster. This relative was reluctant to admit her ability to anyone; she wasn’t an attention-seeker, and it raised all kinds of problems. What should she do with the information her grandmother gave her? Wouldn’t people think she was crazy if she told them she had been speaking to ghosts? So she kept quiet.

She became a character in Sea of Stone, a farmer’s wife, Aníta, who learns unsettling things during the book that she is unwilling to pass on.

In England, I don’t believe in ghosts, and I wouldn’t dream of writing about a character speaking to the dead. But in Iceland? It almost seems wrong not to. There is something about the country, the light, the shadows, the landscape, the rock, the myths, the desolation that makes you feel that the supernatural is natural.

Every other year, in November, a crime-fiction festival takes place in Reykjavík, known as Iceland Noir. In 2018, a group of about twenty delegates drove up to Snaefellsnes and the lovely Hótel Búdir. After dinner, we repaired to the cosy bar, a lava field and a small, isolated church lurking in the darkness outside. Yrsa suggested that we tell each other ghost stories.

The Icelanders had some great ones, well told, and a couple of the Americans present put in a good performance. The British less so. We are uncomfortable with ghosts. But, as an English rationalist, I felt the odd one out; the one who didn’t get what was obviously all around me.

After half a dozen stories, the hotel receptionist asked if we wanted to hear about the hotel’s ghost. We did. Her name is Pálína and she was a chambermaid at the hotel for many years; her grave is in the graveyard beside the church.

She loved the hotel and she was conscientious. She still is. Staff there have become used to her tidying up late at night; the receptionist recounted several examples. This can be inconvenient. The way the staff persuade her to withdraw and let them get on with things is a simple ‘Thank you, Pálína’, which usually works.

So, if you do come across a ghost in Iceland, be polite.

When you are describing a landscape, it is important to describe movement. Things that move bring a scene alive. And the things that move most obviously in Iceland are birds.

These aren’t birds that sit quietly waiting to be ticked off birdwatchers’ lists. These are birds that do things.

The most common bird in Iceland is the puffin, which looks like a cross between a penguin and a parrot but can both fly and swim. The Icelandic word for them is lundi, but they also go by the rather lovely nickname prófastur, which means ‘provost’ or ‘dean’. They live in burrows, often on cliff faces, in large communities. They arrive in Iceland to nest in April or May. Puffin is frequently found on the menu in Icelandic restaurants - it’s tasty if cooked well.

One of the largest colonies in Iceland is on the Westman Island of Heimaey. In August the eggs hatch, and the baby puffins, known as pufflings, waddle forth. These are extremely cute: grey and fluffy and a little clueless. They often get lost and wander into town, but teams of local children are allowed to stay up late in the evening and rescue them. The children take the chicks home for the night. The following morning they find a spot near the sea and throw them high in the air. The pufflings glide down to the water and swim off. You have to put some effort into the throw, apparently, or the pufflings won’t catch the breeze and will splat into the ground.

I most often associate swans with St James’s Park, or perhaps the River Thames, gliding peacefully in sedate surroundings. In Iceland, you can suddenly happen upon small lakes surrounded by lava, in which up to twenty swans paddle. God knows what they are doing there.

Many Icelanders’ favourite bird is the golden plover. People eagerly listen out for its distinctive and persistent ‘peep’, which means that the plovers have arrived in Iceland and spring is here. It is a fine bird, with a royal coat of gold, black and white, and it lurks in the heather.

The word ‘eiderdown’ comes from the down of the eider duck. The males are black and white and the females dun-coloured. They spend the winter at sea, and then nest close to the shore, often on a farmer’s property. They pluck down from their breasts and leave it out to dry, before lining their nests with it to keep their chicks warm. For centuries, eiderdown was an important source of income for Icelandic farmers, who would watch over nests to keep gulls and ravens away.

There are so many spectacular birds in Iceland, all of them doing something: soaring white-tailed eagles, darting gyrfalcons, dive-bombing arctic terns, paddling harlequin ducks, black cormorants splaying their wings, gannets and fulmars diving into the sea, skuas mugging other birds for food, great northern divers or ‘loons’ gliding over lakes with their eerie cry, ptarmigans strutting their stuff in the heather, geese formation-flying in the evening sky.

All right, I can’t deny it: and chickens, or kjúklingar, as they are rather charmingly known in Iceland. Clucking in ugly metal Eimskip shipping containers in a farmyard.

Vík is a pleasant little town crammed between the beautiful glacier of Mýrdal and the sea, at the southernmost point in Iceland halfway along the south coast.

It has no harbour, just a long stretch of black beach. To the east lies the Mýrdalssandur, the sandy desert created by Katla’s jökulhlaups. Spectacular cliffs rear up to the west, alongside beaches and dramatic rock formations. It’s well worth exploring these.

You can see the rock formations from Vík: a line of tall rock spires just offshore, one of which is purported to be a petrified ship grabbed by a troll (of course).

You can get closer to these stacks, driving out of town and inland around the headland to the black Reynisfjara beach. On one side of the beach a cluster of basalt columns rises like a giant church organ on cliffs crowded at nesting season with birds: kittiwakes, fulmars and puffins. Out to sea, the extraordinary rock formations slosh through the waves as if approaching the land from the Atlantic. And to the west, the spectacular rock arch of Dyrhólaey, Iceland’s southernmost point, juts out into the ocean.

This beach is notoriously dangerous. Medium-sized waves wash against the black sand, and it is tempting to go within a few yards of them to look at the sea and the rocks, even to dip a toe in the water. Don’t. Seriously, don’t. The currents and the undertow are very strong here. But most deceptive are the ‘sneaker waves’, larger waves that very occasionally stretch up the shoreline to suck away the loose sand under the feet of people who are too close. Tourists die here: by my count of the press reports, two died in 2015, two in 2016, one in 2017, one in 2018 and one in 2022.

If you drive back to the Ring Road, go west a few kilometres and then turn off again, you cross a causeway and reach the top of the cliffs of Dyrhólaey.

The views from here are truly spectacular: of the basalt columns and the offshore rocks, but also of the outstandingly beautiful Mýrdal glacier to the north - thick white cream flowing between mountains. And to the east, you can see right along the southern shore of Iceland.

Birds nest here, including puffins, which means it’s possible that the cliffs are closed during nesting season (I didn’t notice any closure when I visited in May at 9 p.m., but perhaps I just missed a sign).

When I started writing crime novels in Iceland, I assumed I would have the country entirely to myself. Idiot. It turns out that plenty of Icelandic writers were thinking the same thing at the same time.

There are now an extraordinarily high number of extremely good crime writers in Iceland; why this is so would make a good subject for another blog post. Here is a brief survey of them, starting with the big four who have been published widely abroad, and have reached bestseller lists all over the world.

A caveat. I haven’t read all of the books of all of these authors. And I am friends with a number of them.

Arnaldur Indridason
Arnaldur’s detective, Erlendur, is a policeman of the old school. He yearns for the farm of his childhood in the east of Iceland and he enjoys a sheep’s head for lunch. Arnaldur’s books examine the conflict between the old and the new in Iceland’s society, as well as solving some fascinating crimes. Silence of the Grave, about the discovery of bones dating from the Second World War, won the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2005, so I have no excuse for my assumption that I would have the country to myself. I’m not sure whether that is my favourite or Tainted Blood, also known as Jar City, a novel about genetic research, which was made into a film.

Yrsa Sigurdardóttir
Yrsa’s first crime novel translated into English was Last Rituals, featuring a young, disorganized lawyer, Thóra. She followed up with several more Thóra books, and then another series featuring the child psychologist Freyja, as well as a few suspense novels. Yrsa is not afraid of ghosts, or at least writing about them. Her wonderful, wry sense of humour creeps into her books in the most unlikely places, leavening her darker subject matter. I Remember You is deeply unsettling. I think my favourite is The Legacy, one of the Freyja series.

Ragnar Jónasson
Ragnar was obsessed with Agatha Christie as a child and started translating her novels into Icelandic at the age of nineteen. He loves the concept of the locked room mystery: often his characters are stuck in a snowed-in town, or an isolated island, or a hut in a blizzard. His first series featured the naïve detective Ari Thór. His more recent series is about Hulda, a detective coming up to retirement. I would recommend Outside, a fiendishly clever story about a group of friends stuck in a snowstorm in a mountain hut.

Lilja Sigurdardóttir
Lilja has written three novels about Sonja, a desperate single mother driven to drug smuggling: Snare, Trap and Cage, and a political thriller, Betrayal. Sonja’s problems include her lesbian love life, her bankster ex-husband and assorted unpleasant types. Original and absorbing, Lilja’s books have won worldwide acclaim. The French, in particular, seem to like them. She has embarked on a new series which ostensibly features her Anglo-Icelandic heroine, Árora, but I like to think is actually about her nice British accountant friend, Michael.

Quentin Bates
Quentin’s detective is Gunnhildur a no-nonsense detective with a complicated family. Although English like me, Quentin knows much more than me about Iceland: his wife is Icelandic and he spent many years working on Icelandic trawlers. He depicts the chaos of Icelandic life: the messy family structures of half-brothers and step-sisters and he is good on the criminals, especially of the hapless variety.

There are plenty of other excellent authors to choose from.

I have not yet read any of Eva Björg Aegisdóttir’s books, but her debut, Creak on the Stairs, won the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger and I hear her novels are very good.

Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson’s The Flatey Enigma is set in 1960 on the tiny island of Flatey, home of the famous saga collection the Flateyjarbók. It’s a murder mystery with a literary puzzle included. A different flavour from the other crime novels on this list. His day job is to write the traffic signs in Iceland.

I have also read excellent books by Árni Thórarinsson (set in Akureyri in the north), Solveig Pálsdóttir and Jónína Leósdóttir (who have both featured in guest posts on this blog) and Óskar Gudmundsson.

Credit should go to two publishers – Orenda Books and Corylus Books – who have brought most of these authors to the English-speaking world and to Quentin Bates for translating many of them into English so well. I am impressed at how he manages to convey the very different voices of each writer.

If you would like to read some novels about crime in Iceland, there is plenty to choose from here.

In my next post, I will talk about my own crime novels. They are different from these. Not better, not worse, just different.

In my last blog post, I gave you a brief survey of the amazing crime writers working in Iceland at the moment. Where do my own books fit into this crowded field?

Well, they are different. Right from the beginning, with my first novel, Where There Shadows Lie, I wanted to deal with how Iceland connected to the rest of the world, to examine issues that affect the globe beyond Iceland.

This was partly because I thought this was a good approach to take, but mostly because that’s the way I have always written my books.

My financial thrillers were about the international tribe that beavers away in international finance. The characters came from many different countries, and the novels were rarely stuck in one setting. I have never yet written an entire book set in England.

This simply reflects my own dreams from an early age. I was brought up in a tiny village in Yorkshire. I wanted to escape to see the world. I had an uncle who was a naturalist in the bush in northern Australia, and I thought he was very exciting.

When I left university, I joined an international bank, partly so I could travel for work and partly because there was a training programme in New York for six months. Which is where I met my American wife and met fellow trainees from all over the world, many of whom became my friends.

My Magnus novels have always included foreigners, just like all my other novels. Magnus himself, as I have explained before, although born in Iceland was brought up in America and learned his detective skills there. I don’t know as much about Icelandic society as the other crime writers who write about Iceland, but I think I can write about the way that Iceland interacts with the rest of the world.

Where The Shadows Lie is about how a lost saga got to Tolkien while he was writing Lord of the Rings; 66 Degrees North is about the global financial crash and how out affected Iceland; Meltwater is about how a volcano traps foreign whistleblowers in Iceland; Sea of Stone is about how a murder in Magnus’s own family spans America and Iceland; The Wanderer is about a hoax taking in Italy, Greenland, Nantucket as well as Iceland.

My most recently published book, Death in Dalvik, about the damage cryptocurrencies can do to a small village, is, I suppose my most Iceland-only book, although the cryptocurrency in question is brought to the country by foreign cypto-evangelists.

And the book I am working on at the moment is about that glorious moment in British history, May 1940, when we invaded Iceland. So glorious, almost no one in Britain knows about it.

The Icelandic saying "glöggt er gests augad" means something like "clear is a guest’s eye". I hope my eye, as a guest of Iceland, is clear. Magnus himself is a guest and very aware of it. In my books, Magnus wrestles with the problem of being neither Icelandic nor American. In a similar way, his partner, Vigdís, struggles with what it is to be a black Icelander. As an observer of people who live in countries that are not their own, these are the kind of issues I think about a lot.

I said my books are different from those of the other writers of Icelandic crime fiction, but if you look closely at their books, they too reflect their own individual backgrounds. Which is part of the joy I’m sure they find in writing their novels, and the joy we have in reading them.

Nordic countries are often depicted as being dark, gloomy and depressing. But that is only half the story. The other half is summer, when the sun shines for twenty-one hours. It is light at 11 p.m. in Reykjavík on a Saturday night when the crowds are going into the bars and it is light at 2 a.m. when they are leaving. It is an extraordinary sight to see so many drunk people so early in the morning.

Icelanders become manic. Their eyes sparkle bright blue, but there are red rims around them. On the farms, if winter was the time of snoozing, summer was the time of eighteen-hour days. A whole year’s farming had to be crammed into a few short months. In particular, the hay had to be harvested to feed the livestock over the winter.

Today Icelanders are still busy eighteen hours a day in summer. Eight o’clock in the evening feels like mid-afternoon. It can be difficult trying to go to sleep at ten thirty when your body is telling you it is early evening.

Then comes autumn. Despite the lack of trees, there are autumn colours in Iceland. Various berries and dwarf willows and birches change colour, and the lava fields and heathlands glow in purples and oranges.

Autumn is also the time of the réttir, the annual round-up, when the members of a farming community get on their horses and spend three days scouring the mountains with their sheepdogs rounding up their sheep. The beasts are brought down to pens, sorted by the farmers, and put in barns for the winter. The farmers and their children get very excited at seeing their sheep again, all of whom have their own names, and a good time is had by all. I have no idea what the sheep think about it. I once wrote a short story called The Super Recogniser of Vík about a farmer who was expert at recognizing sheep and was dragged to Reykjavík by Magnus to look at CCTV to find a burglar.

So when is the best time to come to Iceland? Most people come in July and August: these are the two warmest months, and of course children are on school holiday. Personally, I avoid these two months. I’d rather spend the summer months somewhere where the temperature exceeds 20 °C.

More importantly, Iceland is crowded. Tourist numbers are rocketing: from only a few hundred thousand at the time of the kreppa in 2009 to over two million a year now. Despite a construction frenzy in Reykjavík, the infrastructure can’t keep up. It’s hard for locals to rent accommodation in Reykjavík because most apartments coming on the market are rented out on Airbnb. More worryingly, there are not enough public toilets, especially out in the countryside. This infrastructure is at its most overstretched in July and August.

The Icelandic landscape is much more delicate than it looks; hordes of tourists’ walking boots can wreak havoc on moss and lichens trying to establish themselves on new lava. The paradox of travelling a thousand miles to a desolate spot to enjoy the isolation is highlighted when dozens of others are doing the same thing. Summer is also the time when volunteer search-and-rescue teams become fed up with rescuing tourists who have wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time.

I see I have mentioned the idiotic acts of tourists a number of times in this blog. It’s not that all tourists are stupid - clearly, most are not - but the moronic minority gives the rest of us a bad reputation with the locals.

So I would visit in the slightly quieter months of May and June, or September to November. In September the grass is still green, the snow has yet to fall and it’s beginning to be possible to see the Northern Lights. In November, you can experience winter and yet still enjoy a little daylight. Go expecting bad weather; that way you won’t be disappointed.

I have a trip planned myself in the first week of October this year – I'm really looking forward to it. It will be nearly two years since I last visited Iceland.

The weather in Reykjavík is uninspiring. Winters are about the same temperature as Hamburg, but summers don’t get as warm. It is milder than you would think in winter: the temperature only dips a few degrees below zero, nothing like the freezes felt in Chicago or Moscow, which are much further south. Trouble is, it doesn’t get that warm in summer: temperatures rarely rise above 15 °C - the average high is only 13 °C in July.

The real problem is the wind and the rain. Rain comes in many different forms. When it rains hard, it can feel like someone pouring a bucket of water on your head. Or it can feel like someone throwing a bucket of water at you from the pavement, if it’s windy. No umbrella has been known to survive in Iceland: they die rapidly, torn to shreds by the wind. There are two ways of dealing with the wind. One is to face directly into it and lean. The other is to stay inside and read a book.

However, they say that if you don’t like the weather in Reykjavík, just wait ten minutes and try again. That wind blows a series of weather fronts in from the Atlantic, where the warm water of the Gulf Stream creates small angry balls of low pressure, which sweep through Iceland, bringing dark clouds, heavy rain, but then crystal-clear skies, puffy clouds and rainbows. Lots of beautiful rainbows, many of them doubles.

They say there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. I’m not convinced by this. Icelanders mock tourists in Reykjavík for walking around their capital in cagoules or bright ski jackets. Icelanders own stylish dark-coloured coats, waterproof and windproof with warm padding and hoods for walking around the city. I suspect these are expensive. They have another wardrobe of expensive outdoor gear for prancing around the countryside in blizzards. Their fancy city coats would make no sense in Milan or Madrid, or even London or Paris, so I am with the tourists. If Thor, or whoever, is chucking buckets of water down on Reykjavík, then wear your bright orange rain jacket and be damned. Just don’t rely on an umbrella to protect you.

Reykjavík is in the south-west corner of Iceland and receives the brunt of the Atlantic weather. To the north, in Akureyri, the weather is slightly better. On the mountains - and much of Iceland is mountainous - the weather is naturally worse: the wind stronger and the temperature lower. Large areas of the highlands in the uninhabited interior of the country lie in rain shadow and don’t receive any rainfall at all. They are effectively deserts. Deserts with rivers, as meltwater from glaciers fifty kilometres away rushes through them on the way to the sea.

The weather in Iceland is terrible. But then it changes.

A perfect example of this was my research trip to Saudárkrókur in northern Iceland in November 2016. It was snowing hard in Reykjavík. I only had four days to get to Saudárkrókur and back, a distance of about three hundred kilometres there and three hundred kilometres back, and I was worried. According to the government website, road travel was not recommended. You don’t argue with Icelanders on the subject of snow: if they say it’s too bad to drive, it’s too bad to drive.

I lost a day, spent in the snow in Reykjavík. The following morning, at about 10 a.m., the website advice changed to a go. So I went.

The first hundred kilometres along the Ring Road were fine. I passed the windy headland by Borgarnes successfully, and drove north through the snow.

Then the road climbed to the notorious Holtavörduheidi, the highlands between the west and the north of Iceland. People lost their way and died trying to cross this on foot or horseback well into the twentieth century, and the weather hasn’t improved since then. Sure enough, I entered cloud and never left it for another hundred kilometres. I drove along at thirty kilometres an hour, both hands on the wheel, staring hard at the road ahead.

There are beautiful lakes and mountains on either side of the road here. So I am told. I didn’t see them. But the snowfall had eased off, the road had been cleared, and I made it to Saudárkrókur.

I didn’t have much time. I visited Glaumbaer in the snow. Glaumbaer is where Gudrid the Wanderer lived after she returned to Iceland from Greenland, and it was where a body was going to be found on page one of my next book, The Wanderer. In August, without snow, when it would look decidedly different. I then visited the local police station, saw two slightly sinister ravens circling in the middle of town, and stayed the night at the Tindastóll, one of the oldest hotels in Iceland. And yes, a discussion with the chambermaid confirmed that there was a ghost in that hotel.

I wanted to give myself plenty of time for the trip back to Keflavík to catch my flight, and so I set off from Saudárkrókur early, while it was still dark. The snow had stopped, the roads were clear, and the sun rose to reveal a sight of pristine beauty. The following hours I drove through some of the most beautiful landscape I have seen in my life.

It wasn’t any one mountain, or any one view. It was a combination of thick newly fallen snow, smooth lakes, dramatic mountain slopes and desolate emptiness, with only the odd, tiny hut showing any sign of habitation.

And the light. During his visit in 1936, W. H. Auden wrote: ‘Iceland is the sun colouring the mountains without being anywhere in sight, even sunk beyond the horizon.’ It’s still true.

The sun in Iceland is always low, but in winter it is particularly low. It appears above the horizon at about ten o’clock, brushing clouds, water and mountainsides pink. Then it rolls along the horizon before sinking in another glorious inferno of orange and red. As I drove, the sunlight reflected off the clouds in a diffuse pink, even at midday, shifting to yellow, grey and purple as it brought the shape of the towering cloud formations into dramatic relief. Patches of clear sky were light blue and pure. The rivers were pink or a burnished copper, depending on the angle the sun struck them; in shadow they were a ruffled black. Ice shifted colour from white to black, via grey, yellow and brown.

That day the scenery was constantly changing, and I was constantly pulling over to take photographs. As I approached the town of Borgarnes, billowing steam was added to the mix, as the vapour from geothermal pools condensed in the cold air.

It was all glorious.

For years, a group of old friends, who have also been loyal readers of my books, have been asking me to show them around Iceland. I promised I would one day, and this year I decided to take the plunge. If not now, when?

So I drew up an itinerary for the eight of us – four couples - and we went at the beginning of October.

The trip worked very well. And since readers often ask me to suggest places to visit in Iceland, I thought I would share the itinerary with you.

There were some important decisions to be made first.

When to go? Iceland gets very crowded in July and August and the weather isn’t very good anyway. It’s dark in winter. For a land with no trees, the autumn colours can be quite spectacular. So we chose early October.

How long to go for? There would be plenty to see on a two-week trip to Iceland, but it would also be expensive. So we settled on five days.

What about Reykjavik? Once again, there is plenty to see in Reykjavik, but we decided since we had limited time, we would spend most of it in the Icelandic countryside. The centre of Reykjavik is quite small, and you can get a little bit of a feel for it walking around for 3 hours or so.

Where to go? The Snaefellsnes peninsula has featured heavily in my books and there is plenty to do there. It’s also only three hours from Reykjavik. So that, plus the three big sights of Thingvellir, Gullfoss and Geysir seemed a good choice.

Here is the itinerary:

Day 1
Arrive in Iceland.

Dinner Apotek. A good restaurant just off the Austurvöllur square in central Reykjavík.

Hotel: The Reykjavik Residence Hotel. Rooms are in a series of old houses full of character in the city centre.

Day 2
Walk around Reykjavik. Cafe Mokka on Skólavördustígur; the Hallgrímskirkja including view from the tower; walk downhill through residential streets of old brightly coloured metal-clad houses; the Tjörnin pond; the Reykjavík City Hall with large relief map of Iceland; the Austurvöllur square outside Parliament; Baejarins Beztu Pylsur hot dog stand; the Harpa opera house; walk along the bay to the Viking longship sculpture.

Afternoon. Drive to Snaefellsnes.

Hotel. Hótel Búdir. My favourite hotel in Iceland in a spectacular location. View of the mountains, the Snaefelsjökull volcano, a lava field and the black church. Good food too – lamb and fish recommended.

Day 3
The Snaefellsnes Peninsula, as featured in a couple of my books, especially Sea of Stone. Pretty fishing village of Stykkishólmur; Helgafell the "holy mountain" of the sagas; the Berserkjahraun and the Berserkjagata (a path cut through the lava field by two berserkers a thousand years ago); the shark museum at Bjarnarhöfn; lunch in Grundarfjördur looking out on the photogenic Kirkjufell mountain; Hellnar and a 2km walk along the cliffs to Arnarstapi and back

Hotel. Hótel Búdir

Day 4
Drive to Hvalfjördur – "Whale Fjord" – and along the south shore of the fjord, where my next book Whale Fjord is set. Hvammsvik hot springs - an amazing series of hot pots by the side of the fjord with a wonderful view. Worth the expensive entrance, but you need to book online in advance.

Afternoon. Thingvellir, the open-air Parliament set next to a dramatic gorge between the two continental plates.

Hotel: Blue Hotel Fagralundur in Reykholt. Well run and not expensive. Dinner at the good Mika restaurant next door.

Day 5
Morning. Geysir – the geyser – and Gullfoss– a waterfall of magnificent power.

Afternoon either Reykjavik revisited or Kleifarvatn and the Seltún hot springs to the south-west of Reykjavík.

Hotel: Cheap hotel by the airport, but don't choose the one we stayed in!

Day 6
Morning flight home.

There are countless other ways of seeing Iceland, but this trip worked well. It is amazing how much variety you can squeeze into five days! If you have any questions about this itinerary, just ask me.

Iceland blew its top last week. And then it calmed down.

This was the third eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula in the last three years. It was the most spectacular – and the briefest – to date.

The volcano erupted on the evening of 18th December. Rather than a classic conical volcano, this eruption site is a four-kilometre-long fissure which threw a wall of fire into the air and spewed lava over the mountainside.

Within twenty-four hours the ferocity of the eruption had diminished and it was declared over after only three days. The first eruption, at nearby Fagradalsfjall, lasted months.

The site is only three kilometres from Grindavík. The fissure actually stretches under the centre of the town and for a couple of days in early November, it looked as if Grindavík itself might erupt. That doesn’t mean lava flowing down onto the town like it did at Herculaneum, say, but rather lava bursting up from beneath the streets and houses.

Scary if you are a resident. The town and the nearby Blue Lagoon tourist destination were evacuated in early November. By last week, the threat seemed to have diminished and residents were allowed back into town for brief periods during the day.

On Sunday the Blue Lagoon opened up again to tourists, and the following evening a hotelier who had defied the authorities and spent the night in Grindavík appeared on TV to declare that the emergency services were a bunch of wusses. The volcano erupted that night.

I was in Grindavík in October. The town is about 50 km from Reykjavík on the south coast of the peninsula that sticks out into the Atlantic to the west of the capital, and 15km south of the main road to the airport, just beyond the Blue Lagoon. The town has a population of about 4,000 people. It is not exactly picturesque – it’s a serious fishing town with many storage and processing sheds and equipment.

It’s also where Gunnhildur lives, the police officer in Quentin Bates’s excellent crime novels.

Back in November, the residents were told to evacuate in the middle of the night with no warning. Although they have been allowed back briefly, the situation does not look good. Their town might erupt again at any moment. From 23 December, residents were allowed back overnight over the Christmas period, but now the authorities think there may be another eruption on New Year's Eve. I can't help feeling very sorry for the Grindavíkers.

Needless to say, Icelanders pulled together to provide accommodation for the evacuees, including foreign workers who have no local support network of friends and relatives.

Amazingly, there have been no deaths directly resulting from the three eruptions so far. But it isn’t surprising that one hiker had to be airlifted to safety after hiking to the volcano and becoming disoriented.

You thought Eyjafjallajökull was bad! This one is called Sundhnjúkargígaröd. I am practising. Snood–hnurr–gigglegarod? I’ll get it eventually.