2016 was a pretty rich year for me: I was about to finish my posh MBA degree (urgh), got accidentally hired by Microsoft in the spring ’16 and also our 6month-old son was growing up quickly.
To use up the rest of the vacation and to have some ‘me’ time away from nappies I planned something I wanted to do since a long, long time: that is, a hiking trip to Iceland.
Now, Iceland fascinated me since I was a teenager.
The Icelandic names alone! All those æ’s and ð’s!
I think I was totally engrossed in an Œuvre of one particular high-fantasy author who, as I learned only later, ‘borrowed’ most of the content from Icelandic mythology and sprinked it with some random sex in the process (definitely helping its popularity among high school-level audience). I remember I was totally thrilled.
Anyways, in Aug’16 I packed my 20kg Penguin, booked a one-way bus ticket to Skogar for 6000ISK and got on a WOW air (RIP WOWair :/) flight to Reykjavik for the price of 315EUR.
I had two weeks to enjoy myself in Iceland with complete hiking gear and provisions for 1 week.
My plan was simple and ambitious:
Week 1: Start from Skogar, finish at Geysir. The first third of the way I’d follow the famous Landmannalaugar trail and then improvise
Week 2: no idea. May be Eastern Iceland. But i’d have to come back to Reykjavik to restock.
In retrospect, Week 1 worked out as a charm. I made the 160km trek in 6 days and returned to Reykjavik almost in good shape (but more of that later). Week 2 I kind of botched 😀
…..
On 4th August 2016 I boarded the plane to Reykjavik, filled with a sense of adventure and an expectation of something mystical to happenen. And oh boy so it did!
On the plane I was seated with a young lady who, suprisingly, was visiting for Reykjavik as an intermediate stop for a layover to USA. That’d be cheaper, and she’d have a few days in Reykjavik to party. Her husband worked for Microsoft too, what a coincidence. But I partying wasn’t on my todo list this time! I had to disembark quickly to catch the Reykjavik Excursions bus to Skogar, where I would make the camp for the night and early next morning start over the Landmannalaugar.
Well, first thing that went awry was this: I spent an hour waiting for my rucksack to appear (the two Icelandic ladies working the baggage told me this is now normal: so many tourists are coming over they are barely managing) and I missed the connecting bus. No problem: for a meagre fee of ca. 15000 ISK (100EUR?) the taxi brought me to the gas station outside Reykjavik where I was picked by the bus to Skogar.
It was an amazing, mild and sunny afternoon in Iceland.
The bus to Skogar took about 4 hours, I think, but it did stop at various sightseeing-worthy places for long enough to enjoy them.
The one stop that forever will be in my memory was Seljalandsfoss at about 8pm that day.
I went around the rainbowy waterfall, as all the others that day, something that I will very possibly never be able to do again
About 9pm I was at the full, but still surprisingly quiet Skogar camp, put my tent, ate, went quickly to the chilly waterfall nearby, returned and fell soundly asleep. Tomorrow I’d start off early: I didn’t have much time.