First full day included a walking tour around the city and a trip out into the mountains to see the Northern Lights.
*If you want to skip to the Nothern Lights bit, scroll down to the heading THE NORTHERN LIGHTS BIT.
THE WALKING TOUR BIT
A good walking tour with a knowledgeable guide at the start of a trip can be a good ‘cheat’ for getting your bearings and learning about a city.
And with Andrew from Aberdeen, we had an excellent, friendly and knowledgeable tour guide, courtesy of Free Tour . We have used the same organisation in many different cities. Technically, they are free, but they survive on tips at the end of the walk and most people give quite generously.
The city is quite big, but most of the things worth seeing are around the harbour, to the north of the city. You could say it is the ‘old town’, but it’s a comparatively new city. Don’t be expecting anything like Prague, Bruge or Riga. The oldest buildings are made of wood, but wood quickly rots (especially in this extreme weather) so you will see many wooden buildings with corrugated steel cladding.
There’s very little wood on the island today. When the Vikings arrived, the island was 44% woodland, but they cut most of it down to build houses, build ships and to make Viking love spoons. (One of those is a lie.). They also grazed cattle and sheep, who ripped out all roots of the old trees.
Today only 1% of the island is wooded. They can’t plant new forests because the wind will rip out the poor little saplings. Trees are now so rare they have a Tree of the Year competition. A bit like Miss World but less wooden and less pointless.
The city has a population of 140,000, which accounts for a third of the population of the country. It only became a city in 1786. The main reason for the capital being sited here, rather on the east, which would have been closer to Europe, is that the harbour never freezes and can be used for trade all year round.
Many of the buildings you see will have steps leading up to the front door. This is because traditionally cattle were kept in the basement and the warmth of the cattle kept the rest of the house warm. The stink was a problem though.
These day’s, the houses are kept warm by electricity. With many waterfalls providing hydroelectric power and geothermal energy from the lava underneath the island, it is the greenest country on the planet. This energy is also incredibly cheap because it is all state owned with no greedy energy companies trying to make a profit.
If you combine the cheap energy bills with the average wage being three times that of the UK, you soon get to understand how the locals can afford to pay the outrageous beer prices.
This spirit of community solidarity is present throughout Icelandic society. It’s the second most LGBGT friendly country in the world (before you ask, Malta is the first). It is incredibly democratic, it has one of the oldest parliaments in the world, predating the arrival of Christianity on the Island. Any citizen can put their name down for election as president, and everyone just gets on. There is very little crime and you will rarely see any coppers on the streets. The only armed guards you will see are outside the American Embassy. Even the parliament building has no armed guards. There are, however, lots of CCTV cameras, so if you are up to no good, you will be caught and have a stern finger wagged at you.
The country has only been independent since 1946, having been ruled by Norway and Denmark for over eight hundred years before then. They had a vote on independence in 1944, but did not tell the Danes till after the war, because they were a bit busy. When they did tell them, Denmark just said, ‘Yeah, OK, crack on son’.
Everyone here speaks Icelandic, and most speak English, because that opens up the world to them. Danish is also taught here but because of the history, many choose to not bother learning it.
We learned loads more about the history of the city, which I will save for later in the week. Expect tales of sharks marinaded in piss, inbreeding and a fight between a Penguin and a Puffin. I have to crack on though because I need to squeeze the Northern Lights into this post.
After the tour ended we walked up the rainbow road and paid to go in the lift up to the top of the big churchy thing on the top of the hill. The church is one of the big attractions of the city: it looks really impressive from outside but is quite underwhelming inside. There are really good views from the top of the spire though. Sorry if I’m rushing talking about the most iconic building in the country, but I need to get to the evening bit. And it’s all in the guide books anyway.
On the way back to the apartment we stopped off at the Icelandic Punk Museum, which is located in a disused public toilet. If you’re into punk (I am) it’s an interesting way of spending ten minutes. (It’s a toilet, there’s not enough to keep you interested much longer than that.) Although we did spend another ten minutes chatting to Black Elf, the museum’s founder and curator, about the history of punk in Iceland.
THE NORTHERN LIGHTS BIT
One of the attractions of this trip was the possibility of seeing the Nothern Lights. What are they when they are at home? I hear you ask. They are solar flares meeting the atmosphere of the earth near the earth’s polar caps. Yep, they have them down south as well, but nobody lives down there to give them a name.
You need several factors to come into play to see them.
- you need a lot of solar activity
- you need it to be dark. You can’t see them in the day (even though they can be there) and they are best seen away from the lights of the city
- You need clear skies with very few clouds
Having said that, if the solar flares are really strong, they can be seen through clouds and over the city. But they definitely can’t be seen during the day. In the summer you only get one hour of darkness, so your chance of seeing them then is not great. At the height of winter you only get one hour of daylight, which is good, but there’s more chance of storm clouds. So spring and autumn (like now) are your best chance.
There are lots of apps and websites that predict the activity of solar flares.
We booked ourselves on one of the many organised trips where a local guide takes you away from the city. With our trip, if we were unsuccessful, we could have unlimited retries until you get to see the lights. I was hoping we would have luck first time out, because to appreciate them properly and to take a decent photo, you obviously need to be sober. The evening trip had basically dictated how we spent our day. But the outrageous beer prices meant we didn’t mind spending the day sober…
We stood at the bus stop, watching luxury minibus after luxury minibus stop to take people out to see the lights. Eventually our clapped out old minibus pulled up and the guide, Guffi, shouted out our names. We weren’t sure if this company could find the Nothern Lights, because they were struggling to find the hotels to pick up the other passengers, but soon we were heading out of the city.
Before we had left the city we started to see things in the sky. The guide started getting excited. After a few minutes we were out in the mountains pulling off onto a side road.
We piled out of the bus and stared in wonderment at the sky. I had been beginning to wonder if it was possible to see the lights with the naked eye. Now I had my answer. You can. They don’t look quite as exotic as the classic photos you often see, but you can definitely see mysterious white apparitions in the sky, like ghosts dancing in front of the stars. However, through a camera with a long exposure (six to ten seconds) they take on a magical multi coloured hue and present one of nature’s most magical shows.
I set up my camera on its tripod, fiddled with the settings and took dozens of photographs. Photography quite literally means, drawing with light. And tonight mother nature was doing just that. This was the first time I’ve done this, so there was a lot of fumbling about in the dark to get the desired effect (wash your mind out at the back) but hopefully I achieved what I set out to do. I won’t know till I get back to me laptop at home.
With this firm, they also take professional photos of the people on the trip and give you hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls. Whilst I had a dig at the bus, it could go places the posher buses would be afraid to go. So thumbs up for them overall. (https://reykjavikout.is/tours/northern-lights-small-group-tour-hot-chocolate/ )
I did manage to grab a few phone pix to share with you via this blog.
Now ideally, as a photography enthusiast, I would have liked some interesting foreground to include in the shots. But the thing is with the Nothern Lights, or the Aurora Borealis, as us veterans call them, is that they are unpredictable. You have to shoot them when and where you can. We could have driven further for a more interesting location, but they might have gone by then. But hey, another life long experience ambition ticked off and now we don’t have to worry about staying sober to take photographs. The only thing stopping us getting pissed now is the bar prices.
ANORACKY TECHNICAL POINTS
The photographs here were taken with a Samsung Galaxy S22, set to Night Mode, which gives a six seconds exposure, so you have to hold it as steady as possible. Tripod is best but these were hand held.
On my ‘proper’ camera I set it to full manual mode, I experimented with six to ten second exposure, appature set to f2.8, ISO 1600 and manual focus set to infinity. On tripod obviously. I’ll let you know how they come out next week, but they seem to be OK viewing them through the camera.