Three hours in Iceland
Plane keys down, galvanized rubber wheels scream resistance as they scrape against the runway, skid marking the concrete as the brakes, fully locked, reduce a headlong jump to a controlled skid down the runway, the ride ends in a smooth taxi to the terminal.
The Blue Lagoon is one of the few things I know about Iceland. That and Eidur Gudjonnsson, a forward who currently practices his trade with the Spanish giants of Barcelona, who is in all the magazines on board. It’s also all over the airport, a modern building with smooth, clean lines and a sense of fluidity and efficiency – it just feels Scandinavian.
Outside, the Icelandic sky hangs familiarly low, an endless mass of clouds fogging the asphalt with moisture as I cross, seemingly undisturbed, but most likely you just don’t feel the rain – it’s falling so gently. We Scots have a word for days like these: dreich: a word born out of necessity, the only one in our vocabulary that conveys a sense of is – a day we see so often. In many ways it is perfect, a word that sums up not just the weather, but the feelings induced in the observer. To use it is to surrender to all that it implies: apathy, a dulling of the senses that tugs on the strings of the heart; a feeling that one has been here before, that nothing changes, that this may never end. Dreich: rhymes with pain and ends with an ‘eech’; throaty, almost Yiddish but distinctly Scottish.
I wonder, as I get on the bus, how many words Icelanders have for this. In the same way that the Eskimos have so many variations on “snow”, I wonder if the natives here can distinguish linguistically between it and, say, a different cold gray day; one in which the sky looks less like a sheet of slate and bears, perhaps, occasional metallic-looking white streaks, or the occasional blue stain, a distant reminder of warmer climates, distant lands.
He is an international coach; a strange mix of foreign and English languages with different accents, all asking the same questions, more or less. No one really knows where we are headed: ‘a kind of spa’, the sum total of our collective knowledge. No one knows how long it will take to get there, or if we will be back in time for the next leg of our flight. I’m fighting the urge to tell the driver to stop when we exit the terminal. ‘I’ll wait for him back there’, I want to tell him. An American accent behind me, confident, calms my unspoken fears, or at least makes me feel ridiculous for thinking about them; she’s sure, she tells her son, that no one would fix something like this and allow people to miss flights. That would be silly. Obviously, I’m more pessimistic than she is, but suddenly it’s too late: we’re on a twisting, twisting asphalt runway that leads away from the airport, from certainty, into Iceland.
Even so close to the airport, I can see that the Icelandic landscape is strange. Obviously, it doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before. I feel like I’ve seen very little, so personal experience is not the best criterion, but it goes further. It is unlike anything I have ever imagined, save perhaps for the images conjured while reading Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mount Doom. They are all strange rock formations, jutting out masses of solid-looking volcanic spew, clearly highlighted against the gray uniformity of the sky. Ahead of us, the road stretches out, almost deserted, the apparently high asphalt; he feels strangely like he’s floating on rocks, a temporary resident in this alien environment. It is neither fenced in nor enclosed, and there are no comforting, soft-looking fields bordering it. Everything seems unforgiving, harsh, apocalyptic, an impression that is only increased by steam geysers rising at various points in the distance. Apparently, the American voice informs his son, they are the result of volcanic activity. Geothermal action.
Sigur Ros’s music rings from memory inside my head as I examine the scene; a connection that I hadn’t realized I had made, another thing I know about Iceland. Previously, I had always associated her lonely melancholy with a different kind of visual desolation: that of the North Sea, standing on top of a cliff at night, staring at the distant lights of an offshore oil rig, feeling small and insignificant like a wave. wave after wave hit the Scottish coastline below me. He spoke to me, that music, with his made-up language – Hope-ish, someone told me his name was. It touched something within me that recognized loneliness and desolation, evoked the longing for the indefinable. From what I can see through the window here, I know where it comes from: another insignificant little country on the great Atlantic where people dream of bigger things, more fulfilling lives, but struggle to express that desire, or what it means; hence the Hope-ish: a language of intangibles.
The bus stops at an intersection, the driver is in charge of making the turn perfectly, without going too fast, responsible at his expense despite the lack of any other traffic. Looks like we’re headed for one of those steam geysers. There are some low buildings clustered around, near one of them. The road floats over the rocks towards it while we, by coach, float with it.
We stopped in a parking lot; more black asphalt to add to the cool look. The rain is a little stronger now, clearly splashing my face as I head to a path with the rest of the group, following both the path and the group around a rock, as per the driver’s instructions, ticket in hand, ready for inspection.
The entrance to the lagoon is a low-key affair: glass door, horizontal wood slats, more of the clean lines and subtle airport sharpness. They take my ticket without ceremony and lead me down the hall to the men’s locker room, and take my boots off at the door.
Ten minutes and a pre-spa shower later I go out and find the lagoon. It is essentially a large natural spa pool, a major tourist attraction here, representing the crowds. The pool does not have a defined shape, which enhances its natural feel. It has numerous hidden nooks where one can sit quietly, as well as the main bathroom area where people float, swim, and cover their faces with sulfur-laden mud, which is said to be good for the skin. The narrower areas of the pool are spanned by wooden bridges, and there are glass-fronted saunas built into a rock wall next to the lagoon. Next to it is a waterfall, under which laughing children playfully push each other towards the waterfall. Everything is very civilized, gentle, not British; the only thing that is familiar to me is the group of football fans, who stop on their way to or from something, their drunkenness and the volume of their songs attract many nervous glances. The fact that they start singing in German gives me reason to be happy and depressed, happy that they are not my compatriots, dismayed that they represent my gender, they proclaim to follow a sport that I love very much, further staining their already tarnished reputation.
There is a strong smell of sulfur throughout the lagoon, and I have been warned not to put my head under the water, as I risk drying my hair for the next month or so. I choose to test the mud pack and then float around, walk around the pool for a while, enjoy the sensation, discover the different hot spots in the water, more evidence of geothermals, although I suspect that here they may have been harnessed by man . . But it does not matter, there is quite a bit of natural, with the outdoors, the spectacular views of the landscape, sitting outside half naked, without worrying about it.
The whole experience is extremely pleasant, a welcome relief from the stress of flying, yet lingering doubt remains about going back in time. The driver told us we had an hour and a half, so with 30 minutes left I get out of the pool, my skin wrinkled from exposure to the water, and go back to change.
My paranoia about leaving late means that I have time to explore the restaurant area before I leave, a mistake as it instantly creates hunger pangs that the delicious multi-currency menu informs me that I can’t afford to fill myself up here. However, there is a take-out area, where the most affordable item is a hot dog, a reminder of both my home and my final destination, in which canned hot dogs taste the same everywhere.
The coach takes us back to the airport, all in plenty of time before our flights to explore the duty-free shops, floating across the esplanade in a haze of Bjork’s CDs, fancy chocolates, lagoon body products, it all seems fresh and novel, rather than cheap and tacky, as they would have done if I had spent the full three hours here.
The boarding call for the plane comes in and people form an orderly queue at the gate, the flow of the building, the lagoon experience, seemingly relaxing enough to allow us to get by without the usual stampede of being the first to board.
Take off comes without the usual anxiety for me, the stress of the airport this morning long forgotten. I breathe out confidently, rather than hold back in fear, enjoying for once the sensation of being whipped up into the sky. Ahead of me awaits the gleaming continent of America, a modern and impulsive place. Behind me is Scotland: older, more traditional, more set in its ways. Iceland sits somewhere between the two, on the edge of the Arctic Circle, connected but otherworldly, definitely a place to return to in time to pass.
Iceland Air organizes free tours to the Blue Lagoon on any stopover in Reykjavik between Glasgow and the US, and also allows you to stopover in the country for up to 7 days at no additional cost on the ticket.