Fire and Ice: The Vikings and Volcanoes of Iceland

By Jonathan Lewis

Most people would hardly consider Iceland high up on their list of desired vacation destinations, but the country has always held a certain fascination for me. I am a real history buff and have spent most of my life dreaming of faraway places and exotic cultures. When I was a kid, I was naturally drawn to movies about the distant past, with plenty of action, adventure and beautiful scenery. One of my all-time favorites back then (though I'm loath to admit it now) was The Vikings, from 1958, in which Kirk Douglas played Popeye the Viking Man and Bronx-born Tony Curtis was a Norse slave.
     In college, I learned that the Vikings had primarily settled Iceland, precipitated by internal struggles in Norway due to the barbarian king Harald the Fairheaded's vicious quest for the throne. Harald drove his enemies to the Scottish Isles, which he too conquered, forcing the Vikings to flee to a small island in the North Atlantic. As early as 330 BC, the explorer Pytheas wrote of a place he called Thule, six days' sail north from Britain and a day away from "the end of the world," where ships came upon frozen seas. That island would later become known as Iceland.
     When I was offered a chance to finally visit Iceland last month and see for myself if my childhood illusions matched reality, I did not hesitate for one moment. Now you might wonder why a film critic might go to Iceland in the dead of winter. Like so many other people, I wear different career hats, and one of them is writing for Toto Tours, an Adventure Travel company for gay men based here in Chicago. We had received an unsolicited email from Icelandair, inviting us to join a familiarization tour for travel professionals to promote tourism to Iceland. For just a few hundred dollars, I would get round trip airfare, hotel accommodations, all meals, all activities and even cocktails. As they say: "Such a deal!" I was going!
     I flew to Baltimore, one of Icelandair's five American gateway cities (including Orlando, Minneapolis, New York and Boston) for my 5-hour overnight flight to Keflavik, the international airport about 25 miles outside of Reykjavik. As this was to be a whirlwind three days and we landed early in the morning, I knew we would hit the ground running. Our group of sixteen (five men and eleven women) boarded a motorcoach immediately after meeting up at the baggage claim area, and we were off.
     We drove a short distance through a surreal moonscape of lava rocks stretching as far as the eye could see, and I felt that I had landed on an utterly different world. Iceland is a young country, in terms of geological time, built up by volcanic explosions that continue to add to its landmass. There had been a major eruption just two weeks before our arrival, but we were all disappointed to learn that it had ceased completely only two days earlier. All this volcanic activity provides the entire country with limitless natural energy (and not smog-producing fossil fuels), giving it one of the cleanest environments on the planet.
     Our first stop was the Blue Lagoon, a pool of volcanically heated seawater discharged from a geothermal power plant into the adjacent lava field. The lagoon is rich in a unique natural combination of minerals, with blue-green algae and white Silica mud forming light sediment on the bottom of the large pond that gives the water a milky, aquamarine color. After donning swimming trunks, I exited the locker room directly into a tiny indoor pool surrounded by huge window walls. Swimming under a glass partition, I was outside in the open air, swimming in 105-degree Fahrenheit waters as snow fell in my hair. What an invigorating and exciting way to start any tour to Iceland!
     On the drive to Reykjavik, our very cute guide Renato instantly dispelled any misconceptions that we might have about Iceland. He assured us that we would not see any Eskimos and that people do not live in igloos. The land's barren terrain looks like someone bulldozed the entire country and the vegetation is struggling to reassert itself. The earliest settlers began deforesting the entire island for heating fuel, and the joke goes that if you get lost in the woods all you need to do is stand up. It is now one of the country's prime imperatives to reforest the land, planting nearly six million new trees every year.
     Iceland is a relatively small country, about the size of Kentucky or Virginia, but with only 275,000 residents (half of whom live in Reykjavik), there is an awful lot of wide-open space. The country's topography is 1% forest, 25% farms and sheep grazing fields, 50% mountains, deserts and lava fields, and 13% towns and small fishing communities. A glacier field, the largest in all of Europe, covers only 11% of the land. By comparison, Greenland is more than 80% glacier-covered year round. The unfortunately-named Iceland is green most of the year, from moss that grows rampantly upon the lava fields, and Greenland is rather icy all the time, so you have to wonder if some early explorer wasn't just a bit confused when he named the places.
     While waiting to check in to my room, I happened to notice the most gorgeous young man I have ever seen in my life, a hotel waiter with hair so golden it made my own blond hair look like mud. He walked over and began speaking to me in Icelandic. It seems he had mistaken me for one of his countrymen, which happened to me no less than 25 times during the next few days. He gave me the most devastating smile and went his way, as I grabbed hold of the nearest post so I wouldn't fall down. Imagine my shock a short time later, when a knock woke me from a nap and I opened my door wearing only boxers to find this very same Viking god standing in the hallway. But alas, he was only there to check the minibar.
     As I had never taken a familiarization tour, I did not know quite what to expect. I thought we would be just another bunch of tourists there to soak up local color. How wrong I was! We spent an exciting afternoon looking at countless hotels, running in quickly at each to check mattresses for firmness and inspect toilet bowls. Although I was comforted to know that visitors would be able to find just about any accommodation level they desired, I think I looked at more rooms that day than I've actually stayed in during my entire lifetime.
     After dinner, our Icelandair host Brian and I broke off from the group to check out Reykjavik's gay nightlife. Although the bars don't really get going until midnight and we had an early wake-up call for the next morning, we had a nice chat over a beer and enjoyed the scenery. By this time, I had reached the conclusion that there are simply no ugly people in Iceland. Even the plainest looking of them have some striking feature, but in general I found everyone to be impossibly pretty. If there were unattractive people lurking about, they must have been kept out of sight by local ordinance.
     For the next two days, we were kept busy running hither and yon, trying to cram in as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. One day, we did the Golden Triangle tour, which included a geyser park, the magnificent Gullfoss Falls, and the Continental Rift, which is the only place on the planet where you can literally walk from North America to Europe. A "dine-around" had us taking each dinner course at a different restaurant, and the group went hiking and riding Icelandic horses in the middle of a blizzard.
     I was having a marvelous time in spite of the unusually snowy week in March. Although the country's northern coast just skirts the edge of the Arctic Circle, Iceland has more moderate winters than New York City, due to the jet stream and tidal influences. The snow turned everything into a magical winter wonderland, but I became so snow blind at one point that I'm sure I spotted Elvis wearing an orange parka and peering at us from behind a pine tree. My fast and furious sampling of Iceland proved this land of the Vikings to be everything I had imagined and so much more.
     I came away from the tour most impressed by the people. More than a couple of residents took delight in telling me the same story about the country's bank robbery. A man stayed out drinking too late one night and missed the last bus to his town which did not have taxi service, so he smashed a bank's front window to get the police to give him a lift home. The Icelanders's warm humor and genuine friendliness was downright contagious. I was smiling so much that I had to take a muscle relaxant just so I could close my mouth over my teeth and chew my food. Iceland may just be Europe's best kept secret, and as my plane took off for home I made a promise to myself that I would visit this wonderful place again very soon.