Tuesday – Reykjarvik Day 2
This trip, so far, has been slightly frustrating for several reasons. Four Iceland port-stops being reduced down to two is one of them. It’s no-one’s fault, of course; the weather has been such that the decision to abort our stop in Husavik was clearly a sensible one, based on maximising the safety of the passengers. Unfortunately, it also meant that our tour-escorting duties on the whale-watching excursion never came to pass. Our next planned stop after Akureyri was also aborted, leaving Reykjavik as our last chance at experiencing some of the splendour of Iceland’s Natural Wonders, and, possibly seeing some whales.
I should mention; whales have been spotted from the ship. After leaving Akureyri on Sunday, they were seen by most of the ship, apparently… except us. We’d sat on the back deck for a long while before heading back to our cabin. It seems an announcement was made by the captain that whales were visible at the front of the ship… that announcement never came through into our cabin, though. The first we heard about the sighting was later that evening, when almost everyone we came into contact with mentioned ‘the whale’… did we see ‘the whale’?… ‘What whale?….. You get the picture…
Our next disappointment came when we didn’t receive any dispatch papers last night for either of the two tours we were hoping for at this port stop. Amazingly, we were asked if we’d like to escort the ‘In Search of The Northern Lights’ tour last night, but this was just as we were arriving back at the ship, at about 8pm. When we asked when the tour would be starting, we were told 8:30pm… unfortunately, dinner took priority… if they’d said 9:30pm, we’d have done it! We were staving, though!
So, with no tour-escorting duties to look forward to, it meant we had the whole day to go and explore Reykjarvik. We figured we might be able to catch a whale-watching tour independently; however… as we left the ship, we noticed that the all-aboard time for passengers had been brought forward from 4:30pm to 3:45pm… no announcement had been made, and no notice had been included in the daily programme. When we got to the harbour, we discovered that the times for the whale-watching tours were 9am, 1pm and 5pm, with each trip lasting approximately three and a half hours. Once again, we were scuppered! If we’d have known, we would have got up at the crack of dawn and got ourselves down to the harbour in time for the 9am trip. We hadn’t known about the all-aboard time-change, though, and a three-hour trip leaving at 1pm wouldn’t get us back until 4pm – far too late. Not only that; the cost of such a trip would only have been 56 euros each (as opposed to the £90 being charged for the on-board shore-excursions).
Slightly miffed, and massively disappointed, we went in search of things to do in Reykyarvik.
Firstly; we returned to the Maritime Museum to enquire about the monument on the waterfront. It turned out that this is, indeed, the ‘Eve Online’ Monument, and all 500,000 names are there, if you look closely enough, and preferably with the aid of a magnifying glass… (and Warren’s name is there… but it took an awful lot of searching….)
After this, we picked up a map from the tourist information centre and meandered around the town. Reykjavik has an abundance of restaurants, cafes and bars, and at the semi-frozen Tjomin Lake, where we saw the Government Buildings, we discovered it also has an abundance of eider ducks, geese and swans. We had soup and a roll, and a cup of tea, for lunch in a small cafe called ‘C is for Cookie’ (big thumbs-up for that one!… very generous portions, and good food to boot…), then we visited the unusually-shaped Cathedral.
From there, we started heading to an interesting-looking viewpoint-thingy on top of a hill, but abandoned it as time was running out (and we had to be back at the ship for 3:45pm, remember). On our way back, we stopped at the Hofdi House, an old house dating back to 1909, but more famously known as the location for a historic summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbatsjov in 1986 that effectively marked the end of the Cold War.
We’ve now left our last Icelandic port-of-call and are heading towards Belfast, where we are due to arrive on Friday morning. We’ve seen no whales, geysers, glaciers, bubbling-hot springs or large waterfalls, and only visited two ports in Iceland. On the plus-side; we’ve seen a lot of snowy mountains (mostly from the sea), and a loads of ducks. We’ve also seen the Northern Lights, even if they were diminished somewhat by a row of bright spotlights in Akureyri and a searchlight, rather thoughtlessly-placed by Yoko Ono, in Reykjavik. On the plus-plus side… we did see the Total Eclipse off the Faroe Islands (phew! Glad we got that one right, then…).
It’s back to work tomorrow…
