FIRE & ICE: EXPLORING REYKJAVIK IN WINTER

You don’t need to venture outside Iceland’s capital to fi nd adventure – from aurora tours, to barely believable beers, and even a supernatural elf school. Mike MacEacheran soaks it all in.

Above: Downtown Reykjavik.

Right: Gullfoss Waterfall, part of the Golden Circle

In the Old Harbour of Reykjavik, evenings are the best time of day. Norse mythology compares the glow in the night sky to refl ections from the armour of the valkyries, and there’s certainly something otherworldly about setting sail after the sun sets in midwinter, and looking out across empty Faxafl ói Bay. The distant horizon of the Snæfellsnes peninsula is hard to make out, and the shine of the Icelandic capital is a fading haze of neon and lamplight. But this darkness is the key ingredient in the practice of Northern Lights chasing. Here, in the ice-cold air, the aurora is a regular visitor.

My vantage point for this contemplation of the night sky was the rooftop deck of Hafsúlan, a workman-like cruiser operated by Elding, a local whale watching business. Previously, boats in these waters were used for hauling in blue ling and shellfi sh (or in Hafsúlan’s case, as a ferry in Norway). Now, many such vessels are recast as whale watching cruisers by day, and aurora hunters by night. As we sailed out into the bay, there was a hush. Then, in what felt like a heartbeat the sky was full with a rush of primary colours that seemed to be jostling for room. It was like black magic. Onboard, the feeling was of continual surprise. Yet the greatest surprise of Reykjavik is how easy — how close — everyday micro-adventures like this are.

I’d arrived in Iceland the previous night and was fi rst struck by the sheer wildness of the land encircling the capital. On the road from Kefl avik International Airport, we passed a succession of murky black volcanic beaches, then the white-splattered shoulders of the Esjan mountain plateau, stretching away across Faxafl ói Bay. It was a monochrome palette only broken by the evening sky turning pink, and people wrapped in bright, primary-coloured parkas.

The dawn broke softly the next day and Iceland, with its mint-blue warehouses and seafood processing factories, was ripe for discovery. There are countless ways to explore this country. You can travel to the black-lava plains of Grindavík, home to the renowned Blue Lagoon. Or you can snowshoe deep into the hills. Or go on mountain biking, Icelandic horse riding or on glacier snowmobiling excursions. On this trip, I’d decided to stick largely to the city (with a brief day trip out to see the Golden Circle - see boxout). But there’s plenty to keep you occupied just walking around Reykjavik.

The golden circle is the name given to a fi ve-hour day trip – which you can either drive yourself, or do as part of a group – which takes in three of Iceland’s most famous sites.

A forty minute drive from Reykjavik, this stunning protected area is home to the Silfra fi ssure, formed by the gap between two of the planet’s tectonic plates. The water in Silfra is renowned for being some of the clearest in the world – going snorkelling or diving (possible even in winter, with the right wetsuit) famously feels like fl ying.

One of the best places to see the geothermal activity that created Iceland bubbling up the surface, the Haukadalur is home to more than 50 hot springs, and an array of multi-coloured ‘mud-pots’, where heat and gas escape from the bowels of the earth. The most famous is Geysir – whose name gave rise to the English word geyser – which has been known to throw hot water 70 metres in the air when erupting.

If you’ve got an Instagram account, you’ll doubtless be familiar with the Gullfoss falls, even if you don’t know the name. This stunning, two-tiered cataract on the Hvítá river sees water plummet off an 11-metre cliff and then a 21-metre cliff , before running along a steep gorge. It looks spectacular in any season, but snow on the ground makes the white water particularly picturesque in winter.

Iceland is famous for its wild landscapes and natural phenomena. But its cities are equally picturesque.

I took the road from Kex Hostel, a hipster hotel in a former biscuit factory, and walked past Solfar, a Viking longship skeleton, with a frame of smooth steel ribs running from its bow to the stern. I decided not to stop at the Icelandic Phallological Museum (which houses “the world’s largest collection of penile parts”) and instead headed straight to Hallgrimskirkja, Reykjavik’s cathedral. While the former is a reminder of how Icelanders have sought to benefi t economically – often in bizarre ways – from the tourist surge of recent years, the country’s rocket-shaped Lutheran church off ers a reminder of this northern nation’s more ancient traditions.

Among these are a belief in the huldufólk, or hidden people, a race of supernatural elves chronicled in Icelandic folklore. Cynics might head-scratch, but Icelandic culture is rich in myth, and stories of horse-headed sea monsters, trolls, and elvish kings are as tangible to Icelanders as the country’s geysers, glaciers and thermal lagoons. Initially, I found the world of the huldufólk more than a little abstract. But a visit to the Elf School, located west of downtown, helped. Here, Magnus Skarphedinsson, folklorist and anthropological academic, leads classes on where the huldufólk live, what they look like, and their relationship with humans. Part of the afternoon was spent listening to Skarphedinsson recount stories from Icelanders who have had personal contact with the elves themselves. Or as he said: “Men can never see the elves, unless they themselves wish it, for they can both see men and let themselves be seen by them.”

Later that same day, I stopped at Perlan, a dome-shaped planetarium with more than an echo of Jules Verne’s sci-fi classic, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, about it. Inside, it hides an indoor ice cave packed with more than 350 tonnes of snow, a replica of the sort of glacial tunnels visitors can climb into at Vatnajökull National Park, fi ve hours to the east. The park is also home to Hvannadalshnjúkur, the country’s

highest peak, and some of the glaciers most visibly affected by climate change. The exhibition in the dome takes a provocative look at what will happen if and when Iceland’s leviathan-sized ice rivers disappear completely.

In a change of mood, my last afternoon was reserved for beer drinking – purely as cultural research, you understand, because Iceland has a more fascinating relationship with alcohol than most countries. On 1st March 1989, the government overturned a 76-year-long prohibition on beer brewing and consumption and it’s a date Icelanders commemorate on Bjórdagur (Beer Day) every year – by drinking liquor stores dry. On the first anniversary, the country’s 252,000-strong population apparently consumed 330,000 beers. An urban legend today claims the following year saw a huge spike in the birth rate.

I ducked into Skúli Craft Bar, named after the founding father of the city Skúli Magnússon, where the owner Björn Árnason, told me Icelanders had got used to enduring every form of beer substitute in the absence of the real thing. “Shots of substandard vodka poured into cheap malt drinks were the norm,” he said. “We learnt not to be fussy.”

Nowadays, the bar’s experimental beer menu reads like a shopping list of ingredients knocked-up by a five-year-old: hazelnut milk, sweet coconut balls, strawberry milkshake, orange cream, pecans, maple syrup and cinnamon. Truth be told, the three pints I exhausted were all excellent and it was the same story nearby in Kaldi Bar and Barion Bryggjan Brugghús.

Blurry-eyed in the near dark at 4pm, a bracing walk took me back to the quayside, where whale watching tours were returning from forays out into the bay busy with minke, humpback and porpoise. I stayed watching until the horizon began to softly glow once more, the aurora’s hazy gauze of lights appearing as a stark contradiction to everything I knew about the world.

SIlfra lagoon, formed by a crack between two tectonic plates, is famous for snorkelling - even in winter. Icelanders have a fascinating relationship with beer, which was banned for 76 years, until 1989.