To the elves, volcanoes and whales: journey from Germany to Iceland
It was during COVID times that one of my friends suggested the movie Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. Iceland got into my mind after this movie and I added Iceland to my bucket list. After few months I found a travel partner: one of my ex classmates K. We kick started planning and later on, we got another travel buddy: S. As I was busy and mostly tired during those days and as Chat GPT was getting popular, I tried to generate a three day itinerary with it and later customized it after further research and analysis. I was skeptical about relying entirely on AI for our trip. My travel mates confirmed the itinerary and the three of us decided to spend three days in Iceland. In Iceland I wanted to experience the nature of Iceland, watch the whales, visit the tiny elves houses etc. But now that I know more about this country (with the research part), I want to experience even more of the wonders of this country located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the northern hemisphere.
We started on a Wednesday afternoon in the month of May, 2023. I took a train to Stuttgart airport after work in the morning and S met me at the airport. K will be flying from Berlin so it was just 2 of us. We checked in and were waiting for boarding. Shortly afterwards, we saw few upset faces around and soon we realized that our flight got cancelled. With some luck we were auto assigned to another flight which was 1.5h after our originally scheduled flight. Unfortunately, this new flight also got problems and got delayed by further 1h. Though it sounds all crazy, to be honest we were not much annoyed by all this as we would still be able to get our connecting flight from Hamburg. However, we were really hungry and it is Germany: after 22:00 it would be hard to find a good place to eat, no matter if it is an airport or the middle of a street. We were fortunate to find food in the flight after all. It was warm curry wurst which tasted good and satisfied the hunger and we got our happy faces back. The flight journey was actually good. We got window seats and lot of space even when we did not pay for it. The journey was long and we were feeling a bit tired already.
At 01:10 AM Iceland time, we got ready for landing.
We saw through the little window of our flight the separation between the north Atlantic Ocean and the Icelandic land mass.
It was such a fascinating view with the brightly lit moon light. Even though sun had set at 23:30, it looked just like a dusk or a dawn. Summer nights of Iceland can’t be technically called as a night. Say for June, the sun never really sets for several days! We finally landed at the Keflavik airport at around 01:30 AM.
I had booked a rental car in advance and informed them about our delay and called them to inquire what we were supposed to do. Since Iceland is part of the EEA (it is not part of EU), the German mobile carriers were operating free of charge in Iceland. Anyways, the person who attended the call sounded pleasant and helpful. He asked us to wait in front of the “astatue” and said that he will pick us up as soon as possible. I never really understood what he meant. Since S had watched travel vlogs about Iceland, she knew where in airport the pickup vans wait. Besides, we had instructions in the email from the rental cars company. Therefore we boldly walked towards the exit. Anyways, we could always ask for help if needed, people were smiling, seemed friendlier and were welcoming.
We got out of the airport and I noticed a statue at the airport exit lawn. Ha! A Statue! I had thought it was an Icelandic word when I heard “astatue” over the phone. That was silly! In the blink of an eye the guy from car rental arrived. He was very friendly and we had a nice conversation about our Iceland trip while he drove us to the rental station (which is also located at the airport but in another corner). In 5 mins we arrived and I signed the necessary papers while S checked the information brochures. He gave us valuable tips for our journey and recommended us few weather warning websites, certain do’s and don’ts etc. He warned us against going to certain locations when wind speed is higher and where the tides get higher from time to time. He wished us a nice vacation and gave us the car keys.
Once we got the car keys and we were good to go, it took us a little longer as I had to learn all necessary controls of the car as it is a new car model for me. It was a grey Toyota Yaris with inbuilt navigation. Uff that was a relief. Because it is always good to have a navigation as backup even though we got smartphones with us: we could later save our phones batteries for other uses. We started the drive, we felt Iceland in our very own veins. Even at 02:00 in the morning we could see distant volcanoes (one of them were active when I checked later). We saw the greenish fungi on volcanic rocks. On the left there was the Atlantic meeting the land, now closer to our eyes than the view from the sky. The view was just splendid and our tiredness were diminished at the scenic view of this short road trip from Keflavik airport to our Hotel in Reykjavik.
We met and greeted K at the Hotel and soon after all the 3 of us crashed into our beds and slept like babies. I remember that I dreamed about whales and volcanoes that night…