Iceland

The bold openness of the Icelanders is their strength and their weakness.
It makes me wonder if purity isn’t bred in isolation.
Horses, water, people have been kept in a protected environment.
And now the rest of the world is coming to them.

Icelanders have welcomed the world to their island of 39,769 square miles and roughly 325,000 residents. They readily speak perfect English and think ahead about anything visitors might need.

The international Keflavík Airport is 50 kilometers south of the capital Reykjavík, which means “smoky bay” in Icelandic, a language likened to the sound of bird song. A scheduled Flybus takes visitors to the city with roughly a third of the island nation’s population. The bus crosses a lunar landscape where rounded black lava rocks seem to walk independently across barren fields.

Visitors want to ride horses, get inside volcanoes, scale glaciers, watch glacial ice go out to sea on black sand beaches, ride a boat next to whales, spot a geyser going off right in front of them, feel the spray of massive waterfalls, view the dance of the northern lights while soaking in an outdoor hot pot, spy birds nesting in the basaltic rock formations along the coast, and the list goes on.

And Icelandair makes it simple to visit. Travelers can plan a layover stop on the way to Europe without additional cost. Marketing genius!

There are books everywhere in Iceland. You see people reading them in restaurants and Kaffi shops.

Books are the number one Christmas gift. There is actually a name for the three months before Christmas when Icelandic book publishers release new titles: “Jólabókaflód” (Christmas Book Flood).

The statistic is that one in ten Icelanders has published a book. This statistic was proved out to me one night at the Kex Hostel in downtown Reykjavík when the bartender said that he had published a novel. Matter-of-factly. Like everyone has.

The Icelanders have a saying that everyone has a book in his or her stomach.

In April 2014, I had the chance to meet and speak with Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson, author of The Flatey Enigma. I asked him why a country that had one, yes one, homicide in 2009 compared with 15,491 homicides in the United States that same year (Global Study on Homicide, UN) has so many murder mystery novels. He said that with one person there is no crime, with two people crime is difficult, and with three people crime is possible, even in Iceland.

There are few guardrails and signs in Iceland. While on a trail, you may come across a boiling earthen cauldron of burbling blue and if the wind is right, the sulfuric steam may block your view of the trail. Or if you step off one way, the temperature of the ground may be so hot that the bottom of your shoe might melt. Or you might be on the edge of a precipice over a black sand beach 75 feet below or over a roaring waterfall wafting its powerful spray right in your face while you navigate wet, vibrant green rocks.

The Icelanders expect you will have common sense and use logic. I like that.

In one of Reykjavík’s coffee shops, I found a chocolate cake that had many layers, so many that I didn’t count them, perhaps up to twenty. And I thought that this cake was a lot like Iceland. So many beautiful and tasty layers and it doesn’t leave you feeling heavy afterwards. Pure.

Standing behind Seljalandsfoss, the waterfall looks so silky and gentle, but you can hear its roaring power, feel it spray you in the face from many feet back. That’s no water to mess with no matter how soft it looks.