Alice and Helen's Travel Blog

Iceland: 14th July - 2nd August 2013

Written by Alice

For our first ever adventure together Helen and I headed off to Iceland in the summer of 2013. As geographers, Iceland was always somewhere we’d both wanted to go. We managed to find a volunteering service called SEEDs with whom we could spend 2 weeks working on a farm just outside Vik in southern Iceland. After months on of planning we left an incredibly hot and sweaty London Luton for Reykjavik. The first time the UK has had a decent summer in years and we were leaving for Iceland. Great timing.

Selfie at the Blue Lagoon

We arrived mid-morning and managed to find the house where we were staying for our first few nights in Reykavik. The house I would call quite basic, but it would do for what we needed. The first day was spent wandering around and finding our bearings of the city. Reykjavik is a strange place. It is very small, much smaller than Hull which I consider to be pretty tiny, but it felt full of energy. It is the only cosmopolitan area in Iceland and it seems to be where all the young people live. Over our few days in Reykjavik we got up to quite a bit. I can’t remember the exact order in which we did things as I am writing this so long after it took place. I know on one occasion we saw whales off a boat, one of which was called Peter and the woman guiding us got very excited when she saw him. We went on the Golden circle tour where we saw the plate boundaries between the Eurasian and Amercian plate and the famous geysers as well as a few waterfalls. You are never more than a few metres from a waterfall in Iceland, they are absolutely everywhere. For our trips we bought our tickets from the huge building on the harbour front which I still can’t see any use for but it looked very pretty.

Gullfoss, one of the many waterfalls

Rekyjavick from the top of the Hallgrímskirkja church

As Iceland is so far north it has light way into the night, however this didn’t seem to bother me as much as I thought it would do which was lucky as there were no blinds on the bedroom windows on the house. My beautiful pink eye mask was not put to much use.

Our farm

After a few days enjoying Reykjavik and eating as cheaply as possible we were off to our work camp. Work camp makes it sound like it was some sort of torturous punishment but it was actually a lot of fun. We were living in a tiny farm near the town of Vik in the south of Iceland. The location was beautiful as we were right next to the sea and in the shadow of the famous Eyjafjallajokull volcano. The farm was run by the lovely Becki and Ron who I would quite like to be my parents, or maybe grandparents. We were in a mixed work group of people from all over the world from France to South Korea. Over the week we were meant to be helping them with their carrot picking however the weather was often too windy for us to go onto the fields as the plastic sheeting would blow making it too hard to remove. Also they had had a bad year due to cold temperatures so there were very few carrots there, which is a shame. When we weren’t in the carrot filed we were doing gardening. Sometimes it felt like we were doing it more harm than good on the garden but it was still fun.

Showing off my amazing driving skills on the farm

Doing my best farmer Impression

When we weren’t working, or stealing the farm houses wifi, we had the weekends free to explore the area. We were given the use of Becki’s car which had 5 seats for the 8 of us. This proved for some interesting driving experiences as 2 people had to travel in the boot at all times. For the first weekend we had a lot of fun driving to see a glacier and then find an old army plane which had crash landed on the black sand dunes near the farm. To get to this plane you had to drive across the dunes which provided lots of fun for Pierre and Yannis the two French guys in our group. It was an interesting experience being in the boot when those two were driving. During that weekend we found a ‘hotpot’ as our leader Jorge called it. This was a manmade pool in the middle of the mountains which was filled with hot geothermal water from a nearby spring. It was nice to swim in and it was an interesting experience going in the glacial melt river beside it and then jumping back into the pool. Not many people can say they’ve done that.

Our plane home...

The 'hotpot'

At the end of the weekend we drove across the interior to Lacki, a volcano. It was a longer drive than any of us anticipated. Anyone who has been to Iceland would know that driving across the interior isn’t the best driving conditions in a normal seat so being in the boot was not for those with a weak stomach. When we finally got there however it was worth every second. Standing on top to a huge volcano in the middle of nowhere the bright sunlight at 10pm at night is spectacular, if a little surreal. On our drive home we managed to break the car and so were forced to drive slowly through increasingly thick fog. It was a bit scary at times and I was incredibly glad I wasn’t driving. I can seenow how there so many stories about mythical creatures in Iceland as there could have been anything in that fog.

On top of Lacki

As we had broken the car, the next weekend we took a boat to the Westman Islands. They were tiny, but pretty beautiful. We camped at the base of some pretty big cliffs which we climbed on the first day and found a little private beach. We climbed a few more volcanoes (what else?) and then on the last day on our walk home we got very heavily rained on. We ate our lunch that day sat in pjs with our clothes in the washer. We really were not ready for this camping trip as we managed to buy tinned pasta sauce which we had to open with a tent peg and a rock and thin plastic cups for boiling hot tea. How survived these 2 weeks is a mystery. However we did make it back in one piece and after 2 amazing weeks on the farm we said goodbye to the family and the very fluffy dog and headed back to Reykjavik. These final 2 nights in Reykjavik were even better than 1^st 3 as we had the rest of the group to be with. Helen and I went to the blue lagoon which was relaxing and wandered around Reykjavik a bit more. We walked along the front and saw the sunset at about 1am. It was a great way to end an incredible 3 weeks in Iceland. It was a trip I will never forget and hopefully one day I will head back from some more Icelandic magic.