However, you should never, ever assume you’re going to get the same thing or have the same experience as us. Every occasion is different and they’re experienced by different people with different histories and expectations, so the perception of even identical events can trigger completely different levels of enjoyment or lack thereof in people.

This is one reason why I try to steer away from reviewing in the generally accepted sense these days – that is, with an eye to recommending or not – and why I try to present everything about our cruise history in the form of diary-style, photo-heavy entries. These are records; not recommendations.

The second reason that I write about our travels in this way is that things change, and this post will be a good example of that. Or, at least, an example of that. Perhaps not a good one. Let’s not pretend I’m writing anything terribly useful or that most people don’t really know already.

This is a look at the food on Sky Princess during the last two sea days on the ship at the conclusion of our 2022 Norway and Iceland cruise. Except for breakfast; for some reason I never bother with breakfast photos.

Starting below with Alfredo’s, which at the time of cruising was free and fairly popular as a result. The food here was very good, but not to the level that we’d likely pay what they charge now. That might now be free or included if you want to use up a casual dining allowance depending on what type of fare you book your Princess cruise with, but whichever way you slice it, you will now be paying for something that we got at the time for free. When compared to the free offering around the Lido pool (unless that too changes in the future), then the price, if the food were to remain the same, isn’t worth it in my opinion. But the food may be better. Because, here’s the thing: this was just a snapshot of when we travelled.

So, we enjoyed this food. If we’d had the same food and paid for it then the food would have been the same but we might have felt that the value was less. Bear that in mind. And also bear that concept in mind whenever you see reviews of cruising or travel where the people are getting things for free. The perception of value changes, and that can be reflected in what’s reported, and that may not likely match your own experiences. This is why I have trust issues with sponsored travel posts or visits. This is why we don’t get on with many other cruise bloggers. Although, we also don’t get on with many people, period. We’re not people people is what I’m getting at here.

Now here are examples of the food we ate in the main dining room on Sky Princess (that’s the MDR to regular cruisers) and not only does it look great (to me), but it was great (to me). Don’t let that persuade you one way or the other, though, because you won’t be having the same chefs on the same ship on the same day, cooking in the same way, and presenting you with the same food as me unless you have access to one of those new-fangled personal temporal incursion devices that are all the rage. If they’re not all the rage when you’re reading this then oops, someone went and changed something in the past again.

The food in the main dining room was of great quality on Sky Princess but that didn’t stop us splashing out on some speciality dining in Sabatini’s Italian Trattoria. It’s because we like Sabatini’s. We know what we’re getting here in general.

Or do we?

No, because since this cruise with Princess on Sky Princess we’ve discovered on a more recent cruise that the menu’s changed, and quite extensively. And it may do yet again before you cruise. You really just can’t tell. And even if I say that this particular meal was cooked to perfection, with good service, nothing to fault it, you might have a miserable time dining here. We’ve heard people moan about food and service that we’ve thought were absolutely fine, but there’s no point being one of those tedious people who pipe up and say “Well, we had a lovely time” because everyone’s different. That’s like those people who like to tell you that cruising looks terrible and they’d never do it. Great, thanks for that insight that means absolutely nothing to and will affect absolutely nothing for me or anyone for whom this looks wonderful.

Now, you might have read all that and thought “What kind of idiot does this Mark think I am? I know that food can change from ship-to-ship, from cruise-to-cruise, from night-to-night, from table-to-table. I just wanted an idea about the sort of food on the ship and, thanks to this post, I’ve got a few pictures, none of the details I was actually after, and am being treated like I’ve got the IQ of one of the stupider species of hamsters.”

Well, sorry about that, but I’ve read Facebook group posts and seen the questions people ask. What will the sea conditions be like on my cruise in 18 months time? Can you wear two pairs of socks on the top deck if it’s cold? Can you bring a rotary washing line for your balcony? What vegetables will I get on formal night?

In summary: we had great food on Sky Princess. If you’ve found this page because you want to find out whether you’re going to have great food on Sky Princess too then you’d be as well off consulting a tea leaf-reader.

For this post, though, it’s pretty much just pictures of the ship with no waffle from me, and just to be different I decided to take most of these with a 100mm prime lens so it encouraged artistic shots due to a fixed field of view. Expect close-ups, weird framing, odd subject matter, shallow depth of field, and, essentially, something a little different from all the other photographs of cruise ships I or other cruisers typically take.

To conclude the photos from the sea days, and as is mostly traditional on this site for any cruises that start and end in Southampton, a shot from our balcony on the morning of departure. Never a happy time, but at least the weather was lovely for our return to England at the conclusion of this excellent cruise aboard Sky Princess.

Time for a few photos of the centre of Reykjavík first, though, and likely one of the most-taken shots you’ll find from the city is at what’s known as Rainbow Street with its view up the hill towards Hallgrímskirkja.

If you’re walking through this part of Reykjavík then you’re going to see a lot of street art around. It was good to see some new pieces but also some familiar pieces from the visits we’ve had to Iceland before.

The craft ale bar we headed for was called Microbar Reykjavík. If you like clean, bright, airy, modern-looking bars then you’ll like the look of this place. To be brutally honest, the style wasn’t quite to my taste, feeling a little cold and socially-distant in a country that already has its fair share of those attributes, but the style is a very distant secondary concern to the ales on offer and in this respect we liked Microbar a lot, mostly thanks to how different some of the ales on offer were. You can see the menu and pricing below as well as a selection of drinks we tried just to see the different beer styles available.

Leaving ourselves plenty of time to head back to the ship at a sensible pace we then started the walk back along the northern shoreline of Reykjavík once more; a lot of the route was identical – of course – but we veered off a little towards the end for a more direct path to the ship so skipped heading past the Recycled House and the Sigurjón Ólafsson sculptures in Laugarnes, which was probably for the best as I’d have been sorely tempted to take more pictures and risk getting the look from my wife.

I wish I’d taken a closer look at the sculpture or monument or just bit of industrial construction left over and mounted in Laugarnes in the photo below as we neared the port because the look of it really appeals to me. Sadly, I don’t know anything about it.

A look around the very small gift shop at the port and we boarded Sky Princess for the last time on this cruise.

We didn’t see much of the sail away from the final port of call on this 2022 Norway and Iceland cruise because all that fresh air and that bit of drinking in Iceland’s capital convinced us having an early dinner might be sensible. People who like to search for cruise information like to know about the food on cruise ships and that’s why all us cruise bloggers take photos of what we’re eating. We don’t want to. We’re doing it for you. And do we ever get thanked?

The sea off the coast of Iceland as Sky Princess cruised away was ridiculously calm but the mostly overcast conditions didn’t lend themselves to the most colourful of photographic opportunities after dinner. We did have some minor excitement when we saw some volcanic steam vents along the Icelandic coastline, though.

Evening aboard the cruise ship followed the usual pattern of some drinks late into the night in first the Take Five jazz lounge and then the Vista Lounge.

In the final couple of posts in this cruise travelogue series we’ll complete our time aboard Sky Princess sailing to Norway then around Iceland with a couple of sea days. Expect more photos of the ship and the food we ate on Sky Princess to round off this very enjoyable cruise.

We’d passed by the Punk Museum on visits that included time in Reyjavík in 2015 and 2018, and on both occasions we’d said “Ooh! A museum of punk music! Icelandic punk music! We have got to go in there!” but on both occasions we hadn’t. I think we needed to catch a bus back to our hotel the first time when we were staying outside the main part of the city, and we got distracted looking at other museums (and bars; let’s not kid ourselves that there weren’t bars when we were exploring the capital) on the second occasion when we were more central.

For our third visit to Iceland and our first time cruising there we’d already walked from the cruise port at Sundahofn, taking in the sights of the art sculptures in Laugarnes, then the incredible Recycled House public artwork, before enjoying more abstract artwork along Reykjavík’s north shore, but the day’s flexible plan did have something else in mind next. That’s the purpose of this post, and you’ve already guessed correctly that we had made our minds up that – so long as it was open – we would finally pay a visit to the Punk Museum.

The Icelandic Punk Museum was open.

You’re not imagining things from the photo above. The punk museum is really located in a former public toilets space underground and down some concrete steps. To be fair, if you’re reading this after searching for the museum online then there’s a good chance you already knew that.

Something else you probably already knew, or at least suspected, is that this isn’t the sort of place to visit if you’re offended by bad language. Consider that before turning up.

And finally, one last thing to weigh up before you head to the punk museum in Reykjavík is how you feel about claustrophobia. The public toilets weren’t big in the first place, and what space there was is now partitioned off so that you’re left to follow a tight squeeze through a mostly one-way labyrinth of walls decorated with punk memorabilia and a history of the punk scene in Iceland. You’ll be up close and personal with other visitors if it’s busy, and even if it’s not very busy.

So, with all that out of the way, here’s what you can expect from a visit to the Icelandic Punk Museum. Firstly, an entertaining host at the door to greet you and take your payment. Secondly, a path through the small space that encourages you to read everything to learn about Iceland’s music history in a humorous style; you and everyone else will move slowly in here. There are posters to enjoy, stuck on the walls and the ceiling, and often both at the same time; there are photographs; there are prints from newspapers and magazines; there are screens showing punk performances.

The Icelandic Punk Museum in Reykjavík has a few interactive elements. If you used to be a punk and want to relive the experience, or you’ve ever wondered whether the punk look would suit you then there are some jackets dotted around for you to model in photographs. You know you want to. There are also some instruments around if you fancy playing something raw and anti-establishment.

My favourite part of the museum was right at the end of our winding tour through Icelandic punk history. Attached to the ceiling were vinyl album covers of punk bands with chains through them from which hung headphones. You’ve likely guessed that this was a listening booth with a difference. Moving from hanging headphones to hanging headphones, listening to the album above your head playing, this is a great way to finish off by treating your ears to some of what your brain has learnt. It was fun to see other visitors gathering in this spot and us all performing a short listening dance as we’d listen for a while then shift around one another to take up a vacant set of headphones from somewhere else. Brilliant stuff.

The Icelandic Punk Museum in Reykjavík is small but thoroughly engrossing. If you like music, if you like punk music especially, if you like history, or if you just like quirky things – and in Iceland almost everything is a quirky thing – then this is just a fantastic place to visit in the country’s capital city. If you’ve got phobias about closed-in spaces and the possibilities of germ-transfer then you probably would have been eaten alive in the real heyday of the punk scene and maybe this little venue won’t be for you, but for anyone else: go, it’s great.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll conclude our time in Reykjavík with a walk back to the ship that may or may not require us to stop in a craft ale bar on the way.

Yeah, I certainly did. But you know what? There are still more pieces of fantastic, often abstract, public pieces of art on which to feast the eyes on the walk from the cruise port to the city centre and dang it all to heck if I’m not going to write about a few more now. If you’re looking to simply walk from a cruise ship into Reykjavík then this is the important sort of thing that tells you yep, you’re definitely still on the right road, didn’t that guy with that website write some crap about it and post photos when we were researching, yes we can stop soon, look you can see the damn cathedral from here.

To be fair, you can’t really go wrong when walking into the city from the cruise port at Sundahofn. If you head for the road that runs along the coast you will indeed be able to spot the Icelandic capital’s most prominent and fairly central landmark, Hallgrímskirkja, from anywhere along it, and you can see that for yourself in the fourth photo below. This post in the Sky Princess Norway and Iceland cruise travelogue series will primarily be a photo dump for some of the other sights along that route; a route we took in July 2022 with the intention of visiting a few bars and a museum in the city.

The small, bright yellow lighthouse in Reyjavík is called the Höfði Lighthouse. You might think from first appearances that it’s old but this lighthouse was only built and placed on this spot of reclaimed land in 2019. However, its design is similar to those of lighthouses used in the harbour area in the 1910s here in Iceland. The platform around the upper part of the lighthouse tower is supposed to be reachable and part of an appeal to tourists but we didn’t see any way to it other than the closed door in the front that we decided not to try to open.

Höfði Lighthouse gets its name from the Höfði House over the road from it which you can see in the second photo below, its architecture looking somewhat out of place with that backdrop of modern buildings. Höfði dates from 1909 and was built for the French consul in the city at the time but was subsequently the home for a poet, a painter, the British Embassy, and, according to legend, a ghost. Its biggest claim to fame as a building, however, is that it hosted the 1986 summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Samstarf or Partnership is a sculpture by Peter Smith, unveiled in 1991 as one of two pieces, the other located in Miami and displayed the following year. The sculpture celebrates fifty years of friendship between Iceland and the USA and is the largest bronze sculpture cast and finished in Iceland.

The Island Guard is a 2006 sculpture by Jóhann Eyfells, a sculptor known for his works influenced by chemistry and physics and the reactions between certain elements. I suspect that this is one of those sculptures that would be great for posed photos for tourists in Reykjavík but we’re not the sort of tourists who do that sort of thing so you’ll have to make do – and trust me, you’re better off this way – with just a picture of the abstract piece on its own.

Probably the most photographed sculpture along the northern shoreline is the Sun Voyager by Jón Gunnar Árnason. We’d taken pictures of it before when we visited Reykjavík in 2015, and a few days earlier on this cruise aboard Sky Princess we’d stopped at the port of Akureyri and found another artwork by the same sculptor in a similar style.

While we were photographing the Sun Voyager this time around we bumped into our friends from Sky Princess who’d taken the bus into the city for a walk and were about to head back to the bus stop to return to the ship. We pointed along the shoreline we’d just walked and mentioned the Recycled House from the previous post in this series, still visible, showing them some photos of it on our phones and camera. They changed their plans and went to explore that instead, and thanked us afterwards for the excellent little find.

Not an art sculpture now, but a distinctive form and wonderfully artistic bit of architecture on the north coast of Reykjavík is Harpa. This is a business centre, a venue for concerts, and Star Trek canon indicates it will be the inspiration for Borg Cubes after the Queen vacations in Iceland and decides to embrace the country’s oneness with nature in a hive-minded goal of incorporating the best elements of all life in the universe.

The Musician is a sculpture of the Danish cellist Erling Blöndal Bengtsson by Ólöf Pálsdóttir. He apparently played continuously for her as he sat for the initial modelling for the sculpture. The artwork was outside the original home of the orchestra elsewhere in the city, but when they relocated to base themselves at Harpa, the sculpture was relocated too at the request of Bengtsson’s widow.

It had been our initial intention to walk a little further on but despite being summer it was still Iceland and subject to chilly winds, we’d spent way longer getting this far thanks to frequent stops for photos of all the works of art on the coast, and our bladders were having words with us. Luckily for us, we knew of a nearby craft ale bar we’d visited a few times when we stayed in Reykjavík in 2018 called Skúli. It had toilets. And, of course, it also had beer. Any excuse for a drink.

After we’d had a short break – and bought a t-shirt in the bar too because it’s important for us cruise ship tourists to spend money in the local economy and keep them happy about our big ships visiting their home towns and cities so they don’t stop us visiting again in the future – we made plans to head towards a museum we’d thought about visiting on both previous times in Reykjavík but hadn’t managed for some reason.

On the way there we encountered a very strange public art performance piece by, I assume, local art students. To the accompaniment of music a couple of weirdly-dressed, alien-like characters were pursued in an odd, semi-choreographed dance of sorts by a Men In Black-style group. It would be hard to describe without video, but, luckily, I took video (temporarily removed).

That group proceeded to repeat that performance several times on this road through Reykjavík.

The final art sculpture before we reached our intended destination was The Water Carrier by Ásmundur Sveinsson. This abstract woman with water form was inspired by both the hardworking Icelandic women struggling with water in wintry conditions and by the mountain peaks that can be found all over the country. It dates from 1937 but it took until 2011 before it was moved to its present and originally-intended location after earlier objections by locals.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series, on our third visit to Reykjavík, we finally descend the steps that lead to the former public toilets transformed into the Icelandic Punk Museum.

Reykjavík was the final port of call for us on our 2022 Sky Princess Norway and Iceland cruise and with this being our third time visiting the capital city of Iceland (although the first on a cruise ship) we’d decided that there was no point in booking excursions – we’d done all the interesting ones already – and so had opted to take the use-your-own-feet option of exploring. The initial part of this walking route along the shoreline had brought us into Laugarnes and up close with some abstract sculptures by Sigurjón Ólafsson, and immediately adjacent to those was what looked like a junkyard at first glance. But only at first glance. It became clear almost immediately afterwards that there was order, design, and love among the chaos.

The Recycled House is home to Icelandic film director, Hrafn Gunnlaugsson, who originally needed a place to create the decorations for his movies and found a house falling down and scheduled for demolition that he decided to buy. What evolved from that was a sprawling, eclectic exhibition of discovered and salvaged and artistically-enhanced scrap wood and metal, arranged in explosions of works-in-progress with themes of mythology and witchcraft prominent throughout.

You’re free to wander around the many buildings of Reykjavík’s Recycled House at any time, and Hrafn is apparently very welcoming to guests. While we did pass by the living space within the art installation he calls home we didn’t see any sign of the man himself inside on the day of our visit, and I’m not sure that we would have felt right disturbing him, but we adored seeing the fruits of his mind and his hands outside.

The building below is described on some photo-licencing websites as having once been occupied by the famous Icelandic singer, Björk. That’s the sort of thing I wanted to verify but wasn’t able to after a brief check online. It might be true. It might just be something that helps sales of photographs of bizarre rusted metal art exhibits.

Tribal imagery adorns many of the buildings of the Recycled House and there was a feeling of an insular community of ghosts inhabiting the structures. On the day of our visit it was overcast, a little windy, and a little cool, so the weather might have helped to keep almost everyone else away. Apart from my wife and me there were just one other couple of young men wandering around and trying to find different locations to form backdrops for photos. The area was quiet, haunted, but not so eerie that it could overwhelm the sense of childish wonder exploring the place. Indeed, I was reminded of growing up and clambering around unofficial rubbish dumps near where we used to live and making forts or houses from the burnt and crumpled waste discarded there. Dangerous, imaginative fun.

The Recycled House used to extend towards the main road on the way towards Reykjavík city centre but the council flattened it, either considering it an eyesore or a health risk. It’s the sort of thing that might upset owners and artists but Hrafn’s feelings on the matter are reportedly that nothing needs to be preserved and that when he dies he doesn’t care what happens to the place. That’s not something I necessarily agree with because there is something of the artist in all his work and information should always be kept, but I can respect his position.

While it may no longer reach the main road, you can still explore right down to the water’s edge. A building there, described as a shrine of Freyr, showed signs of recent use in some of the items left behind: beer bottles, food wrappers, cigarette ends.

Another building along the shoreline had a flat roof and some stairs to it that I was compelled to climb. Up there was what could be almost described as an open plan living space exposed to the elements. I took one step onto the upper surface and felt the rusted metal plating flex beneath my feet. Let’s not be the subject of a local news item recounting the severe injury caused to a cruise ship visitor, I thought to myself, and backed away from exploring that particular spot.

The Recycled House is a fantastic place to explore, but be careful, and I probably shouldn’t have to tell you this but perhaps make sure you’ve got your tetanus shots up to date given all the sharp and rusted surfaces everywhere.

I could have spent twice as long, really exploring the details of all the various wood and metal buildings that comprise the Recycled House, but I sensed my wife was a little more uneasy in the area. Perhaps on a warmer, brighter day with a few more tourists around she’d have been more comfortable. She still agreed, though, that it was an absolutely wonderful place. There’s nothing quite like finding out of the ordinary places when you’re travelling; those incredible spots that you want to tell the whole world about but still want to remain a bit of a hardly-known secret.

We’d not heard of the Recycled House before, despite having been to Reykjavík on two previous visits to Iceland, but it’s now our most-recommended spot to visit if we talk to other people considering hitting this country and its capital. We bumped into some friends from Sky Princess later in the day who were about to get the shuttle bus back to the ship and convinced them to walk along the shore to find the Recycled House. They loved it too and described it as having a bit of a horror movie vibe to it.

In the next part of this cruise travelogue series we’ll continue our walk along the northern shore of Reykjavík, passing by plenty more examples of abstract, public artwork, and encountering a bizarre – even by Iceland’s standards – group of students performing for bemused locals and visitors.

Viðey was under consideration as a potential destination to explore by us before we arrived at Reykjavík for the reason that we knew the ship would be close to the ferry crossing and with us having been to Iceland twice before in 2015 and 2018, we’d done a lot of the excursion options on offer and had spent several days in Reykjavík overall. However, we were concerned that there wouldn’t be a whole lot to actually do on the island and this seemed borne out by our first views of it.

We decided quickly that we’d simply head into the capital instead and try to find a few things we’d not been able to see before. The daily guide on Princess ships is called the Princess Patter and we could see that a shuttle bus option was independently run and therefore not free. That, plus the fact that we knew from experience that Reykjavík is pretty walkable, and we tend to walk if we can, made us decide we’d get some mild exercise on a stroll into the city instead. That gave us a chance to take part in the morning trivia with a far emptier ship than on a sea day which made winning it that much easier.

The walking route we took in Reykjavík was the shore walk – it may not have been the most direct path but you can never get too much of that sea air – and this ended up taking us into the Laugarnes quarter of the city. This is an area of Reykjavík that has previously housed the bishop, a leper colony, and barracks for the military during World War II but there’s little indication of any of those former roles these days. Instead, you get rocky coastlines, tufts of windswept grasses, and views across flat water to mountainous landscapes. You’re in Iceland. What else were you expecting?

Sigurjón Ólafsson was born in 1908 in the south of the country. He studied and sculpted in Denmark until 1945, winning numerous awards for his realistic and then increasingly abstract art pieces in a variety of media. When he returned to Iceland it was here in Laugarnes that he set up home on what was barracks during the war and he was sculpting pieces up until his death in 1982. His wife then transformed and expanded their home into an art gallery and both inside and out you can now view some of his art pieces. If you like modern abstract art – and we do – then this is a delightful place to wander past and appreciate a bit of culture, and if you’re walking from the cruise ship port in Reykjavík to the city centre then it’s barely out of your way at all.

We like bracing views and weird art so we adored picking this path to walk on the way from Sky Princess to Reykjavík and recommend it not only for these sculptures but also – and mostly – for what will be in the next post in this cruise travelogue series. The next thing we would come across might just happen to be our most favourite spot in the entire Icelandic capital to explore: The Recycled House.

At the conclusion of this tour we were brought back to Grundarfjörður, and it had been our intention, because we had the time for it, to have a walk into town and across to Kirkjufell for some photos of what is often claimed to be Iceland’s most photographed mountain thanks in no small part to it featuring in some fantasy programme we never got the chance to see when it was first released, then got put off by everyone claiming it was excellent, then got put off more by everyone claiming the ending was terrible, and so decided to never watch.

However, regular readers of these travel posts – and counting me, that’s one of us – will know that my wife has on occasion injured herself either on her hip or knee or ankle, often causing her to fall or twist something even more. Basically, one of her legs has been trying to kill her for years and we keep putting off taking her to see a priest to get the demon inside exorcised. She hadn’t fallen on this day’s tour, but some of the walking had been on very uneven ground (or up uneven rock steps in the case of the first stop of the day at Djúpalónssandur Black Sand Beach) and it had aggravated existing problems.

“You can go off on your own,” she said.

“I could,” I agreed, “but the trolls might get me. Can’t go without my wingman. Wingwoman.”

“Are you calling me an old bat?”

It’s not like there won’t be opportunities to return to the country in the future. Including this cruise, this was our third time in Iceland, it’s our favourite country in Europe, and it won’t take much to get us back there. So I decided to simply hop back on board Sky Princess and enjoy some of the views of the spectacular landscapes in this part of the world from our balcony and the top deck of the ship before we sailed away in the evening.

The waterfall you can see in the photo below is Grundarfoss, one of Iceland’s tallest waterfalls with a drop of seventy metres. We were quite some distance away on the ship but it was still an impressive sight.

The evening aboard the cruise ship was much like most others. We had a few pre-dinner drinks first alone, then with our friends on the cruise, and we all joined together to not only take part in the trivia but win it too. One day Princess Cruises might offer up decent prizes, but not on this day.

And to finish off, some photos of the dinner on Sky Princess in the main dining room, because you wouldn’t believe how much some people like to see pictures of it. Food was of a great quality and we had a wonderful table for the last of the time in port in Grundarfjörður.

While I didn’t take any photos of any drinks I can assure you that they were nevertheless consumed.

In the next post in this 2022 Sky Princess Norway and Iceland cruise series we’ll arrive at the final port in Iceland and the country’s capital, Reykjavík. With this being our third time to the city we wouldn’t be going on any excursions but we ended up finding some awesome pieces of public art and finally visiting the punk museum.

Having just come from another village, Hellnar, we’d anticipated something similar in size but Arnarstapi was a lot larger, containing more buildings, and a lot more tourists. In the summer months it’s tourism that thrives here now because of the landscape, although in the past Arnarstapi was an important fishing port and was run by first Norway then Denmark for their own interests. The industrial revolution saw investment in the countryside areas of Iceland dwindle and the village shrunk in size and importance.

If you’re visiting Arnarstapi then it’s the coastal walk you’ll want to be taking, enjoying the sights and some of the natural wonders on view. If you like rock formations then you are going to find some fine ones. There is also an extensive lava field here, ejected from the dominating form of the Snæfellsjökull volcano and glacier on the peninsula, but our tour stuck to the coastline.

And, of course, with this being Iceland, you’re never short of stunning views to the landscape not just where you’re standing but for miles around. We got lucky on our visit that it was bright and, for us, warm. In fact, we were walking around in t-shirts on the rocky cliffs, although we were in the minority.

The basalt columns and cliffs around Arnarstapi are home to lots of birdlife. Noisy birdlife, when we were there. You can probably expect to see kittiwakes, gulls, and Arctic terns, depending on the time of year you visit.

There are a few stand-out natural rock formations among all the others. The first of those was a stone bridge over an eroded section, across which many people were walking and posing for photos. Our guide kept us moving past it, no doubt a little concerned that accidents upon it would reflect badly on the tour as a whole.

Further along the coastal walk at Arnarstapi was the more impressive and more photographed Gatklettur, a stone arch more akin to those you might find at Lulworth Cove or Cabo San Lucas (and probably others, but those are the ones we’ve seen so far).

As our circular walk around the Arnarstapi coastline came to an end and we approached the parking lot for our bus we came upon the last landmark. The sculpture of stones on a slight rise represented Bárður Snæfellsás, a half-man, half-ogre who lived in this part of Iceland in the ninth century according to a fourteenth century saga.

Absolutely beautiful landscape views is the staple of any visit to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, and Arnarstapi did not disappoint, but a cruise excursion could only give the merest highlights of all there is to see. Furthermore, because of the number of people on the tour and the narrow, uneven walk along the coastline it wasn’t always possible to hear the guide explaining some aspect of the saga histories or the wildlife or the formations. Not helped when I wander off to snap some photos, either. A visit to Arnarstapi is definitely recommended if you’re visiting Iceland.

In the next part of this 2022 Sky Princess Norway and Iceland cruise travelogue series we’ll return to Grundarfjörður ahead of our departure overnight to Iceland’s capital, the last port of call on this cruise.

Whilst decidedly quieter these days, Hellnar was once a fairly thriving fishing village surrounded by agricultural farms. Little of that industrial history really remained to be seen, and one of the main draws to this location now is the prominent rock cliff jutting out to sea with its deep cave. This was Valasnös.

We were given not quite enough time to do very much at all. A small café was reachable down some steps on the cliff, but whether anyone would have had enough time to order anything and consume it was debatable and we didn’t see anyone try. We wandered along the cliff and back for the most part but I determined we still had enough time for me to route-march up the road to get close enough to the village’s church for a few photos. The volcanic mountain forming the church’s backdrop was Stapafell, and turning slightly around gave another fine view of the glacier-topped Snæfellsjökull that dominated the landscape of the entire peninsula.

As photo stops go, it was nice enough, but as is often the case when you’re on a cruise ship excursion there wasn’t enough time to do it justice and see what else there was on offer. If you were travelling on your own then it’s likely that the cave and the church and a little more wandering around the bay and cliff could occupy a decent chunk of time, though.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll make the final stop of the tour at the somewhat busier village of Arnarstapi for a longer walk with more points of interest to see.