As I’ve mentioned already in this travelogue series, and as you’ll know if you’ve looked at the menu structure of trips we’ve made on this site or if you’ve ever followed any of our posts on social media in the past, we had not only visited Iceland before, but it’s also our favourite European country to visit. You can read about the weekend trips we took to the country here: Iceland (2015) and Iceland (2018). What would make Akureyri special for us would be that it would be the first time we’d arrived in Iceland via cruise ship. What would make the cruise special would be that we’d be hitting Iceland’s northern coast, which we’d not done before, and with the exception of the capital, all new locations for us.

If we could see any of it.

The very early view from our balcony seemed to indicate that the fog bank we’d cruised through during the day before had made the journey to Iceland with us.

We had an excursion booked for the day in Akureyri, Iceland, but it started at a very reasonable hour and meant we’d have time to have a leisurely breakfast and take part in the morning trivia before hopping off the ship. For those staying aboard, or those who might be returning early you can see what sorts of activities were taking place on Sky Princess in the day’s Princess Patter below.

After eating, we had a wander around the top deck to see whether the view was any less foggy from other sides of the ship.

Sky Princess wasn’t the only ship in port on that day, with the Silverseas vessel, Silver Whisper, also visiting Akureyri. If you take a look at the cruise menu on this site, or if you take a look at our Cruise History page, then you’ll notice that – at time of writing – we haven’t cruised with Silverseas. That’s because we’re not stupidly wealthy. I have little doubt that the service and quality aboard one of their ships would be fabulous, but barring a lottery win it’s a cruise line that we would struggle to pay for a single night aboard let alone a full cruise. And would it really be worth it? We’ll likely never know.

Anyway, after that little aside to bemoan the fact that we can’t afford to cruise with an ultra luxury cruise line, here are some more views from around Sky Princess looking out to Akureyri. As you’ll be able to see below, the fog or low cloud that had covered most of the port scenery when we first awoke started to burn off as the morning progressed.

We took part in the morning trivia before heading to the meeting spot for our day’s excursion to begin. One of the good things about taking part in the early trivia on a port day is that some of the smarter people may already be ashore, and they must have been on this day because we managed to win.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll leave Akureyri and head to the Laufás Turf House Museum and Heritage Site.

We were visiting Iceland in the summer for the first time, and on our first day there during our 2022 Sky Princess cruise we’d docked at Akureyri then embarked on a half-day excursion. Celebrating the lifting of the fog that had hounded us across the Norwegian Sea, I got all giddy and did something I don’t do very often, and took some photos while on the bus. You might be able to see why I’m not keen on doing this: reflections! But, sometimes it’s more important to capture a true sense of the journey rather than simply filtering the account to the perfectly-photographed and arguably less-real impressions.

Our excursion started with a visit to the Laufás Turf House Museum, managed by the Akureyri Museum. The bus parked up and we all gathered to listen to a couple of young, local guides dressed in traditional Icelandic clothing associated with the period of the house we’d be looking at. At least, I hope that’s why they were wearing what they were wearing.

Records indicate the presence of a church at Laufás in the eleventh century, and a fire therein the following century, and the place features in a couple of Icelandic Sagas. The former manor house on the site became a vicarage in the nineteenth century, and our initial impression from looking at it was that we were looking at five separate houses, perhaps for the family and workers of the location. In fact, what we were really seeing was five gables of essentially a single dwelling. Stepping inside brought sudden understanding as we found ourselves in a labyrinth of interconnected rooms, corridors, and staircases, making the whole place somewhat TARDIS-like. Our time inside the Laufás Turf House was one of joy and wonder and frequent questioning whether we’d been in this room yet or up those stairs yet.

After spending time clambering around rooms and ducking through doors and dodging past other passengers from the cruise ship exploring the museum building, we headed back out into the bright sunshine of this part of Iceland. Our next bit of exploration would be inside the church adjacent to the house.

Laufás Church was built in 1865 and is notable for its curved ceiling inside the roof space and the carvings on its pulpit which date from 1698. I’m going to assume that the pulpit came from another church and that this isn’t yet another example of religious folk messing with the timelines, but those religious folk do like to mess with the timelines. Remember back when Jesus was called Annabel? No, nobody does now.

Back out in the Icelandic sunshine once again we spent the remainder of our time at Laufás Turf House Museum enjoying the warmth of the day and the contrasts between the bright blue of the sky and the vibrant green of the grass, the distant views to snow-topped mountains, and the old farm equipment left around to appeal to rust fetishists who are a very important travel demographic often overlooked by the tourism industry.

In the next part of this cruise travelogue series we’ll hit the second stop on this day’s excursion with a visit to Goðafoss and Geitafoss Waterfalls.

We were on a Sky Princess Cruise to Norway and Iceland that had reached Iceland and the port of Akureyri, and we’d taken an excursion that had already seen us visit the very nice Laufás Turf House. The second part of this day’s exploration of this part of northern Iceland brought us to the waterfall you quite possibly searched for before ending up at this page: Goðafoss.

Let’s start with a handful of photos of the Icelandic landscape as seen from the bus window en route to our tour destination. If you’ve read the previous post in this series then you’ll know my feelings about photos from bus windows already, and yet here I am, doing it again. That’s Iceland!

We had options when we arrived, of either heading to the visitor centre (i.e. the café or toilets) or coming with him along the path towards the waterfall, or exploring on our own with a set time to head back to the bus. We were told it was possible to walk around the falls but that we wouldn’t have time to do that. We opted to follow the guide, but were we to visit here again we’d likely head off on our own for a very good reason I’ll explain a bit further on.

Summer in Iceland meant blue skies and green grass. Considering that our previous visits to Iceland had both been in the winter, it was lovely to see so much greenery on the Icelandic landscape as our previous experiences had all been more cold, dry, dark, desolate, and moody. It’s a fabulous country for your eyeballs no matter when you visit Iceland.

We’d been hearing the increasing roar of the waterfall as we traipsed along the trails from the car park area in the direction of Goðafoss, and we’d caught glimpses of the spray rising into the air over rises in the ground as we got closer and closer to the waterfall. It wasn’t too long before Goðafoss appeared.

Goðafoss, like most passengers at the end of a nice cruise, is around thirty metres wide, and water from the Skjálfandafljót river drops about twelve metres over it. The name of the waterfall is a little contentious, with some people claiming it’s derived from the word for gods, and others claiming it’s derived from the word for a chieftain. As luck would have it, a tale purporting to be about Iceland’s move from pagan worship to Christianity involves both idols of gods and a chieftain throwing them into this waterfall after an Althing in order to discourage Norway from invading. While the characters involved did exist in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, the part about throwing idols into Goðafoss first comes to light in the nineteenth century and is almost certainly untrue.

I mentioned that if we were to return to Goðafoss and if it were on a tour like this one with Princess Cruises, then we’d opt to explore on our own, and I’m going to explain why now, even if you don’t care – and maybe especially if you don’t care – because this site, if it’s not clear, is a mixture of travelogues and a stream of consciousness sometimes. It’s what we used to call a blog back in the days, where we wrote for ourselves and didn’t worry about whether or not someone read it. Which was lucky, because hardly anybody did, and even fewer do now. I do feel for those who try to make money from static sites these days, spending so long on getting pages listed on increasingly useless LLM-powered search engines that they’re now incomprehensible to humans, and trying to earn so much from advertising and subscriptions that any humans who do find the pages can’t even find the content the search engine assured them was there somewhere between the flashing imagery and under the popup and partly three pages down the screen now that a video embed has appeared out of nowhere. See what I mean about the stream of consciousness thing? Where was I?

Half-decent photographers – the sort of photographer I aspire to become one day – might already be looking at these pictures of Goðafoss and sucking on their teeth and saying things like “Well, it’s framed fine, of course, but the exposure’s all wrong there, washing out the colours of the sky, not getting enough detail in the foreground.” And they’re right. I know it. I knew it then. The problem was one of location and local conditions and timing and time at the location. The problem, obviously, is that it was bright and sunny on this mid-morning visit to the waterfall. And the car park was to the north of the waterfall. And the path we were on with our guide headed south. And south is where the sun was. And the spray from the waterfall was shooting up into the air. And the contrast between the shadows of the black, volcanic rock of Iceland and the bright whiteness of the clouds and spray and foam was extreme.

Look to the left of the photo below, though, and you’ll see people on the other side of the river. Those people don’t have the sun in their eyes, and if we’d been on our own we could have opted to head across the river near the car park early then walked down that side to capture pictures of the waterfall without the difficult photography conditions we encountered. Or, if we’d had more time – so if we were visiting without the sort of constraints that a cruise tour necessarily imposes – then we could have walked a complete circuit around the falls and given ourselves plenty of chances to compensate for any type of weather. But, you just can’t really tell ahead of time. To be fair, it’s only the second time I can recall where we took a tour and I thought during it “Well, the sun is going to be a right bugger here, isn’t it?” The important thing is the experience, of course, but it’s something to bear in mind for those who like to take photos when they’re travelling.

We headed back towards the car park along a slightly lower trail that afforded closer views of the still-turbulent water downriver from Goðafoss waterfall as well as some of the local geological formations on the hilly sides.

Close to the bridges over the water, there was another section of waterfalls with a lower drop and width but still some impressively fast and thunderous water crashing through. This was Geitafoss. Because we could get in amongst the rocks and because we weren’t affected by the position of the sun anywhere near as much, I thought the pictures of this part of the river’s couple of falls produced some more interesting photos, if perhaps not quite as impressive thanks to the scale.

The final two photos here show Geitafoss in the foreground and the spray thrown up in the distance by the larger Goðafoss upstream.

So, come to Goðafoss and get Geitafoss for free. Two waterfalls for the price of one. As I mentioned at the start, Iceland is one of those countries where you will find it very easy to satisfy your waterfall habit.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series I might not head off on a rant about the state of blogging but who knows what sort of things will pop into my head when I write up about our far-too-brief visit to Akureyri Botanical Garden ahead of some free time in the town.

If you’ve read the previous two posts in this particular series then you might just be expecting some photos of the Icelandic landscape as seen from the bus as we travelled between stops, and I’m feeling in the sort of mood where I don’t want to disappoint you, so here, to start with, have some more.

We particularly liked the views up the fjord as we crossed over it just to the north of the airport, getting a great look at our ship, Sky Princess, and also the Silverseas ship, Silver Whisper. The difference in sizes between the two ships, the low-lying town, then the flat-topped mountain range, all combined to form something incredibly pleasing to the eye. I understand that not everyone likes the look of cruise ships, particularly against nature’s backdrops, but the important thing to remember here is that this site and its owner does, so tough titties.

Akureyri Botanical Garden opened to the public in 1912 following the founding of a park association a couple of years earlier and the granting of some land for use. Located towards the southern end of the long Eyjafjörður, the area is protected from the worst extremes of weather and temperature, and it therefore provides a good microclimate in which to grow not just local flora typical of the latitude just outside the Arctic Circle, but also more temperate varieties and mountain varieties of plant-life too. Of the approximately seven thousand types of plants grown in the garden, the overwhelming majority – around six thousand, six hundred – are not native species.

Should you wish to visit Akureyri Botanical Garden, then it’s open and free to enter from June until the end of September. It’s not a long walk from the centre of town, but it will involve a little bit of an uphill stroll towards the end as the garden is in an elevated position which does provide for a few nice views outside its boundaries.

Our visit to the garden was unsupervised but we were given some guidance about the best route to take as well as the time to meet back at the bus. There were some groans as this information was imparted because we weren’t given very long to explore at all. We accept that if you’re on a tour then you can’t please everyone – some people may have had no interest at all in the botanical garden, for instance, and considered what time we had there excessive – but with our ship not due to leave for several hours this felt like too short a period for no good reason. In fact, had we properly realised how close the town was we might have asked to make our own way back on foot, but you know how it is: first time in a town in a foreign country and you don’t want to be that person who has to phone the captain and cry because you’re lost and you’ve heard there are trolls.

I can’t really tell you much about the flowers, bushes, shrubs, or trees in Akureyi Botanical Garden because when it comes to this part of nature I’m more a know-what-I-like person than a know-what-I’m-looking-at person. I know that I liked the flowers in the garden.

We met back at the bus at the time we’d been told to meet back at the bus, as did almost everyone else. Almost everyone else. Two women clearly agreed with the majority of people that they’d not been given nearly enough time to see what they wanted to see, but differed in that they reasoned the bus and everyone else would simply have to wait for them rather than giving any consideration to fellow tour passengers. Did they apologise as they boarded the bus nearly ten minutes late? Did they fuck.

In the next part of this cruise travelogue series I’ll cover some photos from around the waterfront area of Akureyri as we still had plenty of time after the excursion to take a walk around. But did we also find a pub in which to have a drink? That’s the question!

The first sculpture we encountered was a piece called Farið by Pétur Bjarnason. The name means Gone or Flight, and if you’re anything like us then you possibly assumed from its shape that it had something to do with fish or whales, although I’ve seen some people associate it with a horned helmet. Quite what anyone thinks it looks like is neither here nor there, though, as it’s actually to commemorate commercial aviation in Akureyri in 1937. Aircraft had flown to the area a little prior to that, but the venture was short-lived, ceased operations, and it was 1937 that an airline associated with the town was formed.

If you’ve read may articles on this site before or you’ve been unlucky enough to meet us then you might know that we love architecture, and one form we’re particularly fond of is brutalism. Happening upon the Hof Cultural Centre in Akureyri our eyes lit up. It’s easy to look at this piece of modernism in a couple of the photos below and picture it being constructed in the late 1960s or early 1970s, but it’s actually a twenty-first building, with work first starting on it in just 2006. Three hundred tons of basalt form the exterior of the building. Gorgeous.

Another piece of sculpture next in the form of a memorial to a boat named Súlan EA 300 (catchy name). There have been several boats of this name in this part of the world but the first of those sank in 1963 with the loss of five lives.

On our walk around the fjord shoreline we caught sight of Akureyri Church. It was easy to see a similarity in design between it and Iceland’s famous Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík and the reason for that was simply that they’re both austere, Lutheran churches, both dating from the late 1930s, and both designed by Guðjón Samúelsson.

From one piece of design in Akureyri that reminded us of something we’d previously seen in Reykjavík to another, and the thing that had caught our eyes a couple of times already during the day when our tour bus had first left for the excursion, then returned. This was Sailing, unmistakably a sailing vessel, and clearly in the same style as the Sun Voyager in the capital. Yet again, the simple explanation was a shared creator, this time being Jón Gunnar Árnason. It made for a lovely and appropriate sight with Sky Princess in the distance.

Our cultural wander in Akureyri came to an end and we wandered back into town to find a bar in which to spend some money locally. It’s perfectly fine – desirable even – to sneer at those who travel but don’t spend when they get there. I strongly encourage it. On the walk along the fjord we spotted a traffic light with heart-shaped red lights. Cute.

We ended up at R5 to try some of the craft beers on offer. Absolutely lovely stuff. If you like cocktails then they do those too, and I’ve got some of the drinks menus shared in the pictures below in case you’re interested in knowing just how much money that would cost you were you to hop in a time machine and travel back to the summer of 2022 to join us for a drink.

And that brought our time ashore in Akureyri to a close with a short stroll all that was needed to take us back to the cruise ship.

In our cabin we had certificates waiting for us as our approach over the top of Iceland the night before had meant we’d technically crossed the Arctic Circle. We’d like to do that properly on a more northern cruise at some point but it was nice to tick something else off the list of travel achievements.

Some freshening up, some ordering of drinks to the room, and some watching the sail away of Sky Princess up the Eyjafjörður and towards the open sea occupied us for the early part of the evening aboard the ship. It may be one of Iceland’s longest fjords but it really can’t compete with those of Norway. Still enchantingly beautiful, though, and a great experience to glide past on a cruise ship.

For dinner this evening we chose to eat at Alfredo’s, the premium pizza place on a Princess Cruises ship which, at the time, was complimentary. That’s no longer the case, and that’s both a shame and a strange decision, even if the reasoning for it – money – makes sense for the business. The food there is good, but is it that much better than the free pizza on the top deck or free food elsewhere? Not in our opinion. And if that opinion is shared by enough people then it’s going to be interesting to see what they do with the large space given over to the restaurant area on these Royal-class ships if they never get full any longer.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll reach another new Icelandic town for us, Ísafjörður, and we’ll discover some absolutely brilliant museums and a fantastic brewery too.