It’s story time.

Clive Clothear approached the obvious local standing by the frigid water’s edge. “Hey there, buddy!” he said cheerfully.

“My name is not Buddy,” replied the sour-faced man feeding the last of the fishing net through his calloused hands, checking for signs of fraying. “I am Sigurdur Jon Egilsson, although our surnames are patronymic so…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about the patronimmy whatsit. Been told it enough on this trip. Seems like everyone in Iceland wants to mention it. Anyway, pal, I’m making a map so can you tell me the name of that over there?”

Sigurdur took a breath, held it for a second, calmed himself, then looked where he thought the American was pointing. “That is a fjord, duh! I thought everyone knew this!”

“Isafjordur. Got it. Only you’ve probably got some funny letters and everything. I’ll make some changes later. Cheers, chum. Onto the next town.”

Sigurdur watched Clive leave and only slowly did realisation come to the Icelandic man’s mind. Town? he thought. Oh no. He stepped to where the American had been standing and looking along the fjord to the small grouping of buildings. He had wanted the name of the town.

“The people of Ísatownnotafjörður are not going to be happy about this,” he told himself quietly.

We had arrived in Ísafjörður, the second port in Iceland on our Sky Princess 2022 Norway and Iceland cruise.

Now, you might think with all the travelling that we do, that we do a lot of research into the places we’re going to visit. We generally don’t. Given that we often will only be in places for a short time we will most frequently look to see what are the popular things to do in a given location, or we’ll look for obscure alternatives to the popular things just to be different, or we’ll look to see what excursions to nearby attractions there might be. And if there’s nothing else then we’ll check out where the pubs might be so that a walk around can include them. Ísafjörður offered us nothing obvious to see in the town, and it also offered nothing we really wanted to take an excursion for (we like a waterfall, for instance, but we’d seen two the day before in Goðafoss And Geitafoss), but it also seemed from the first look at the map to not even have a pub we could spot. More on this later, but to start with we resigned ourselves to simply hopping off the ship and having a bit of a walk for the views. It’s always nice to get ashore when on a cruise, and we always try to do so when it’s somewhere we’ve not been before.

Had we decided to spend the day on board Sky Princess instead of heading ashore, here’s what might have kept us entertained.

Since sail away from Ísafjörður wasn’t until late we knew we could have a bit of a lie-in, a late breakfast, enjoy some morning trivia, then think about visiting the town. This would also give the town a bit of a chance to wake up and open up anything of interest because opening hours, even in summer, aren’t something to simply make assumptions about in this part of the world.

Ísafjörður was a tender port so giving people on excursions a chance to head ashore first made sense, but we were Elite level loyalty with Princess Cruises at this point so it wouldn’t have made any difference. We simply headed down to our Elite boarding area and were immediately directed to jump ahead of anyone else waiting.

There’s no getting away from it: a cold, grey day does not paint Ísafjörður in the best light, but I can’t imagine a bright, warm, sunny day would have improved things much. It’s a very practical place, a very no-frills place, a very concrete place. I quite liked it.

We’d seen a couple of minor potential points of interest around the town in the form of a waterfall some way from it, but easily doable given the amount of time we had in port, and a viewing platform. Our not-really-a-plan-as-such was to head in the general direction of both and see if we wanted to pursue those options once we’d got a feel for the land and conditions.

The surprisingly yellow Lutheran church in Ísafjörður just past the more industrialised port area did not appear to be open to visitors, which was a shame for three reasons: firstly, it would have been nice to see the architecture inside as the exterior design had an air of the Sydney Opera House about it; secondly, there are apparently a lot of clay birds above the altar of the church; thirdly, it was bastardly cold. Ísafjörður’s climate is classified as tundra, and we had no reason to disbelieve it.

If you visit a port in a Nordic country then at some point you will find a statue to fishermen who’ve lost their lives at sea providing for the people on land. Ísafjörður is no exception.

Ísafjörður Culture House is the former hospital for the town. Following six years of dithering over council budgets, the building was eventually built and opened in 1925. At the time it was the most impressive hospital building in Iceland. These days it houses a library and several museum rooms. The lawn in front of the building housed a few interesting art sculptures and it was all bordered to the west by rather colourful houses.

We could see people heading towards what was the viewing platform, and for a while we followed them, but became increasingly aware that the ground was about to rise steeply. Clouds were descending and covering the tops of the ranges of hills, and with my wife not having the best track record with steep climbs anyway, we figured we might just give up on our plan to see either of the two potential sites of interest we’d originally identified.

Circling around with an intention to make our way back towards the tender boat area after a short side-trip to photograph some street art we’d spotted as we’d disembarked one earlier, we came upon Jónsgarður, a small park or garden on a slightly elevated area of the town. Small is the operative word here, but it was fairly nice for a compact spot of greenery and occasional wood carvings. The modernist building just below the garden, with a nice little water feature in front, and with views across the roundabout to the church, was the new hospital that replaced that which had occupied the culture house.

Some photos of the Skutulsfjörður fjord now as we shuffled along in the icy temperatures towards the industrial area of the town.

So, at this point we had figured that we’d seen all there was to see in Ísafjörður and we should simply catch the tender boat back to the ship, enjoy some luxury and relative warmth aboard, that sort of thing. But I pulled out my phone to look at the map again as we entered the roads of warehouses and concrete buildings and suddenly spotted a few museums that we’d not noticed before for some reason. And they were open. Perfect, we thought. Even if they’re terrible museums, it means we spend a little money locally and eat up some more time.

They were not terrible museums at all. In fact, following this trip, one of them just happens to be now rated our favourite museum in the world! You can read about that in the next part of this cruise travelogue series.

That’s a bold statement there, Mark. Some might even call it an unsupported opinion.

That’s all very true. It is just my opinion but there’s something very important about that to consider: my opinions are incredible. Everyone should aspire to share my opinions.

In the previous post in this cruise travelogue series covering our 2022 Sky Princess cruise to Norway and Iceland we’d reached the second Icelandic port on the itinerary and, thanks to some poor zooming in on maps and research to see what was around, had decided that all we could really do was take a walk around Ísafjörður to brave the cold and enjoy the views. Oh, but we should have zoomed in on those maps a bit more. It turns out that Ísafjörður has quite a few museums. Now, admittedly, the time of the year you visit and time of day you visit plays heavily into whether any of them are open, but if you like museums then Ísafjörður will not actually disappoint you, and in one particular case, if you trust my opinion – like you should – then it will positively thrill you.

Our intention at the conclusion of wandering around Ísafjörður was to simply head back towards where the tender boats would take us to the ship with a small diversion towards some street art we’d spotted earlier in the day. We more-or-less picked a random route to where we needed to be and that’s when we spotted a small place beside the road with a sign indicating it was a museum and open.

“I thought you said there wasn’t anything to do here,” my wife might have mentioned. I might have made a non-committal noise then said “Well, since we’re here, let’s pop in.”

We found ourselves in the Museum of Everyday Life. Beside the door there was art equipment set up and a link to an account of a local artist’s workflow. On a wall there was a sheepskin, some mushrooms, a recipe, rhubarb, and baking mix, along with some notes. It was all a bit weird and eclectic, but it wasn’t until we reached the books nailed to the wall, each with someone’s photo stuck inside plus a some description of the memory of that particular day by the photo’s owner that it started to come together. Moments in the lives of Icelanders to share. And then there was the shelving with different shoes on them and telephones you could pick up and listen to the owners of those talking about what those shoes meant to them (taking a foreign holiday, or working in the fields, or just being able to dress up one time, etc.)

In the second of just three rooms in this museum darkness was the overriding factor. This was the room in which to engage your other senses. Jars could be unscrewed and their contents sniffed for more memories of life; crayons, rusty screws, cold coffee, seaweed, etc. In holes you could stick your hands in and feel socks or wool or other objects. Just, basically, things that evoked feelings of being at school or being at work or being at home; something we all have and can share, but which are also unique to us.

The final room showed three short films on loop. Photos or films were accompanied by people connected to them talking about seeing the Northern Lights, or being in the kitchen with their mother, or winter time and the fjord water freezing over. Captivating. You could hear the emotions of the people recounting the simplest of things and live it with them.

So that’s it. Three small rooms. No precious works of art, but precious memories shared. It was enchanting. The Ísafjörður Museum of Everyday Life was enthralling. It’s our most favourite museum we’ve ever been to, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

* We have since learnt that this museum has closed permanently. We were immensely pleased to have visited when we did and hope that the future permits it or something similar to reappear in Iceland.

After we left, thoroughly pleased with our lucky discovery, we decided to pay a bit more attention to the map, discovering several other museums in this part of the town, and another was very close by so a couple of minutes later we stepped into the Nonsense Museum. I’m very happy that we did so too as within nine months of our visit this museum would close permanently, and that’s a shame as we enjoyed this building a lot.

As its name might suggest, the museum housed nonsense. In effect, it housed collections of collections. As we walked around the two floors of exhibits there was everything on show from alcohol miniatures to airline memorabilia to perfume sample bottles to packs of sugar cubes to police headgear. You can see the sorts of things in the photos below. Like the Museum of Everyday Life it showed off something of human nature when thinking about the sorts of people who would collect these sorts of things. We, ourselves, pick up shot glasses and bookmarks when we travel so there was a connection to us in this. Again, a shame that the museum has now closed.

We decided that we would head towards the little bit of street art we’d seen at this point. The map also indicated another museum was in the vicinity but also a brewery.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll finish our time in Ísafjörður with a visit to either a final museum or a brewery. Knowing what you do about us, assuming you know anything at all, will you be able to guess which one ends up absorbing a fair chunk of our time and money before we tender back to Sky Princess? Find out in Ísafjörður Street Art, Brewery, And Sail Away Aboard Sky Princess.

The street art of Ísafjörður is not going to win any international prizes. Or national ones. Or possibly even local ones. Somewhat basic would be an honest appraisal. Pretentious art critics might call them wonderfully naïve. For all we know, they might have been painted by six-year-old kids. Whatever. That’s not the point. The point is that they were there, they were bright, they were colourful, they were an expression of something, and that’s why we liked them.

An obvious subject for a photo was a large propeller on the pavement outside a building with red walls. We couldn’t see anything explaining its presence but it turns out that the building itself – imaginatively named The Red House – has some history behind it. Around the start of the twentieth century there was an increase in whaling operations in the region thanks mainly to Norwegian businesses, and processing areas were needed ashore. Buildings were constructed not far from the town. In the 1920s whaling fell out of favour and these buildings were converted to herring processing instead. By the early 1950s these had ceased operation until some locals decided to group together and form a new local fishing fleet for Ísafjörður. They had a building but not a convenient location for offloading catches, but were able to buy land from the government and dismantle then reconstruct their red building in the place it is today. It’s presently used as a storage facility.

And that brought us to the brewery. We hadn’t been certain it would be open but we could see as we approached that it was larger than we’d thought, definitely open, and definitely popular with fellow cruise passengers and possibly other tourists too. This was the Dokkan Brughús. A TV was showing sport which had attracted a lot of the people to the place, but it was the beer that caught our attention. Nine produced by the brewery itself, and three from the Ægir brewery in Reykjavík. All Icelandic beers!? Nine brewed on site!? We were in heaven!

We found a free table and ordered a couple of beers. Then a couple of flights. Then a couple more beers. Then bought some cans to take away with us. It was all that good. Any thought about going to see if another museum was open went out the window. We spent most of our time talking to another couple from the ship that we made room at our table for. We also got talking to the barman who turned out to be English, from Milton Keynes. The Dokkan brewhouse was absolutely fabulous.

Eventually, though, it got to that time when we needed to take the short walk to the dockside area and jump aboard one of the tender boats heading back to the cruise ship.

The fjord in which Ísafjörður is located is a wide one with not particularly high land either side of it so the sail away that evening wasn’t like one of those spectacular fjord cruises you will always experience in Norway, but the distant land under low cloud was still delightfully ominous and cold; a testament to this country and how far north we were, barely outside the Arctic Circle.

Ísafjörður had been a complete surprise. From starting the day with no real idea what to do we’d then spent hours in museums and a brewery, and they’d all been some of the best we’d ever visited. This was a cracking port stop on this cruise.

To conclude our time aboard Sky Princess in and around the port of Ísafjörður, pictures of dinner in the main dining room and some cocktails in the jazz club which, for some reason, was ridiculously loud that evening so we had to head off into the far corner to be able to hear ourselves speak.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll be visiting the last of the new towns in Iceland for us when Sky Princess docks at Grundarfjörður and we head off on a tour of the absolutely stunning landscapes of the Snæfellsnes peninsula.