As a piece of expressionist architecture the church borrows a lot from brutalism in its use of materials and repetitive strutural pieces, all of which I love. The church looked great from a distance and it was wonderful to be able to walk around its exterior taking photos.

The interior of Hallgrímskirkja was austere, possibly because that’s the way Lutheran churches are (we’re not familiar with churches of the faith) and possibly because that’s part of the Icelandic culture. For all that it was still impressive in a minimalist way.

We paid a small fee and took an equally small elevator up the tower. This took us to roughly the level of the clock face and a set of steps allowed us up further to see views out across Reykjavík. As an obvious tourist point in the city it’s well worth a visit.

Our first stop was the most obvious landmark in Reykjavík, the Lutheran church Hallgrímskirkja. As we exited the impressive building we happened upon a wedding photo shoot taking place using the church as a backdrop. I made sure to take a few shots of the action as well.

After the church visit we walked the short distance down to the Reykjavík shoreline which provided some lovely views across the water to mountains around the Icelandic coast.

One of the features of the shoreline was the presence of a beautiful, stainless steel sculpture called The Sun Voyager. There were quite a few people hovering around, braving the bracing temperatures to take a photo or two and, unsurprisingly, I did the same. I also took a photo of an Icelandic man in front of the piece of art who drove up, hopped out of his car, and asked if I would. I’m nice like that.

Further along the water’s edge was the Harpa Concert Hall, an interesting piece of architecture that reminded me a little of the sand crawlers in Star Wars. We didn’t go in the building because there was a music festival taking place in Iceland in the week we were visiting and entrance was for ticket holders only.

We wandered around a little bit more after that taking more photos of Reykjavík’s streets and buildings as well as some of its street art while there was still light enough to do so before hunkering down in a few bars to grab some food and drink. Expensive, as you probably could guess with it being Iceland, but what we had was very good.

There’s a tradition when we’re flying out of the UK somewhere and that’s to have a drink in the airport before we take off. My wife is a fan of a Bloody Mary in these situations whereas I hunt down whatever’s closest to a darker ale especially if it’s one I’ve not tried before.

Breakfast eaten and Start of the Holiday Drink drunk we boarded the plane and were heading northwards for the few hours’ flight to Iceland soon after.

It’s not a great photo but we did like the air sickness bag provided by Wow Air.

We’d been keeping an eye on the Icelandic weather before we left so we knew that there had been occasional drops of snow in and around the areas of the country we’d be visiting for the few days there. In the main, though, the temperature was expected to be well below zero and subsequently too cold for it to snow much. It was lovely, therefore, to dip under the clouds on the approach to Keflavik airport and see the landscape looking white and frozen. There’s nothing quite like travelling and instantly thinking to yourself “I am somewhere very, very different from home.”

We had one issue in the airport on arrival in that we somehow managed to walk straight past where we needed to pick up our ticket for the bus transfer and ended up outside the building on the opposite side to where we needed to be. Eventually, though, we worked out what we needed to do, grabbed our tickets, boarded the bus, then were whisked off on the fairly short drive to the capital, Reykjavík.

On the way we were pleased to recognise Hafnarfjörður where we’d stayed during our previous visit to Iceland in 2015. We’d really enjoyed that stay but wanted something in the city rather than on its outskirts so this time we had chosen the CenterHotel Plaza located right on Ingólfur Square. Our room was spacious – perhaps bordering on the spartan but appropriate for the Icelandic aesthetic – and on the top floor of the hotel, and would have provided some lovely views over the buildings across the bay that formed the northern edge of Reykjavík to the mountains beyond if it wasn’t mid-afternoon with an already fast-fading light along with a chilly drizzle in the vicinity.

Our plans for this Friday evening in Reykjavík weren’t particularly exciting. We wanted to get something to drink, we wanted to get something to eat, and we wanted to just get our bearings ahead of a full day exploring to come. Probably the main road that any tourists to Iceland’s capital will wander along is Laugavegur – it’s off that road that you can find most of the shops and bars and things of likely interest to a first-time visitor – and with Ingólfur Square being at the western end of that road and a few minutes north of the large lake, Tjörnin, getting our bearings was pretty easy. We had the benefit of having been into the city on two occasions before so some things were instantly familiar too plus you can’t really get lost in Reykjavík anyway; it’s ridiculously small.

We didn’t wander very far from the hotel as we already had a place in mind to check out so after braving the bitter wind and unpleasantly persistent spitty rain for less than twenty minutes we quickly made for the Icelandic Craft Bar on Lækjargata. My wife was on a quest to have a cocktail in Iceland for some reason but I stuck with what I know and love: a local, red ale.

Of course, with this being Iceland those two drinks cost us a small fortune: somewhere just north of £20. Still, we’d known all about the country’s staggeringly high prices before we came and this was only mildly shocking.

We’d already spotted a number of places that could satisfy our food cravings, all of them very close to our hotel, and checked the map on the phone to pick one of them and a route. That’s when we noticed another place in the vicinity serving up local craft ales – the Skúli Craft Bar – so heading back past the Christmas decorations for the Yule Cat we made for the bar and exchanged money for alcohol once again.

We loved the glasses here and we had a decent talk with the barman who was happy to explain the various types of ale they had available.

After that it was time to get some food in us and the place we ended up choosing was the Sæta Svínið Gastropub, mere metres from the entrance to our hotel. We weren’t sure we would be able to eat in it at first as the place was absolutely rammed and standing room only but after asking a waitress about the possibility of dining we were led up the steep and narrow set of stairs to the first floor where in a nearly equally-rammed location we were seated at a small table and handed menus. Like several other people there we needed to use the torches on our phones to read the menu as it was stupidly dark but we picked some drinks and food, admired the star effect on the ceiling, then enjoyed everything that turned up.

The photos are about twice as bright as everything really was and there was a lot of guesswork as to what else I was eating with my Ling. Price-wise it was about par for the country, which is to say that we paid restaurant prices for slightly better than pub quality meals back home. That’s Iceland, though, and that’s what you’ve got to be prepared to do when you visit.

We finished the evening after the meal with a short walk to see if anything caught our eye but ultimately decided to simply head back to our hotel room to warm up and get a decent night’s sleep after about fifteen minutes of that chilly activity. A final, somewhat eerie sight of the night was this sculpture that wouldn’t have looked too out of place in an episode of Doctor Who.

Our plan for the Saturday was to hit cultural sights in Reykjavík and to take an aurora-spotting trip out on the water at night, all of which will be covered in the next post.

We decided to head towards the northern point of Reykjavík, Effersey, as a look at the map indicated that it would take us past a grouping of museums and we’re fond of a museum or two when we’re out and about travelling. Even though it was mid-morning the sky was dark with the sun barely creeping above the horizon. It was also windy and, of course, this was Iceland in December so it was extremely cold. The walk took us through some fairly industrial landscape but you’ll never find a terribly pleasing architectural style in this part of the world as practicality has to come first. Nevertheless, the views of the harbour area of the city and across the water to the snow-peaked mountains north were gorgeous.

One thing you will see a lot of in Iceland’s capital is street art. We’d had a good look at the street art in Reykjavík on our previous trip to the country and were pleased to see that even in the less tourist-inhabited areas of the city there was still plenty of really good quality work to see.

Reykjavík Maritime Museum

As we headed back from Effersey into the main area of Reykjavík we stopped in at the first of the museums we would visit during the day, the Maritime Museum. The museum has a coast guard vessel moored alongside it which can be visited at set times on guided tours during the day but we wouldn’t be around for those so just explored the museum on our own. The main features of the maritime museum were focused on the local fishing industry; indeed, the building in which the museum was located was formerly a fish factory. Following the main exhibition through the museum from room to room took us through artefacts from Iceland’s fishing history with explorations of the ocean, fishing vessels, and the fishing communities. There were a number of interactive elements too – we quite liked putting our hands in boxes to try to guess what was in them and taking broken plates and reconstructing them jigsaw-like – and the museum was a nice enough diversion (plus it was warm and dry) although it might not be that interesting if fishing isn’t something that particularly excites you.

Aurora Reykjavík

A very short walk from the maritime museum brought us to Aurora Reykjavík, an exhibition centre dedicated to the Northern Lights as you’ve probably been able to guess. It’s not the hugest exhibition in the world and you could probably walk through it all in five minutes but there are plenty of pretty photos of aurorae and there are some really interesting facts relating to the colours and patterns of aurora that you might be able to see in Iceland. With us having a nighttime boat trip out to see these for ourselves we found this very interesting indeed and we learnt a few things we hadn’t realised before. For example, we did know that when there’s suitably highly energtic particles flowing from the sun then aurorae happen all the time, day and night but, obviously, you can only see them at night because it’s dark. What we hadn’t realised was that the ones you see at night are from particle streams that have flowed past the Earth, curved around the magnetic fields, rebounded, then flowed back down the magnetic lines into the higher latitudes. That was fascinating to realise.

If you’re unsure how to take photos of aurorae then there are guides to how to do this and there’s even a dark booth where you can test your camera settings to see if you can take a picture of what’s inside. Finally, the centre also has a high definition cinema screen at the end of the exhibition which shows video of the Aurora Borealis from different locations around Iceland on a loop. This was a very enjoyable, very attractive, incredibly relaxing thing to sit and watch for about ten minutes.

Bryggjan Brugghús

We’d had another reason for picking the part of Reykjavík we’d wanted to start our Saturday’s wandering in and that was because we’d seen that the Bryggjan Brugghús was there, the first independent microbrewery and bistro in the country. We weren’t quite ready for any food at this point, having had a suitably large breakfast in the hotel that morning, but we couldn’t pass up the chance to try some very locally-produced ales. It’s what we do when we travel. The drinks were wonderful and the brewhouse was a very nice venue too. We didn’t do the beer tour because we wanted to make the most of our time in the city but that’s something we’d definitely consider when we return, as we surely will.

Reykjavík

The next two places we wanted to visit were across the eastern side of Reykjavík. We weren’t in any rush and Iceland’s capital isn’t very large, though, so walking was an easy choice for us. We headed back into the city and walked along the main drag, Laugavegur, towards the first of the two destinations we intended to visit.

The Icelandic Phallological Museum

One of Reykjavík’s most famous museums must surely be the Icelandic Phallological Museum, or as it’s more commonly described, the Penis Museum. In fact, we’d wanted to visit this museum when we’d come to Iceland before but had ended up missing it for some reason. This time we’d checked the map beforehand and realised how easy it was to find.

The museum houses penile specimens from nearly all of Iceland’s sea and land mammals plus examples from other mammals around the world and, bizarrely, some ones from the realms of fantasy too. It’s a place that’s worth visiting to say you’ve been there but it would be fair to say that all the exhibits are a little samey after a while and you get a look that spells danger from your wife after five minutes of saying “Mine’s bigger. Mine’s bigger. Mine’s bigger. That’s just wrong. Mine’s bigger.”

Reykjavík Art Museum

We’re generally appreciative of art so our final cultural destination for our day in Reykjavík was the modern art museum only about fifteen minutes away on foot south of where we were. We ended up walking past the road we’d intended to take to the museum’s entrance so approached the building from its south once we’d realised this but this meant we got to walk through Klambratún, a large park with some interesting art sculptures and play equipment. With the sun sinking in the western sky by this time there was some lovely light coming across the park area casting long shadows and reflecting golden warmth in the windows of the art museum.

The art museum was perhaps a little disappointing in what it contained but probably mostly because of the exhibits at the time we visited which just weren’t to our taste. That’s just a chance you take when you visit any art gallery. From an architectural perspective, though, we loved the brutalist design of the building itself and the cakes on offer in the building’s café looked very tempting indeed.

Food And Drink

By this time we were starting to get hungry and thirsty again so we decided to make our way back towards our hotel as it was very close to a number of dining establishments and some good places to get drinks too. We walked back through the centre of Reykjavík, detouring slightly so that we could pass by Hallgrímskirkja. We’d visited it before so didn’t go in this time and satisfied ourselves with a couple of shots as we headed back but you can read about our visit to Hallgrímskirkja in 2015 if you’d like to see inside it and the views from the top of the impressive landmark.

We dined just around the corner from our hotel then took a short stroll to the Skúli craft ale bar nearby that we’d enjoyed visiting on the night before. We didn’t want to eat or drink too much as we had one final activity planned for the night.

Reykjavík Northern Lights Boat Cruise

Part of the deal that saw us travel to Iceland included tickets for an Elding Northern Lights Cruise from Reykjavík Harbour. It had originally been scheduled for the day before but the weather had put a stop to that so we’d rescheduled the trip for the Saturday instead. With eating and drinking out of the way we stopped in our hotel room to start layering up then made our way down to the Elding office on Ægisgarður in the Old Harbour area. Tickets were shown and exchanged for admission slips then we were sent down the dockside to board the boat.

On board we were shown the red overalls we were invited to put on should we wish to. We decided not to bother but plenty of people did. After everyone was aboard and we’d been given a little bit of information from one of the guides the boat set out into the harbour. We elected to stay inside at the start as there didn’t seem to be much point heading outside into the cold when there was nothing to see but it wasn’t very long before we were told that there was an auroral band forming in the western sky. We headed topside and for the second visit to Iceland in a row we got to see the Northern Lights. We know plenty of people who’ve been multiple times and not seen them at all so consider ourselves very lucky. Of course, trying to take a photo on the phone on a boat that’s rocking on the water and in strong winds is not the easiest thing to do and doesn’t produce the best results but here’s what was captured anyway.

The aurora faded pretty quickly and there were only hints of more forming during our time out on the water. To the east of the city on the island of Videy the Imagine Peace Tower was throwing its beam of light into the night and provided the only other point of interest in the sky.

It was incredibly cold on the boat. I know, I know. It was December, it was night, it was Iceland, it’s what we were expecting. I was wearing two pairs of socks, long thermal leggings, jeans, a long-sleeved top, a hoodie, a double-layered coat, gloves, a woollen hat, and had the hood up on both the hoodie and the coat. It was absolutely bitter out there on the water and the main problems were with the toes and fingers and the hoods getting whipped off by the wind that was cutting across the harbour and battering the boat. For those parts that were coldest we don’t think that the overalls would have helped so my recommendation if you think about doing this cruise is invest in thermal socks and gloves.

We really enjoyed the experience on the boat and can now say that we’ve seen the Northern Lights from the land and the sea but if you’re mostly interested in photographing the aurora rather than simply seeing them then this isn’t the best way to go about it.

We’d originally planned to visit a bar after our boat tour but were so chilled to the bone by the end of it that we elected for a cup of tea in our hotel room instead. How dreadfully sensible of us. The next day, Sunday, would see us up early in order to take a tour of the southern coast of Iceland.

Gray Line tours depart from their main office to the north east of the capital city just across the water from the island of Videy. It is possible to make your own way there for the departure time but free pick-ups are provided around Reykjavík too using minibuses. Our pick-up was just a few minutes walk from our hotel at Bus Stop Number 1 – Ráðhúsið/City Hall. It’s worth noting if you’re looking at a map or arriving at the location that there are bus stops on both sides of the road but as far as we could tell – and certainly as far as we were concerned – tour buses were picking people up only from the southern side. Our excursion was due to start at 09:00 which meant pick-ups were commencing from 08:30 and when we arrived just before then there were a lot of people already waiting and trying to find somewhere that the wind wasn’t striking them quite so violently. We initially thought everyone was going on the same tour as us but it soon became apparent that there were at least a dozen different groups getting ready to explore the Icelandic landscape somewhere with different companies.

Of course, with this being Iceland in December it was dark at 08:30. And cold. Very, very cold.

Our minibus eventually turned up, our names were checked, we got aboard, were whisked across to the main office, transferred to the big bus, and very soon after 09:00 were on our way eastwards out of the city then south towards the coast. It was still dark but the sun was starting to create some lovely colours on the horizon.

Hvolsvöllur

The first stop was at the small town of Hvolsvöllur. This was strictly a toilet and refreshments break as there was very little else to see or do where we parked. But that’s a relative term when you’re talking about Iceland because the views are always spectacular in some way wherever you are, and since we neither required the use of the loo nor picking up anything to eat or drink, having sensibly done the latter at the shop near our hotel before we left, I snapped a few images of the Icelandic landscape while everyone else sunk some coffee and grabbed snacks.

Eyjafjallajökull

We passed Seljalandsfoss on our left hand side – this would be the last place we would visit during our return to Reykjavík later in the day – then made a stop by the roadside a while after, a photo opportunity to take pictures of Eyjafjallajökull. The almost unpronounceable Eyjafjallajökull is an ice cap which feeds several glaciers in the region. It’s far more famous, though, as being on top of the stratovolcano that erupted in 2010 and caused huge disruption to air travel around Iceland.

The long shadows cast by the sun slowly creeping into the sky were fabulous.

Skógafoss Waterfall

The next stop on our tour of southern Iceland was the first of the two waterfalls we would be visiting, Skógafoss. Its 60 metre drop makes it one of the largest waterfalls in Iceland and even if you’ve not visited it in person you might have still seen it anyway as it featured as a location in the movie Thor: The Dark World.

With the low, weak sun coming from the south our view of the waterfall and the huge amount of spray it was throwing up was accompanied by a rainbow. The waterfall area formed a small valley and the wind was bitterly cold as it thundered down it. Taking photos was a case of removing gloves for the briefest of seconds to take the picture then immediately replacing them and rubbing the fingers for warmth. That spray and the wind were the reasons we didn’t want to venture too close to Skógafoss although plenty of people did. If I hadn’t had my camera with me then I might have done so too. But when don’t I have my camera with me?

There are steps to the right side of Skógafoss that lead up to a viewing platform and form part of a walking route that heads as far back to the west as Eyjafjallajökull. Because of our tour duration limits we would only really have had time to climb to the top then come back down and with the light falling on the waterfall the way it was I decided we’d get better views from ground level. At a different time of the year or even day I might have made the ascent.

All that water cascading off Skógafoss has to go somewhere and it was into a river that flowed surprisingly slowly to the south of us. You can see just how cold it was from the lumps of ice floating downstream and the shallow edge closest to where we were was frozen over completely which encouraged some people to even walk on it and take photos.

In the second post covering this south coast of Iceland tour I’ll include the next two stops – the village of Vík and the black sand beach at Reynisfjara – and the third post will conclude this excellent Gray Line excursion with an unexpected stop at the Sólheimajökull glacier before our second waterfall of the day and the place we’d passed a little earlier, Seljalandsfoss.

My main camera was packed away in our carry-on luggage for the flight so the few photos taken on this cold morning in Reykjavík were on the phone and required very swift removal of gloves, composition, and snaps because of the weather conditions. The strong winds that had accompanied us on the previous three days had dropped completely but the Feels Like forecasts we had seen put the temperature at -12 degrees Celsius. That’s pretty chilly.

With money spent and no room to store anything else we might have considered splashing out cash on anyway we decided to head back towards where we’d need to meet our minibus a little earlier than we needed to. Reykjavík’s City Hall, or Ráðhúsið, is on the northern edge of a large lake called Tjörnin and I suggested it might be nice to take a walk around it in our last half hour or so in the Icelandic capital.

Before we’d left for our tour of the southern coast on the previous day we’d seen some other people trying to crack the ice that had formed on the pond at the entrance to City Hall. It was easy to see the appeal as we came back on the same place. Ice just looks like it wants you to break it.

The sun never climbs very high in the sky in Iceland in December but those late morning sunrises are spectacularly wonderful with the crisp, clear air. We began our anti-clockwise circumnavigation of Tjörnin enthralled by the warm-looking yet decidedly not warm-feeling sunshine glowing on the southeastern horizon and reflecting off the lake. The reflection was bright enough that despite what you might see from the photos and video below it wasn’t clear to us that Tjörnin was completely frozen over. We could see what we thought were patches of ice on its surface but it took until we got nearly halfway around and the sun was behind us that we realised the extent of just how cold the lake was and how far that ice had spread and how thick it was.

In the photo below you can see how the wind from the previous days had joined with the plummeting temperatures to create frozen sheets of ice then push them onto and over one another to form spiked waves. I’m reminded of a hairstyle I used to sport.

In the picture below it looks almost like a snapshot of the crest of a wave and that one side of the surface of Tjörnin is frozen while the other remains in liquid form but that’s an illusion. Both sides were frozen but the right-hand side had been disturbed enough by the wind and water motion at some point to have fragmented a little more with flakes of ice then piling up to form a natural dyke.

You can’t go very far in Iceland without stumbling upon an odd art sculpture and in the month before our visit to the country a new one had been installed in Tjörnin. In case you haven’t instantly grasped that this sculpture represents democracy (what is wrong with you?) and you’re wondering just what this pink, erect thing jutting out of the lake in the centre of Reykjavík is then in the artist Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir‘s own words when speaking to mbl.is:

A sausage, sitting like the Danish mermaid on a small bread bun out in the pond, erect and happy, a small marine sausage without arms, a strange being that doesn’t realise it’s own power. It’s also a bit creepy. […] It’s both a mermaid, usually female, but also a penis, because it’s difficult to make a sculpture of a sausage that doesn’t resemble a penis in some way. But I don’t think that’s bad.

As we completed our circuit of the lake – really only the top half of the lake as we didn’t have quite enough time to cross the road and complete the full loop – we found a gathering of birds. Over forty species of birds frequent Tjörnin but of the few that were present in this small area that had resisted freezing through a combination of shelter from the northerly wind and water feeding the lake via pipes the one that stood out was the Whooper swan which was there in large numbers. They are noisy buggers.

I grabbed one last shot of the Reykjavík sunrise over frozen lake Tjörnin before we found ourselves back at the bus pick-up point and huddled together for warmth until it turned up. A quick transfer to the main terminal followed by a painless run down to Keflavík airport and by late evening we were back home.

This concludes our second short break to Iceland. All of the posts relating to this visit can be found here – December 2018 – and the posts from our first trip to Iceland are here – November 2015. It’s a fabulous country with landscapes and seascapes and night skies and a general way of life that you will find yourself totally absorbed by, and if you’ve not been there before then you really need to. Just save up a little before you make the journey. No, more than that. Maybe double that amount.

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.

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.

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.