Sea days are days to rest and recuperate and watch the blue water rolling past under blue skies.

Usually.

This particular sea day on Sky Princess started with a low, long, familiar sound.

“Was that you?” I asked, risking becoming the subject matter of an episode of Cruise Ship Killers for the sake of a poor and obvious joke.

Fog horns! That meant fog! Quiver in fear at our deduction skills! We know the sound of fog horns well as we live just ten minutes on foot from a port. We’ve experienced fog a few times on cruise ships in the past, too, with notably impressive memories of a foggy Suez Canal and on a red, glowing Scarlet Lady among others, but nothing like the duration we were about to encounter.

Wanting to give our cabin steward plenty of time to clean our room, we headed out for a walk on the open deck after breakfast. The Sky Princess infinity pool took on another feel entirely when looking out into the white, featureless void. For a brief moment it was possible to imagine this was a cruise in a universe where Olbers’s Paradox didn’t exist. Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking that too.

It was mostly devoid of people out on top of Sky Princess. The all-encompassing fog had dropped the air temperature down very noticeably, especially when compared to the warmth of the day before in Norway. One person who was out, however, was one of the ship’s photographers. We’d already encountered him a few times on this cruise, always asking us if we wanted to pose for pictures, us always smiling and replying no, me always pointing to my own camera. On this day, though, I got him to pose for a picture for me instead. And then we performed a quick draw shot of each other. Because we’re adults, that’s why. It was fun, and it wouldn’t be the only time we’d do this, also drawing against each other ashore much to the puzzlement of other passengers and ship’s photographers around when in Iceland. Again, fun. These sorts of interactions with crew are always welcome.

Sky Princess was like a ghost ship, doomed to sail some fog bank that awaited ships passing too close and sending them to the watery grave where all its own missing passengers were assumed to be. Another reason for the lack of people outside was the fog horn itself. We hadn’t realised until we decided upon our circuit of the top deck that it would be quite so deafening. We tried timing the gap between blasts in order to prepare ourselves for the next thunderous honk but spent a good portion of our morning walk yelling “Fuck me!” nevertheless. Probably a good thing we were not in earshot of other cruisers, to be fair.

At least we could see some sea from our balcony. This was the Norwegian Sea and not the North Sea as we’d initially assumed. Sea boundaries are a bit arbitrary, though, and, while seas sometimes feel like they have personalities, you are very unlikely to offend them by calling them by the wrong name.

There’s not a lot else to report about this foggy sea day on Sky Princess. It was a day of reading and eating and drinking and taking part in trivia quizzes. We snacked for the most part, and even our dinner ended up being bits and pieces from the International Café because we weren’t that hungry by the time evening rolled around. In addition, it was a formal night and we didn’t feel like dressing up too much (not that anyone really cares about that on Princess, thankfully). We won the very last of the quizzes – an 80s music one – and snatched up some of that Ship Champagne (spelling and pronunciation important).

The only point of contention was in the Princess Live! lounge. This cruise took part during raised COVID precautions aboard, which meant that you were expected to keep your mask on when moving around and in certain lounges, but not others (for reasons unknown). One where this was required, where announcements were made by hosts to ensure people complied, was Princess Live! We, of course, had no problem with this in principle, right up until the point they got everyone in the lounge to start a group singing contest between two halves of the venue. This ran counter to every precaution. Either enforce the mask rule and don’t do stupid singing events, or don’t enforce the rule and anything goes. This hypocritical approach to health precautions felt tokenistic and ultimately annoying. Whatever.

The view as we headed to bed was still that of thick fog, and the fog horns still blasted out every couple of minutes. An entire day of fog at sea!

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll arrive at the port of Akureyri, Iceland.

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.

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.

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.

Following on from our unexpected drinking session in Ísafjörður and sail away from that port in the evening, we found ourselves already at anchor in the last of the Icelandic ports we’d never visited before, Grundarfjörður, the next morning. As I’ve already mentioned, we would be taking an organised tour while at this port in Iceland but if you’re not the sort that takes trips or you’re thinking of cruising to Iceland with Princess Cruises and want to see what sort of things might distract you on the ship while everyone else is having their breath taken away by the landscapes, here’s the sort of things the ship laid on back in July, 2022.

The thing that the port of Grundarfjörður is probably most famous for is its nearby mountain, Kirkjufell. Its distinctive shape makes it one of the most photographed mountains in Iceland, but you’ll have to search online for pictures of Kirkjufell if you’re not familiar with it because, like the day before, some low cloud had accompanied our cruise ship around the Icelandic coastline and hidden the top from view. We hoped that by the time we returned to the ship later in the day we’d have better conditions for some better photographs.

Nevertheless, the views from the cruise ship were still lovely. Iceland looks incredible no matter what the weather is like.

We’d had to set our alarm for not long after six in the morning because of the duration of our cruise excursion. Breakfast done, we had a little time in our room and on our balcony, looking at the tender boats operating, before we shot off to meet up with our group for the day.

In the next post in this Sky Princess Norway and Iceland cruise travelogue series we’ll make the first stop of our day’s tour from Grundarfjörður when we visit the black sand beach at Djúpalónssandur.

Our first stop of the day was at Djúpalónssandur, famous for its black sand beach. Black sand is, of course, a shorter way of saying “little bits of volcanic rock spit out from the Earth’s core and deposited by the water” and upon exiting the bus and glancing roughly northwards from the car park above the beach we could see the source of all that volcanic rock. This was Snæfellsjökull, a 700,000-year-old, glacier-topped volcano, last active in the early parts of the first millennium. Not only gorgeous to look at, but also immortalised in the Jules Verne story Journey to the Centre of the Earth as the entrance towards the Earth’s centre.

We had a bit of a wait around the car park because there were toilets there and we were on a cruise ship excursion. Toilets are like Venus Flytraps for cruise ship tourists. They can’t help themselves. They’re compelled to venture inside the sticky surface and remain trapped in there for far longer than you’d think necessary before emerging outside somehow desperate for something with lots of caffeine in it so they can flush their body with more diuretic and repeat the process over and over again.

Eventually, though, our guide led us down the winding, occasionally steep, rocky, grassy, and always pretty Nautastígur path towards the beach.

Djúpalónssandur has a few points of interest, one of those being on the path down to the black sand. A natural hole had formed in one of the walls of dark rock and provided a lovely view back towards the volcano dominating the Snæfellsnes Peninsula skyline. The name of this rock formation is Gatklettur in case you’re wondering whether it had one. Of course it had one.

At the bottom of the path a small lagoon had formed and offered photographers a nice place for reflection. The beach had several lagoons and it’s from them that the name Djúpalónssandur derives and it also explains the name of the path, which translates to Path of the Bulls, and refers to the act of walking cattle down to the lagoon to drink. Drinking the water yourself is not recommended. Fresh water may sit on the surface but it’s by no means guaranteed that you won’t simply get a mouthful of Icelandic sea water instead. I didn’t test this to find out, but if you’re feeling adventurous then fine, go ahead.

Djúpalónssandur’s probably most famous attraction, if you want to call it that, is the rusted remnants of the steam-powered fishing trawler Epine GY7. This British vessel was caught in a blizzard in 1948 and wrecked. Locals managed to get a line to the boat and saved four while one other swam ashore in the freezing conditions and survived, but fourteen lost their lives.

We had some free time to look around and it had been my intention to walk down to the shoreline as many others were doing, but to be honest here, it was all a bit tiring and we didn’t really have enough time to fully explore and do the place complete justice. One thing about the black sand on Djúpalónssandur Black Sand Beach is it’s incredibly giving. That compactness you might find with finer sand isn’t there and the effect is more like putting your hand in a box of marbles rather than laying your hand on dirt. After traipsing across the surface for a few minutes and realising you’re only three metres away from where you started (a slight exaggeration) you might also feel inclined to turn around and head back onto more solid ground.

There is far more to see at Djúpalónssandur than shown here. Cruise excursions, like cruises themselves, are tasters for places, often never quite satisfying enough in their own rights, but rather encouraging you to come back for more if you like what you see. If you like lagoons and volcanic landscapes and morbid history and looking at tall rock formations and thinking “I bet the locals claim that’s a troll turned to stone when the sun hit it” (it will be) then it’s definitely worth a visit if you’re on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula.

In the next part of this cruise travelogue series we’ll continue our drive around the Snæfellsnes Peninsula and make a photo stop near the Malarrif Lighthouse.