On a couple of nights we dined at the restaurant next door. The first night’s meal was something specially made for the tourists – dried cod, cured shark, pickled herring, lamb testicles, lamb blood pudding, guillemot, foal, and minke whale, all washed down with Black Death schnapps – and it was… okay. Guillemot I would eat again. Minke whale I would not.

I didn’t have my proper camera on me when we went to the restaurant but we were quite amazed to see (considering we were in a bright parking lot next to the hotel and main road) the aurora bright in the sky above us. I managed to capture a shot on my phone which surprised even me.

As it was November it was cold enough to give everything a sheen of ice so we were quite careful on our first evening there but had a reasonable walk along part of the Icelandic shoreline before heading inland. We had no plans to visit anything at that time, just take in the lay of the land, make a note of anything interesting, and grab some shots of the varied architecture.

Water featured heavily in the town with rivers, a lake, and a reservoir in addition to the Atlantic coast.

We noticed a few pieces of art and sculpture and there was obviously some sort of street art scene going on in the area too.

On the final day we would discover Hellisgerdi Park and its abundance of artwork.

By the ocean’s edge I was quite taken with a piece of brutal architecture but I couldn’t work out what its function was.

A processed image of something that may have been art or may have been functional or may have been both.

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.

There was also a church in the park although we never did find out what its name was or the religion to which it was bound (although Lutheran would be my guess).

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.

It was incredibly windy during our visit, especially up on the viewing platform above the waterfall. Hoods were being whipped off if you turned the wrong way and just holding my phone up to try to record some video of Gullfoss (removed for now) from a good vantage point required two hands and me leaning hard against the railing for support.

Gullfoss is a waterfall along the Hvítá river in Iceland formed from a series of turns and drops into a canyon. While it had been intended at some point in the past to tap the waterfall for energy production it is now a protected, natural monument and open to visitors throughout the year. A wooden staircase allows everyone to descend and walk along the river then back up some the waterfall’s drops. Although it didn’t rain while we were in the canyon alongside Gullfoss the fierce wind often whipped the spray from the crashing water into us leaving us almost as wet anyway. Still, I managed to take some photos of the waterfall when I could.

A pseudo-HDR processed photo of Gullfoss emphasising the darkness of the day.

And I even managed a little bit more (removed) video of Gullfoss from a slightly less windswept position in the canyon. The short video shows the viewing platform on the cliff edge right at the end.

Iceland is incredibly bleak and our trip to Geysir was under heavy, grey skies but that doesn’t stop the landscape looking awe-inspiringly beautiful. When you add a hillside with steam rising against a cold temperature and wind and a fountain geyser called Strokkur erupting every few minutes you end up with some fabulous sights and wonderful memories.

You only needed to wander off for a couple of minutes to explore a few springs or check out the wide vistas visible from Geysir before you could turn around again and wait for Strokkur to send another jet of hot water tens of metres into the Icelandic sky.

Despite the size and obvious danger that boiling hot spring water possesses it was possible to get very close to the Strokkur geyser. This gave us a good opportunity to see how the surface of the water would periodically recede bubble up into a dome just before everything erupted with a wonderful whoosh. I was also able to position myself so that what little sunlight there was backlit the geyser; this gave me a chance to capture some of the blues in the water with one of my photographs.

Away from the spectacle of the geysers at Geysir that landscape of Iceland offered up some immense views of empty, nearly colourless land and distant mountain ranges that, like elsewhere in the country, made you feel both big and incredibly small at the same time.

The commentary on the bus ride to this destination was particularly good, explaining not only the history of the place (it was the location of Iceland’s first parliament to limit the power of the country’s chieftains) but also the fascinating geology. We stopped several times so that we could look down on gaps along the road where the Earth’s crust was splitting apart or where large variations in the surface level were located.

The bus eventually took us to Almannagjá, where the land simply seemed to suddenly step up tens of metres in the middle of nowhere. There was a path that could be walked to a tourism information point at the top of the canyon and we were offered the option of walking it to meet the bus there or staying on the bus. As you might guess, we walked. Many people stayed on the bus and the perfectly understandable reason for that along with the lack of photos from the bus was because of the torrential rain that was coming down at the time. It was without a doubt the most rain I’ve ever been drenched by in my life and the photographs of the walk up the canyon in Þingvellir below do not do the conditions any justice at all; the water was running off my coat like a waterfall and it was all I could do to keep my camera just dry enough with a cloth every now and then to shoot any pictures at all (the LCD took days to get the moisture out).