4 Days in Reykjavik

In March 2020, me and Scott made the journey to Reykjavik, Iceland. Here's what we got up to...

We flew from Manchester to Reykjavik landing around mid afternoon, we caught a bus from the Airport to central Reykjavik. Scott seemed extremely fascninated by the fact there was so much snow everywhere.

We arrived at our hostel, and when I say this was the coolest hostel I have ever stayed in, I mean this place was literally like being in a spaceship in a Sci Movie movie. We stayed in a place called "The Galaxy Pod Hostel". As the name suggests, the rooms were essentially lots of bunks that looked like Space pods that you would find on a spaceship.

We headed out or a little walk to get a sense of the city, we saw the Harpa Concert hall by the river, walked past the Icelandic Voyager Sculpture, walking around the old harbour and breathing in the icy air.

In the morning, we headed over to take a look at Hallgrimskirkja's Church, we found a park that was actually an iced over lake in the heart of the cit although we were on edge as we walked across the lake as we weren't sure if one of us were going to step on a thin piece of ice and end up swimming. We continued to walk around the sea edge taking in the view of the mountains in the distance. We also went to the Ice Bar where you can have a drink and walk around and look at the ice sculptures.

One thing I reccomend anyone does when visiting Reykjavik is to book themselves onto a tour guide through Get Your Guide. They have a number oef tours that are definitely worth doing.

The two that we chose to do included a South Island Tour and the Secret lagoon and Golden Circle tour. These tours were full day tours that take you around some of the famous spots in Iceland.

The South Island tour, takes you to the south of Iceland to explore the beautiful landscapes along with its coastline where you can discover a variety of rivers, waterfalls (including Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss) , mountains, and glaciers. The waterfalls were especially remarkable as they were iced over and you could see and hear the water running inside of the ice. Just make sure when you're exploring through the ice that you don't smack your head or fall over like I did because you'll end up with a headache for the rest of the day. My favourite part on this tour was seeing the black sand beaches and discovering broken pieces of an old pirate ship and being taken over the highlands literally on top of the active volcanoes.

The second tour we chose to go on inlcuded a morning trip into the thermal springs, the only part I'd say wasn't enjoyable was walking outside in my swimming trunks where it was -2 degrees before getting into the pool. But after that it was like a nice hot bath.

The rest of the tour included seeing the Golden Circle watching the geothermal Geysirs in a snow storm, Gulfoss Waterfall, Volcanic craters at Lake Kerio. We couldn't do much walking on this tour due to the nature of the snow storm that hit whilst driving up the highlands and you could see how many of the other vechiles were sturggling. But at least we were all cosy in the mini van.

We found the best place in Reykjavik to have fresh fish and chips called Harry's Seafood Grill and Bar. Couldn't reccommend this enough, friendly staff and the food was top notch. Although the people on the table next to us weren't too happy as we had our food served before they had but you can't please every customer.

Overall a thoroughly enjoyable little trip even though I'm not a fan of the cold weather but it wasn't actually as bad as I thought it was going to be.