Iceland 2000

Arrival in Reykjavík

We flew from Stansted Airport in the late evening of the 14th July with Go for £120 each plus £20 for each bike, each way - you still get your full luggage allowance with this.

Saturday, 15th July, 2000:

We arrived at about 2am on the 15th (it was still light!) to be greeted by rain and a howling head wind. The airport buses were on strike too! So we set up camp near the airport and got some sleep.

The wind was just as strong when we woke, and we struggled with a tremendous cross-wind a few km down the road towards Reykjavík. It was 14 years ago since I had been to Iceland - on my first and only previous visit. One day on that trip I had hired a bicycle to cycle around Lake Mývatn and had experienced strong winds. So I had warned Peter the wind could be strong in Iceland. However, both of us were now wondering what we had let ourselves in for - surely not two weeks of this? We stopped at a police station and a friendly officer told us the local bus from Keflavík to Reykjavík was still running and directed us to the bus station. We had an hour to kill so we sat dripping wet, drinking coffee in a nearby café.

At the bus station we met two German cyclists from Köln whom we were to meet several times later on. We all loaded our identical-looking Ortlieb panniers into the bus's luggage compartment together with some of the bikes. The rest of the bikes went on the back rack of the bus. We never had a problem getting our bikes onto any bus, though you sometimes had to pay a little extra for the bikes.

So later that morning we arrived in a grey, windy & wet Reykjavík. After a brief stop by the impressive but bleak-looking cathedral, we sat in the youth hostel sheltering from the rain. After cycling to the bus station to find that buses didn't leave for Gullfoss on Saturday evenings, we returned and booked into the camp site next to the youth hostel (which was completely full).