I find myself in Iceland (strangely) for a week-long company conference for a company I technically don't work for yet. That is a strange situation but I don't generally turn down reimbursed trips to Iceland, so here I am. I have collected a number of pictures that, in my view, are worth sharing.

We are staying at Klængshóll, which is near the (tiny) town of Akureyri. This is a 6 hour drive from the Reykjavik airport. A map of the region it's in (the Troll Peninsula) is below:

Below are worthwhile pictures. zeroth update; first update; second update; third update; fourth and final update

Obligatory gas station sales inspection. The exchange rate means this movie is roughly $36. (It better be good!)


And also a $45 pocket umbrella. (Was this the tourist trap gas station? But it wasn't right outside the airport.)


We drove for six hours along the ring road (the road that circles Iceland). Mostly it was very sparsely populated and looked like this.


Our lunch restaurant advertised their Big Green Egg expertise. I guess these are not that common here since they need to be imported. (Also, the hamburgers---the cheapest thing on the menu---started at $25! The cost of living here is expensive I suppose.)


Most of the scenery looked like this. No trees, grassy hills, fog rolling through the valleys, impossibly beautiful.


At some points, the clouds started to clear a little.


Finally after some driving (several km down a dirt road) we arrived at our lodge, which is quite truly in the middle of nowhere. Here is the view looking one way.


These are the cabins we are staying in. Apparently this place is an ancient sheep farm that has been continually inhabited since 850 AD.


The lodge is in a valley with large mountains on either side.


It was immediately clear that I needed to walk directly up the mountain and ascend into the clouds. I began by simply walking upwards (after equipping rain pants, waterproof boots, and gaiters).


This is all just runoff meltwater from glaciers up above in the clouds.


Since the ground is so wet, it was hard to know exactly how to step. Typically my feet would sink in to the ground a bit. Here's a shitty two-frame example. In some places it would sink much more.


The mountain is much taller (I am not sure how tall since I have not seen the top yet); this is only what has come down from up above the clouds.


(This is a video. Click to watch.) This shows the flow of the water down the mountain. This is all snowmelt (and maybe there is a little rainwater but not significant), so it's crazy to think about how large the glaciers must be up there.


As I climbed, I had some observers from afar. I was a bit concerned that they might be hostile but they seemed to be content just watching.


Looking back down, I got pretty high up pretty quickly.


Getting closer to the clouds...


More observers, closer this time. I was a little alarmed (who would hear me die alone on the mountain when I've just met my new coworkers? Let's think through how awkward it would be to have to ask my new CEO, hey, do you mind giving me a ride to the nearest hospital because I just ran off to go up a mountain alone?). But they seemed intent on only watching.


This is all I had time to do. By this point I was definitely in the cloud. I was high enough up that the plants had gotten smaller and I could see barren mountain ahead. But I was out of time and had to turn around.


(This is a video: click to watch.) Here's the flow of the water down the mountains. I wish I had time to keep going further. Maybe tomorrow...


Turning around I saw that the clouds had cleared enough to see the mountains on the other side of the ridge.


As I descended out of the clouds, they cleared a little and I was able to get a good view of the valley below.

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The next day, the clouds cleared somewhat and you can see the route that I took up the river. I believe I went significantly past the top of what we can see here, but I am not sure...


At some point, I set up a chair here and wrote some code. I like to set my desktop background to be some nice pictures of mountains or something, but I would say that overall this was an improvement.


Here's an attempt at capturing a panorama from the middle of our lodge. There are mountains in every direction.


This is the inside of one of the cabins. Each cabin has two rooms, each with two floors. This is the lower floor.


Steep stairs lead to the upstairs loft...


...where my bed is. I keep hitting my head on the ceiling (although it is tall enough to stand in the middle).


This is the view out the window.


The following morning, it was finally clear and I could see all the way up the river that I walked up. I would say "the sun comes up over that mountain" but, the sun doesn't really go down...


Each day we are sitting in this conference room. It's kind of funny: we came all the way to Iceland and we are here looking at slides on a screen instead of outside. (That said, we still have evenings for free time so it is not bad of course!)

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We took a company photo with startup t-shirts.


The next day, the clouds had cleared basically entirely, and as a group we embarked on a day hike in a different valley. It took me a long time looking at this to figure out which valley this was---it turns out, there are so many of these valleys it's hard to tell them apart.


We climbed a path towards a mountain lake. You can see the drainage from the lake here.


Our lodge hosts informed us that the water is perfectly safe to drink without filtration. Here, Nick samples lake water after confirming he is not bothered by the idea of sheep waste contamination. (I think he said he believed he expected the concentration to be sufficiently low that he didn't need to care.) I will ask him in a few days if he regrets his decision but so far he seems fine.


We all sat at the edge of the lake for a while. If you look closely you can even see that one person was clever enough to bring an extremely comfortable chair.


I think someone left this here to make a commercial for Toyota. ("Buy a Tundra. Be in Iceland."?)


We went out for dinner in the thriving metropolis of Dalvik that evening (population 1400, which makes it the 25th largest city in Iceland). They had fermented shark as a specialty. It smells so bad that they serve it to you in a closed container.


The brave soul who ordered the fermented shark was nice enough to share it with me. Here it is in my hand. It smells strongly like dried squid (but not really that bad), and doesn't really have any taste. I'd eat it again.


Here is, um, downtown Dalvik, I think. I was unable to find the club district.


Later, at 9:30pm, I set out on a hike to climb to the top of some mountains with some folks. Here's the hill that we climbed up.


The hike quickly afforded some nice views of waterfalls. I entered this hike under the belief that it would be 5 or 6 hours and only a handful of miles.


Once we ascended the first part of the hill, I found out what our target was: the faraway semi-snow-covered peak on the right side of the picture. It seemed clear it would only take 20 or 30 minutes to the snowfield. This was taken at 10:45pm.


The terrain was not flat; it was kind of like an upside-down egg carton. So it made navigation a little difficult.


30 minutes later we had made seemingly zero progress towards the snow field. But the terrain did get steeper and more rocky. We mostly held constant with our elevation, so it was like walking sideways along a hill. Lots of small runoff streams and rock fields to cross.


It seemed like in 40 minutes we'd made barely any progress towards the snowfield. I was sure that now it had to be only 20 minutes away.


By 11:30 the sun was starting to go "down"---you can see the last beams of light on top of the mountain. Surely we could still make it before the sun went down fully. Crossing many of these runoff creeks was dubious and I'm glad I had waterproof boots and gaiters. I'm not glad that I decided against bringing trekking poles.


Finally we entered the snow, but we were still far off my original anticipated schedule.


The snow melting exposed rocks and dirt which had not yet had enough time for anything to grow on it. It was very strange to walk upon.


The running water from melted snow will actually cause snowdrifts to melt out from the bottom, making them really bad places to step on.


Once we got to the main snow field, we were close to the top and I was extremely tired. This picture was taken at 12:30am---so you can see that it doesn't actually get dark, though the sun does barely dip below the horizon. This is looking back towards the valley we came up in.


Shortly after this (probably around 1), we got to the peak that we wanted to climb. However (and I am disappointed to say it) I definitely did not have the stamina to go on, and that snow looked too steep to safely navigate with my equipment. So, two of us went onwards, and I and another headed back down.


But not before taking a picture to document our expedition.


So, they continued upwards while we headed back down. When we finally made it back it was 4:15am---and I needed to be awake 3 hours later. I paid for it the next day. Overall we went roughly 11 miles and climbed ~3000-3300 vertical feet.


The two that continued to the top were handsomely rewarded for their efforts with this view that I did not see. I would say in retrospect that I would have done it if I knew I would have seen that, but I don't think my legs had it in them anyway. More summit pictures here.

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The following day was a complete write-off that I struggled through only with the help of copious amounts of caffeine. Then I slept for more than 10 hours and I was ready to observe interesting things again.




For dinner, we traveled north up the coast to Siglufj¨rður, the 26th largest city in Iceland with ~1200 residents.


The roads were very empty---long sweeping curves with cliffs on one side and mountains on the other.


Iceland is coated with tunnels because of the difficulty of navigating the landscape. To keep costs down (because tunneling is not cheap!) many of these are single-lane tunnels, which is a little bit harrowing! The way these work is that when traveling in one direction, you have to pull into small pulloffs (pictured here) when an oncoming car approaches, and in the other direction you have the right of way. Speeds are very low in Iceland (the limit was roughly 35-40mph in this tunnel) so it seems to work out okay.


After dinner we continued north to see the coast. You can see a small orange lighthouse here.


We traveled down the road to see the lighthouse.


The cliffs were steep and tall---that's probably 500 feet down to the water.


Like most Icelandic buildings, there is no shortage of land but the buildings are very small compared to what I am used to.


The lighthouse painters did not mask off the rocks when they painted.


Looking back inland from the lighthouse. The falling-apart van indicates to me I would get along well with whoever lives here... or works here... or both...


I'm a little sad it wasn't clear, but still you could see the next peninsula over very clearly. Also, there was literally nobody on these roads, so we escaped the hordes of tourists Iceland is known for. (Actually, we have escaped them this whole trip, which to me is great.)


Small farms and houses dot the landscape. But they are so infrequent that the map we are working with actually has each house labeled and named.


We found a road down to the shore and took it, thinking we would stand on a beach. But the beach was not very standable. Still I did manage to get my hands in the North Atlantic (expectedly, it was cold).


I guess we have to wait many more millions of years before geologic processes turn this into sand.


Our only road choice to get back if we did not want to backtrack was a very long gravel/dirt road over a pass. On the way there we saw a big lake.


Continuing onwards, we saw some snowfields, and walked to one and took a picture. (It wasn't as long a hike as previous days. In fact it took maybe 10 minutes. But celebration was still warranted, because, hey, why not celebrate while in Iceland?)


A few days ago we took headshots and here is one strange photo I ended up with.

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The lodge had a handful of chickens floating around. Here they are outside the sauna that I regrettably never went in.


I spent the afternoon discussing how to efficiently solve a certain class of problem with the people I will be working with. This was an exciting experience, especially so because what's written here is not incorrect. Usually when I sit down and write a lot of things on a paper, they are all incorrect. So the quality of the people I will be working with is top-notch and for this I am excited.


After this afternoon of math, I actually ended up needing to catch a flight to Reykjavik since I had not driven back with anyone. So we went to the Akureyri airport, which is by far the smallest airport I have ever been to.


The checkin counters at this airport don't open until 45 minutes before the flight. They ask for your name and hand you a printed-out boarding pass but don't check the ID.


Here's the gate area for the airport. I think it has two gates.


Today we'd be flying this small deHavilland Dash 8-400. You can imagine my excitement. When the flight boarded, they simply glanced at everyone's passport and made sure the name matched what was on the ticket. No security or anything.


This is not the smallest plane I've ever been on, but it certainly isn't large. Two seats on each side, 17 rows, giving a total of 68 passengers.


(This is a video; click the image to watch it.) The pre-flight safety discussion is largely the same, just with an Icelandic accent.


(This is a video; click the image to watch it.) I wanted to capture just how small this airport is, so I filmed the takeoff. You can see we go by the maintenance area with a hangar or two, then right as we lift off we go by the actual terminal itself with its tiny little control tower.


On the airplane they had a little "adventure diary" that they encouraged people to fill out with their stories. Here's the first one I encountered.


And here's another that I'm not sure I fully believe (or understand).


When we landed I got some dinner but didn't get a receipt. So I took this picture to prove that I actually did buy mozzarella sticks and a coke, so perhaps it will suffice. But I think it is a picture representative of Icelandic cuisine---which for the most part was really not all that exciting and different. Fried fish, grilled fish, lamb, sometimes chicken, prepared in ways that I'm used to. Fish and chips, mozzarella sticks, pizza variations. (Also in case you wondered the ring is on the wrong finger only because I guess my ring finger was very small this day.)


Back in Reykjavik, I was with someone who really wanted to go to the Blue Lagoon, which is close to the airport we'd be flying home from the next morning. Out on the far western peninsula of Iceland, very little grew---it's primarily small volcanic rocks with some moss on it. A very alien landscape.


Here's the Blue Lagoon. I'd actually never even heard of it before we went (I suppose I am ignorant). It's supposed to be one of the 30 wonders of the world. In any case, it's geothermally heated water with high silica content that gives it its strange sky-blue color, and it's warm enough to swim in. So it's been made into an expensive tourist attraction (pro tip: buy your tickets online, they are much cheaper. They also have wifi in the building so you could buy them online on the spot).


Since they only let so many people in per hour, we had some time to kill and went hiking on some paths around the area. You can see out here in this picture, very little moss grows, so it is just dark volcanic rock and silica blue water.


Walking further, we managed to find an area that was covered with moss like on our drive. I think in many places the rocks have a little white on them that is silica that's been deposited. But I am not sure of course. (Also, it was very misty this evening. It was probably 9:30pm at this point; still quite light.)


Here's another geothermal pool. There is a power plant around here and some warnings signs that the water may be far too hot to touch, but in this case we ignored the signs, touched the water anyway, and discovered that it was not really that hot at all.

I'm sad to say I didn't get any pictures while we were in the water. It seemed like it would be unwise to bring a phone in, even though a lot of people did.


Finally we got to our Airbnb near Keflavik airport around 1am. Even though this area is only about 100 miles further south than the lodge was, it got significantly darker here (though not completely). You can see that the streetlights are on. It was very surprising how my body reacted to even slightly more darkness: it felt like for the first time in a week I was ready to go to sleep instead of take a nap.


The last picture I have of my trip is the group I was with trying to put gas in the car. It was fairly challenging, seemingly, requiring the input of at least three highly trained people.

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I would say, overall, that Iceland is like no place I have ever been. It was an incredible week that I had and I feel really lucky to have been able to go (on someone else's dime even). If, for some reason, the opportunity ever arises for you to go, I'd suggest saying yes. (Well, as long as it's the summer. I can't imagine what it would be like in the winter when it's dark all the time.)