We said good-bye to Snæfellsnes peninsula and our favourite house by the sea, and started our journey to Reykjavik. We planned to visit a few places of the city on the first day, but due to the delay in delivery of our rental car we couldn’t visit any places.

We planned to visit places in the capital city properly. So, we started early and reached Reykjavik without stopping anywhere.

We parked our car near the famous Reykjavik church, Hallgrímskirkja and walked around to get the city feel. The church looked very tall and its architecture looked amazing. That looked like the tallest structure of the city.

The interiors also looked very nice and peaceful, loved the symmetry of the structure. There was an entry ticket to go to the top of the church for city views, but we didn’t take that.

From there, we walked up to the The Sun Voyager, located on the sea shore. It was constructed as an ode to the sun. It was designed to convey the promise of undiscovered territory, a dream of hope, progress and freedom. It was a very beautiful sculpture.

The sea beside the road had large stones in the border, to protect the city from high tides, which reminded me of Mumbai’s Marine Drive.

Then we walked up to Harpa concert hall located on the sea side. It is a conference centre in Reykjavík. The building features a distinctive colored glass facade inspired by the basalt landscape of Iceland, which looked very attractive. After witnessing the wonders of nature so far, today we were looking at the man-made wonders in Iceland, inspired by natural wonders 🙂

We walked across a shopping street in Reykjavík to do some souvenir shopping.

We found colorful buildings on our way with different art, which added beauty to the streets.

One interesting souvenir that we found was “Fresh Icelandic Mountain Air“. We need it very much in Delhi, but this tin would definitely be not sufficient :P. I wanted to buy this, but didn’t end up buying. The packing and the content written on it sounded very funny.

After some souvenir shopping, we drove to Perlan museum, which has the history about the geography of Iceland and also a replica of an ice cave.

We walked into the ice cave with the help of a guide, who explained to us how ice caves were formed and elaborated on different parts of ice cave etc. The replica ice cave is far more colder than the original ice cave, as it is maintained at sub-zero temperatures. So, it was seriously freezing cold and one cannot spend more than 15 mins inside.

The ice used for this ice cave is real and it has been brought from the Vatnajokull glacier. It didn’t look like a replica in any manner. It looked so real. I could understand the efforts that were taken to create this. As per our guide, Greenland has some of the largest ice caves and glaciers in the world.

 

Ice caves in glaciers should be explored only with the help of a guide and the guided tours were costly, so we didn’t go on the actual tour. It also takes one full day for the tour. This way, we got to experience an ice cave.

From the top of Perlan museum, we could see the city completely. This museum started recently and they plan to include geysir, northern lights, whale exhibition and many more in the future. There were a lot of real whale watching tours from Reykjavik and Akureyri both, which we couldn’t take.

There was a restaurant on the top floor of Perlan museum, which looked very attractive, offering city views.

From Perlan museum, we drove to Keflavik for our night stay. It was located at 10 mins distance from the airport. We chose that to catch our early morning flight back.

One last time, we went to a grocery store nearby and bought some chocolates. It felt sad to leave this place. Being there for more than 10 days made us feel like locals and we started feeling that this was our own country. But I felt happy and lucky to have visited all the places we wanted to and the weather had been kind throughout our trip. Thanking all the forces of nature in making our trip successful!