Herbiberous' Hood Dreams:
If seeing Egypt was my boyhood dream, then exploring Iceland is my manhood dream.
I got into Reykjavik at 6 a.m. Friday morning, after leaving Boston the previous night at 9:30. The flight was only four hours, but somehow the sun was coming up as we descended into Iceland. It was like we´d flown through some kind of invisible time distorters, like different zone-thingees or something, which pushed us ahead into the next day.
I didn´t sleep a wink -- and was actually asked by the guy sitting next to me to turn the music down (a little overzealous with headphones in my ears for the first time in three weeks) -- and got off the flight needing a toothbrush and a pillow. But that wasn´t going to happen.
Zombie-walking off the plane, I ran into a really cool chick from Germany, on her way home after living in Canada, and hitchhiked through the country for the past nine months, and ending up in a small town in Newfoundland, where she wound up becoming a local celebrity -- she could walk through town and wave to people, and they would all come up and talk to her because they never got tourists. In her week or two in Newfoundland, she said she didn´t pay for a ride, a meal or her eventual plane ticket to the states the whole time.
Get to the hostel and I can´t check in for hours. So no sleep for hours. Also, I find out that my debit card wont let me take out any money from the ATMs here, so I´m relying exclusively upon my VISA. (It´s Sunday morning and I still haven´t held one Icelandic Krona in my hand).
Anyways, I luckily walk past a bus heading to the Blue Lagoon, and figuring I´d rather wallow around in hot mineral water in the middle of a lava field than on a couch surrounded by laptop-enslaved hairy tourists, I jump aboard.
We drive off there and... oh my.
About 45 minutes out of Reykjavik, through this immense lava field that looks sort of like mint chocolate chip ice cream, the way the moss, with rock kicking out of it, sprawls out for miles, as far as you can see. The lava field, with the moss exploding like some oozing, out of control science experiment, like a gigantic tumbling sick green comforter, rolling and dipping and rising out to the horizon. The Oscar the Grouch, ninja turtle green is untouched and unspoiled even beside the road.
It´s through this foreign landscape that you walk after getting off the bus, down a high-walled pathway and into the building then the lagoon.
For those not familiar with the spot, it´s this gigantic thermal pool, almost like a small lake, filled with run-off water from a geothermal power station (so I´m told... and too lazy to look up.) If you know of my fondness for hot springs, then this really was a match made in heaven.
I stayed in the water for nearly 6 hours. By the end, my hands looked like they belonged to an old lady, crossed with a California raisin, who was very sick and had emphazima (I think that´s what it´s called... whatever my sister has. hahah!)
I lay there on my back floating, and look up at a jet overhead and for the first time in a long while, I think to myself I´d rather be here, where I am, than in that plane, heading off somewhere new.
Rain comes down. And then sun. And then rain again. Wind and then calm. The cold pulls steam off the lake so you can barely see three feet in front of you. The sun comes out and everything is clear and you can see the hills and bluffs on the horizon. The water is so full of minerals, you can´t see three inches below you. But blue. And there is this mucky white stuff that you put on your face that´s supposed to expoliate and cleanse the skin. So everyone is walking around looking like the Joker girls from the first Batman movie (you know what I´m talking about.) For my seedier friends, it was bukake day down there.
(Also, you are supposed to put conditioner in your hair. While the minerals are very good for your skin, they leave your hair dry and dull... 'Like a troll,' an Icelandic lady tells me.)
I made a friend from New York -- funny how I have to travel to Iceland to meet a New Yorker, after spending eight days there -- who was on her way home that afternoon and she convinced me to hit up the ´booo-faye´. I said, ´buffet?´
So we went to this swanky part of the facility where they were serving traditional Icelandic fare, which basically means fish, fish and more fish. And all raw.
You all know I´m no sushi lover, and the last time I touched a herring, I was stringing it on a downrigger on Great Slave Lake to catch some real fish, but there I was, half-dead from the pool, the other half dead from not sleeping, eating as much raw herring, salmon and mystery fish as I could stomach -- so obviously not too much. I grabbed a big scoopful of this mashed potato looking stuff, but put it to my lips and... fish. Also, I tried what I can only try to describe as a sort of mink whale eggs benny -- a piece of bacon wrapped around some cooked mink whale, in hollondaise sauce with a dip of caviar on top. It was probably the tastiest part of the buffet. That or the mystery meat soup. Or the bread with Icelandic butter. Or the skyr. No, definitely the skyr. More about that some other time.
On my way out of the restaurant, I walked right into a plate glass window, thinking it was a door. I was so tired, I wasn´t even pretending to be embarrassed.
I went right back into the pool, into the steam room, stood under the massaging waterfall and tried hard to leave, but each time I couldn´t. I couldn´t shake that I´d never float like that again in a place that looks like the moon.
Finally, with hands-a-shrivelled and smelling like a rotten egg, I heaved myself from the water and walked the shower off. Then there by my locker, was this crazy Chinese man who couldn´t get his locker open. He was butt-ass naked beside me, freaking me out, asking me how to open it, in frantic gestures of course, not language. A wrinkly, frustrated naked old man -- I believe this is what Seinfeld would call ´bad naked.´ I shrugged and showed him how it was supposed to work. But he hadn´t locked his properly, so now it wouldn´t open.
To make it worse, he had this growth on his shoulder, which I can best describe as like a testicle in apperance and as he hopped up and down or this way and that, his little shoulder ball would jiggle around.
I think that was probably the only thing that could have gotten me out of there.
