A week on the ice

Our new favourite place

Two weeks ago, my wife and I took our annual anniversary trip to Iceland. Last year, I wrote about our trip to Senegal, so I’m back again to write some more!

I’m taking a (little) break in this piece from the usual politics and security studies stuff. Plenty more of that coming, but I figured this would be a nice break (for me at least).

First of all, Iceland is the most beautiful country we have ever seen. No pictures we took could do it real justice. Mountains, glaciers, ice plateaus, volcanic craters, black sand beaches, and the Northern Lights. Often while driving we wouldn’t see another car or person for hours. My wife and I love cold, and massively preferred these empty, freezing glacial mountains to some hot and sweaty beach somewhere.

(Black Sand Beach near Vik, southern Iceland)

(Godafoss Falls, in eastern Iceland)

We drove for four days around the entire island, starting with Akureyri in the far north. Throughout the whole drive and in each of the places we stopped, there was something I found immensely calming about being so far away from just about everyone. I’ve always been a city guy, but just knowing how isolated we were was actually incredibly comforting. Sure we saw the occassional tourist (and even had to push a few of their cars out of ditches), but it was mostly just us, the ice, and the volcanoes. And we got to ride the Icelandic horses!

Before all this, we also spent two days in Reykjavik, an interesting city on its own. There are almost no foreign chains in the city, only the occassional bodega with a Costa Coffee machine. There are some Icelandic specific chains of shops, but all still primarily independently Icelandic.

I tried the fermented Greenlandic shark with brennevin (twice actually) and it was fine! Maybe my tolerance for that is just to high somehow…

There’s the rainbow painted on the ground on Skólavörðustígur street, which is much shorter than the picture shows below. At the end is the Dune/Warhammer-esque Hallgrimskirkja (Hallgrim’s Church), a symbol both of Icelandic identity but also the country’s just under the surface social conservatism that calls into question its reputation as an ideally socially progressive place.

(Skólavörðustígur Street)

(Reykjavik, near the Althing, their parliament)

Ok maybe a little about politics here. Iceland is unique in the world in that it is one of a few countries that do not have a military (others include Costa Rica and many Pacific Island states). And being in Reykjavik, near the Parliament and the Foreign Ministry, you notice it. There are no warships in the harbour, no military planes or helicopters over Keflavik airport, not a single ‘defence site’ on the entire drive around the island. There aren’t militarised police patrolling central Reykjavik. Its just not a factor in peoples’ lives. Coming from the uber-militarised U.S., and experiencing an increasingly militarised continental Europe first hand, it was a breath of fresh air.

True, Iceland is in NATO. But this has been controversial in the past, with anti-NATO riots in 1949, and as seen in the 1955 Icelandic novel The Atom Station (highly recommend). So, it has no military but is not neutral (the opposite of say, Ireland and Austria, that have militaries but are neutral). This alignment seems to be more of a bureaucratic matter of course than a more explicit pro-US alignment. Iceland has been a consistent supporter of Palestine at the UN, for example, and has been a regular site for arms control talks over the past decades (e.g., the Gorbachev-Reagan talks). It leads a lot of work on combatting climate change (an existential threat to them as an Arctic state) and is loathe to do more than the minimum in relation to NATO. Further, it has been strongly in support of Greenland amidst Trump’s threats.

Of course, nowhere is a paradise. There are trends of domestic abuse among Icelanders, threats towards women intimate relations, and the cost of living is immediately noticeable as high. Further, much of its continued development relies on migrant labour that is paid much less than Icelanders, most prominently from Poland.

Taken together though, this was perhaps my first time experiencing an explicitly non-militarist society, and it was refreshing.

(The Unknown Bureaucrat statue, nearby the Althing in Reykjavik)

To end all this, we absolutely loved Iceland and I think we will be going back much sooner rather than later. I need to try the shark a third time.