Arriving in Iceland

It is said the Bifrost, the bridge between heaven and earth, the gods and humankind, is usually invisible to the human eye. Only when rain and sun meet each other it is revealed in all its glory.

We spotted our first rainbow, as ignorant people call it, when slowly descending through the clouds towards this rugged and barren island in the North Atlantic Sea.

We had come here for 10 days of camping in the summer season. Despite all warnings received, little did we know about the heavy cold winds that a July day could bring. Renting a 4×4 with a rooftop tent to explore Europe’s most sparsely populated country had occurred to us as the perfect birthday gift for Lindi.

KuKu Campers was the company we rented a small Suzuki Jeep from. After our arrival, a shameful meal at Taco Bell and a night in a warm bed on the outskirts of Reykjavik we picked up the car and equipped ourselves with sleeping bags, blankets and a camping cooker. The next most important purchase of the day was the camping card that would allow us to sleep at dozens of campsites around the country.

After a short stop at the grocery store to fill our car with all essentials of a balanced diet, namely Heinz beans, pesto and bread (the most lavish lifestyle we had come to afford) we started our journey following a prepared google map pitted with small yellow stars. When talking to friends and colleagues at home we had gotten a long list of places to visit on our roadtrip. Little seemed to evolve around cultural sites and all around a vast and beautiful landscape that seemed to only miss one thing, trees! As we would come to learn later Iceland had been robbed of most of its trees with the building of ships and the expansion of grazing lands in previous centuries. So much so, that we got jokingly told any collection of more than three 1-meter high trees would definitely be a forest.

With all preparation done and a car that being 4×4 was allowed on all public roads our trip around the island had begun. Unable to ride on the Bifrost to Asgard we would soon discover that heaven and earth are close companions in this country so full of natural wonders.

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