Hello! And welcome to the official edition of my traveling around southern Iceland foodblog. We just got home around midnight last night, so I'm a little tired/jetlagged but hopefully this will make some sense as I work on this over the next couple of days.
Iceland is otherworldly beautiful - the landscape constantly changes as you drive through it, from moss covered lava fields to hay fields (they just finished baling) to miles (kilometers?) of stark nothingness to moss covered mountains and snow covered peaks. Hopefully you'll get a good sense of this as you read along - I'm going to be adding some videos also that will help illustrate some things which pictures can't really do justice to.
One thing to note is that, contrary to most of our other trips to SE Asia, Iceland is exhorbitantly expensive - from fuel to food. I don't know how much is being affected by the war in Ukraine, but I am of the understanding that no matter what, it's always expensive there. For example, fuel prices averaged 345 Krona per liter, which at the current rate of exchange of about 130 Krona/US$, works out to $10.22 per gallon! Obviously this is not the best time for a driving vacation, but this was originally scheduled for July 2020 and we all know how that worked out. Meals in a simple cafe (kaffi) are expensive - a standard burger was typically over $17! I don't think food prices are affected by Ukraine so much as it seems as though just about all the animal proteins are grown locally, most being free range/grass fed - I read that Iceland is self sustainable with meat/dairy with no imports necessary. Vegetables (at least that I saw in the summer) usually came from local farms or a restaurant's own garden. We've tried to take photos of menus to give a sense of things.
One more interesting tidbit before I get on with the show is the use of English. It seemed that everyone I dealt with - from the gas station attendant to waiter to hotel staff to tour guide spoke better English than I did. As right now is super peak season, there were tons of tourists, many of them were surprisingly to me American. I don't think I've seen such a high proportion of American tourists in a foreign country I've visited, ever.
So, flying over the area in preparation for landing, you can see a good example of landscape right off the bat - huge tracts of nothing - or more specifically, undisturbed moss covered lava fields:
We landed around 9:30AM local time, which is 4 hours ahead of my standard Eastern Daylight Savings Time. The flight left late at night, and I worked a full day that day which means that by the time we picked up the rental car, I had been up for over 24 hours straight - the flight is so short (about 5 hours from NYC) that there's really no time to get any sleep. And since we had about an hour and a half drive to check into our first hotel, it makes this an absolute necessity:
Just driving away from the airport is gorgeous:
We checked into our hotel just around lunchtime and since we were exhausted and starving, we opted to have lunch there. The hotel's restaurant is really only open for breakfast (included with the room rate) and dinner but they will make you a "box lunch" upon request... Since it was beautiful out - about 55F and sunny, we decided to have it on our patio.
Upon closer inspection, it looks like this:
A simple ham and cheese sandwich with mayo and cucumber with a slice of some kind of tart (which we'll also see at breakfast) and some fruit. Interestingly enough, the apple was from France.
After we rested a bit, we decided to do a bit of sightseeing. This hotel has good proximity for the Golden Circle sights - which are commonly seen on day trips for people staying in Reykjavik. I had allotted about a day and a half for these since one of the days will be spent doing a big hike in the interior highlands a couple hours away.
The first stop - Kerid crater formed by volcanic activity and is basically filled with groundwater - the level of the water in the crater rises and falls with ground water levels but never actually drains.
You can take the stairs down to the bottom:
From the bottom:
After viewing the crater, we went to dinner in Selfoss, which is the major town near our hotel. Outside of these types of towns, there is literally nothing except landscape.
I had done a bunch of research before the trip, and found a few places in Selfoss that I had wanted to try - we'd only get to some of them though as well see later.
First dinner: Krisp
Overall, the food was really tasty here. We forgot to take photos of the menu, but prices were in the range of most other places we went to, which you'll see later on.
Local cod tempura - I was surprised to see chillies being used all over the place in Iceland - fresh chillies, chilli jam, pickled chillies... served breakfast to dinner!
Grilled local lamb (all Iceland lamb is free range) with roasted potatoes smothered in the same sauce as came with the tempura - like a citrus aioli. I don't know what cut of lamb they used - it was perfectly cooked, but you can see different muscle groups:
Local wolf fish on barley with some kind of fruit compote on top - to tell the truth, I don't remember it much but I was exhausted by that point. It was really tasty though.
