Ice Ice Baby

the journey

Icelandic ponies, photo by Claire Nolan/Unsplash

Ice Ice Baby

The hottest place to go right now is somewhere very cold Stacy Gregg takes a tour of beauty in Iceland

As an author, it’s always perplexed me that Elizabeth

Knox wrote her best-selling novel The Vintner’s Luck without ever actually setting foot in France. I find this baffling for two reasons. Firstly, I simply cannot fathom the idea of writing a book set in a country that I haven’t been to. Secondly – duh – it’s a tax deductible business expense. Elizabeth, go stay in a chateau and drink some wine for Pete’s sake!

So far my books have taken me to Jordan, Spain, Italy and Russia. All of it, ahem-cough, for research purposes of course.

And now, Iceland. Because I like to set my novels somewhere deeply obscure where no one else would ever think of going.

“Oh Iceland!” My publisher at HarperCollins says when I stop by the London office for drinks. “How marvellous! Everyone is going there. It’s very hot right now.”

I blithely pretend that I’m being intentionally zeitgeisty rather than admitting that Iceland’s newfound popularity is a bit gutting. It is hot right now, it’s true. I blame the Americans – they’ve taken to offering a free stopover in Iceland with most European flights. And of course I blame Game of Thrones. Season seven was heavy on white walker scenes and all of those are shot in Iceland. Reykjavik is the new Hobbiton.

Most of the Game of Thrones scenes are shot at Iceland’s national park, Thingvellir, which is about an hour to the south of Reykjavik. But really the film crew could have saved themselves the trip and just set up their cameras on the side of the road as they left the airport. Even the immediate landscape in that one hour bus ride between Keflavik International and downtown Reykjavik is incredible and otherwordly, a snowy moonscape of spectacular nothingness.

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Claire Nolan/Unsplash

Author Stacy Gregg in Thingvellir national park; the local horses she came to ride, the city of Reykjavik

The nothingness stems from the fact that there are only 345,000 people in Iceland (if you don’t count the tourist hordes) and a third of them live in Reykjavik. Like, imagine the North Island being populated by only the people of Parnell and you get the idea of how much space there is left.

You’ll want to spend two days in Reykjavik. You don’t need any more than that as the city has the size and sprawl of Parnell too. You can walk your way around all the sights comfortably on your first day. Take your pick between the penis museum (the Icelandic Phallological Museum has the world’s largest display of the male animals’ thing) and the punk museum, browse yourself some very Spinal Tap-inspired Viking trinkets, buy a street-cred ski beanie at North 66, and you’re pretty much done. Food and drink is pricey here – even one of the famed Icelandic hotdogs and a soda will set you back over $20. But splash out! Have

dinner at the excellent Fish Company on Ingolfur Square where they serve up Icelandic seafood prepared in both traditional and international ways, with a good wine list. And since you are here for a good time, not a long time, go luxe with your digs.

Architecturally, Reykjavik is a strange blend of Tyrolean and Eastern Bloc, and most of the accommodation is underwhelming. So my extremely firm recommendation is that you stay at the Sandhotel. With the rooms built above Reykjavik’s yummiest artisanal bakery and chicest menswear retailer, the hotel is truly my perfect boutique hotel. Classic and understated, the rooms are spacious and indulgent in subtle ways with velvet chairs, plush beds, marble tubs and parquet floors. There’s a brilliant bistro downstairs that does real Icelandic cuisine with a modern twist (you want kimchi with that crowberry?) without playing into the tourist gambits of serving up puffins or fermented shark.

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the journey

Left: The boutique Sandhotel, Reykjavik. Above, walking below the Law Rock, Thingvellir, a UNESCO world heritage site. Top, and right, Hotel Ranga is popular for guests viewing the aurora borealis, and its globally-themed suites and the in-house polar bear, Hrammur

The Sandhotel bistro prices are good too and we spent our happiest hours in the city sitting on the moss green velvet banquettes by the windows watching the snow fall on the main street right outside, drinking the house speciality of white mulled wine and planning our itinerary.

You are really missing a trick if you plan a trip that doesn’t involve hiring a car and getting out of Reykjavik and into the countryside. The epic splendour of the landscape is really what Iceland is all about and you don’t have to go far to find it. Less than an hour and a half’s drive from downtown Reykjavik is Thingvellir – the national park that features as the main location in Game of Thrones. It also features as the main location in my new book, The Fire Stallion.

Standing on the Law Rock at Thingvellir, where Iceland’s Viking tribes met to hold what amounted to their AGM over a thousand years ago, I feel the pieces of the puzzle that is my book coming together.

From there we drive to the South, through dramatic mountains and heathered volcanic plains that rival our South Island’s West Coast in terms of epic grandeur, heading for the coast.

The Southern coast is the best place to see the Northern Lights if you are hunting them, and the very best place of all, according

to the guides, is the Hotel Ranga. And that’s where we’re heading now.

At the Hotel Ranga we kick back in one of the upstairs themed suites, The Japanese Room. It’s the one Kourtney Kardashian chose when she stayed for her birthday. She got kicked out of the hot tub during her stay for being noisy and bothering the other guests. We are much better behaved, and we brave the snow in our togs to leap in with glasses of wine, our faces going numb in the icy wind that blows in off the mountains nearby.

The upstairs suites are all themed to different countries and the next night we move to Antarctica. It has life-size emperor penguin figurines in the living room standing sentry at the bathtub, and full 360-degree picture windows so you can see the Northern Lights without leaving your bed. If you fancy something more Scandi-basic, the downstairs rooms are woody and chic.

In the hotel restaurant we dine on langoustines and reindeer carpaccio, and salmon caught from the river that runs outside our door. We take day trips to snow-mobile across volcanoes and go clambering down into the ice caves. And we ride horses of course, the famous Icelandic horse, the country’s own equine breed. They may look like adorable furballs on the ground, but when you climb onboard they are powerful, spirited and sure of

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hoof, with their distinctive extra gait, the tölt, a fast trot where the rider doesn’t rise from the saddle. Draconian biosecurity controls mean that the breed has remained isolated and pure blooded. These are literally the horses the Vikings rode, although it’s hard to imagine a strapping Viking onboard an Icelandic horse because size-wise they are not much bigger than a child’s pony. Being onboard at a mad tölt as we cross the endless tussock plains, I get a feel for how it must have been for my book’s Viking heroine, Brunhilda, a thousand years ago. And that, I guess, is the reason I came. p

Stacy Gregg was a guest of the Sandhotel, Reykjavik, sandhotel.is/en/forsida; and in southern Iceland, the Hotel Ranga, hotelranga.is Both properties are part of the “independently minded” Small Luxury Hotels group, slh.com

For more information on Icelandic horses and places to book a ride, visit horsesoficeland.is

Stacy Gregg is the internationally-published author of 22 books for 8-12 year olds, all of them about horses and many recognised with awards. A former fashion journalist, she lives in Parnell and shares an Arabian horse, the impossibly handsome Cam, with her 18-year-old daughter, Isadora.