The Blue Lagoon

I spent my final day in Iceland at the famed Blue Lagoon. As I had read, it was both overly touristy, overly priced, yet still worth seeing. The water all around was a milky baby blue and looked rather surreal sitting in the lava fields.

I'm often asked if it was cheap to travel in Iceland. I thought it would have been since the entire country actually went bankrupt. However, while the currency fell in half, the prices doubled, which is of course terrible for the people living there and made it no cheaper to travel than it had ever been. The Blue Lagoon's prices had tripled in the three years since my Lonely Planet was published, and that's not even counting the bus ride out there.

Inside the manicured swimming area there were steam rooms, mud-floored pools, and fake steam vents where even warmer water bubbled forth. The mud here purportedly helps people's skin due to the high mineral content (or something), and there were stations where gobs of the chalky white mud waited to be applied.

After a couple hours I felt that I had soaked enough and headed towards the airport. My plan was to walk the 26 kilometers to the airport. The bus ticket to the lagoon included a shuttle to the airport, but it only ran twice a day, once half an hour after I arrived and once far too late for me to catch my flight the next day. It actually worked out well since I had all night with nothing to do anyway before my early morning flight and, as my fellow European Hobos know, the cheapest way to the airport is to walk.

I had some nice views of the sunset over the lava fields. Before it was fully dark a man pulled over and offered me a ride. I thought it was rude and thickheaded to refuse (though I almost did out of a stubborn desire to avoid taking the easy way) and he sped me on to Keflavik International. I then of course had all night in a shut down airport without free internet. I first walked a few kilometers to the actual town of Keflavik where I had one last Icelandic style seafood dinner. On my walk back a woman offered me a ride and seemed concerned for my safety walking along the narrow road in the dark so again I assented despite the fact that I would have that much more time to kill in the airport. An airport worker said there was no sleeping at the airport so I spent the whole time making plans for Britain and doing non-internet things on my computer. In the morning the airport began to show signs of life and I was able to sleep on the hop over to London.