Such a connection to water may help explain why Icelanders are quite simply in love with their swimming pools. There are 126 public pools in a nation of 290,000 people. To put that in perspective, New York City has 68 public swimming pools for its 8 million residents. Every Icelandic town, even the tiniest fishing village of a few hundred people, has a public swimming pool, and it's often the most prominent building in town, alongside the white Lutheran church, the Esso station and the fish factory.
As we traveled the 932-mile Ring Road around Iceland, we began to experience certain sundlaug similarities and differences. The bigger towns -- those with, say, 1,000 or more residents -- would boast an extensive sundlaug complex, complete with locker keys on ankle bands, lifeguards (all of whom sat behind glass fully dressed inside heated rooms), crowded saunas and steam baths, and often even water slides. Several of the pools had kiddie water slides in the shape of mushrooms. One, in the affluent suburb of Selfoss, had a water slide in the shape of a giant piece of cheese. These bigger pools were heavily monitored -- Hjalti was scolded for walking into the locker room with shoes on and then scolded again for sliding down a water slide head first.
Icelanders have ample opportunity for bathing in the country's many geothermal springs, lagoons and swimming pools.
(Silvia Otte)
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By contrast, as we drove east from the town of Stykkisholmur, we stopped at a spot on the map called Reykadalslaug. Hjalti's relatives used to always stop there when they drove down from their home in the remote West Fjords to Reykjavik. We drove many miles off the main road, past a huge sheep stockade and into a valley surrounded by mountains. In the middle of nowhere, next to a river, was a concrete pool full of warm water piped in from the ground. There were two small plywood changing stalls with a sign, in Icelandic and English, which read: "Danger. The pool can reach 80C (176F). You go in the pool at your own risk."
ON OUR FIRST DAY OF TRAVEL, near a farming settlement called Brun, our map showed a swimming pool that we couldn't find. So after several minutes of driving around in the early afternoon, we knocked on the door of a farmhouse.
An older woman named Erna answered the door, and when Hjalti asked about the pool, she told him, warily, in Icelandic, "That swimming pool was built for the farmers around here." When Hjalti explained our swim around Iceland, the woman looked at us as if we were crazy. But she went inside all the same, fished out a key, which was inexplicably attached to a Detroit Pistons gym bag, and pointed us down the gravel road.
We let ourselves inside the farmers' swimming pool -- a concrete-block building that looked like an army barracks. We washed thoroughly without our swimsuits and then swam a few laps. The tiny pool was surrounded by a six-foot corrugated-metal fence. We could see only one lamp that might illuminate the pool in the dark. "This looks like a prison," Hjalti said. "Can you imagine sitting here in the middle of winter, when it's dark all day?"
When we returned the key, Erna was making pancakes and invited us inside to eat. As we stepped in, Hjalti complimented her on the lovely glassed-in sunroom. "Do you get to sit out here a lot?" he asked.
Erna laughed. "I'm a farmer's wife," she said. "When would I get time to sit out here? Maybe on Christmas or Easter."
Erna laid out quite a spread. Besides pancakes, there were coffee, cakes, fried doughnuts called kleinur, a rye bread that had been baked underground by thermal heat, and cheese and fruit. Erna's husband, Petur, came in from the barn to join us. Erna's granddaughter Thora was visiting with her boyfriend and baby, and they all joined us at the table as well. Thora was a philosophy student at the University of Iceland. As we ate our pancakes, the conversation swerved toward gender studies and the German philosopher Kant. Hjalti and Erna also debated the usage of an obscure Icelandic word that meant "home."
THE SNOWSTORM BEGAN IN EARNEST on the second evening of the trip. As we fishtailed into Saudarkrokur in our first rental car -- a two-wheel drive Toyota -- Hjalti seemed a lot less confident. "I cannot believe they'd allow a tourist to rent a car like this in Iceland," he said. He was sufficiently spooked to call the rental car company to demand -- in his calm, quiet Icelandic way -- a new vehicle.
A guy from the rental car company drove all the way over from the bigger city of Akureyri, more than 60 miles away, to deliver us the new vehicle: a four-wheel-drive SUV with metal studs in the tires. This being Iceland, Hjalti knew the rental car guy. He was married to an old school friend of Hjalti's wife's.
When we awoke the next morning in Saudarkrokur, there was sunshine and driving snow at the same time. But it didn't matter -- we knew the first thing we were doing was going to the swimming pool.
We soaked outside in the 110-degree hot pots (what we in the United States call hot tubs) with a middle-aged man and woman, who sat in silence. Hjalti pointed out how strange it was for sun and snow at the same time.
"Well, the snow is good for the grass," said the man.
