By Tommy Nguyen
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, July 30, 2006; P01
Inside a smoky, jam-packed bar that was spilling music onto Laugavegur, Reykjavik's main drag, a roundtable of young Icelandic men sang at the top of their lungs, tipping over their pints when they tried to dance. It was 2 a.m. By that time I was imagining large-horned helmets on their heads. It was a silly thought, but when you're watching the tall, burly descendants of Vikings singing a mean backup chorus to Gwen Stefani, your mind has a way of taking the best picture possible.
Reykjavik is full of these lively weekend warriors, which has made Iceland in the last half-decade the most talked-about outpost of the partying free world. I'll end up talking about it myself: It's a great time. Though this particular pit stop had a bit of an "Animal House" vibe, just a few barhops ago the scene looked like Fashion Week in Manhattan. Another hop away and it felt like the old Seattle, with kids in black hoodies keeping warm and electrified in their world-class live-music scene.
I've always wanted to have a proper night out in Reykjavik, just to see what the fuss was about, and my friend Krista -- a twentysomething Californian who now edits a glossy lifestyle magazine here -- gave me the perfect opportunity to visit.
But here was an interesting problem: I was visiting a party capital -- and a friend who knew how to party -- at a time in my life when I wanted to tone it all down. I wanted to get healthy, get focused and finally redirect these aimless, last-call years of post-college denial. I didn't want to remember Iceland merely as a hangover in wool socks.
That's why the idea of a detox road trip came fairly quickly to me. Krista and I would defame ourselves on Friday night and then spend the rest of the weekend getting rid of the toxins by driving to some of Iceland's most beautiful and isolated wonders. After some research, our road map was traced in ink: First, we would take a tranquil coastal drive up to the Snaefellsnes peninsula and spend the night at an eco-hotel, then make the seven-hour trek to the interior hot springs of Landmannalaugar.
The timing of my visit felt right, too. I arrived in Iceland in August during the last weeks of its great summer hurrah, when its famous midnight sun slips beneath the arctic horizon around 10 p.m., just as Icelanders begin to slip a little deeper into their warm beds. (The daytime temperature had dropped into the mid- 40s when I was there.) It seemed the country was sobering up from its sleepless summer delirium just as I promised myself I'd clear up my blurry, bloodshot soul.
Speaking of which, the sun came back around 3 that morning just as we were queuing up for Sirkus, our last bar. Once inside, a smashed pint glass and a long bathroom line are the only things I can recall. By the way Krista and I were emptying our $11 pints (this is hands-down the most expensive city I've ever been to), I think we were secretly competing over who could out-drink the other.
Judging by Krista's hangover the next morning, it was clear that she'd managed to win and lose at the same time.
* * *
The road to Snaefellsnes peninsula, about two hours north of Reykjavik, lived up to its billing, from the dazzling blue inlets that bejeweled the sunlit coast to the small rivers threading through green mountains on their way to grazing sheep.
Krista eventually crawled out of the back seat and finally took on her co-pilot obligations by popping in the Heartless Bastards, Arcade Fire, Bjork, the Sleepy Jackson, Elliott Smith -- my usual road-trip sounds.
Earlier in the week I'd already tried to rejuvenate my body at the Blue Lagoon, about an hour's drive from Reykjavik. It's the Disneyland of Healthy Iceland tourism, where a man-made geothermal pond -- filled with dissolved minerals, silica and blue-green algae that give the steamy, 100-degree water an inviting milky-blue color -- is said to have dermatological benefits for its bathers.
More than 300,000 people visit the pool and spa facility each year. It's one of the few places where you'll see spiky-haired British punks, large German grandmothers and pale Japanese businessmen sharing a warm, relaxing moment together half-naked. Once they smeared on their mud masks (buckets of the silica mud were brought out by the spa staff every hour or so), everyone pretty much looked the same. It's a small world after all.
But in our detox research, Krista and I discovered an unusual swimming facility on Snaefellsnes that also claimed to have famous healing properties, though its pool and hot tub have the murky green color of untreated sewage. When we entered the grounds (which are occasionally open to the public during the summer), we found just a married couple -- August and Thora -- soaking in the hot tub, which Icelanders call a "hot pot." August tried to get us to go in.
"Does it feel weird being in that water?" Krista asked.
"You just close your eyes and enjoy it!" he said.
Krista and I dipped our hands in the pool, which seemed a lot slimier than the hot pot. Still, the unsightly substance somehow reminded me of how many Icelanders believe that eating putrefied cubes of shark meat, called hakarl , is a great way to cure a hangover. Perhaps Icelanders know that only through worldly repulsion can one acquire inner calm. Maybe this place, like rotten dead fish, was on to something.
"It's getting late. We need to check into our hotel," Krista said to the couple. "But maybe we'll be back tomorrow."
We got back to our car in a hurry; the arctic winds had whipped up in the last couple of hours, dragging in an armada of gray clouds from the sea.
"Are we really coming back?" I asked.
"No," she said without a break in her stride. "I'm not getting in there."
We drove on a winding cliff road that brought us beneath the massive ice cap of Snaefellsjoekull, the setting for Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth." On the other side, far below, I noticed a small patchwork of curvy manicured greenery straddling the coastline.
"That's pretty," I said. "Is that a golf course?"
"No," Krista said. "That's the town we're staying in."
I felt horrible driving up to an eco-hotel -- one that had just received an international award, in fact, for its dedication to environmentally sustainable tourism -- in a loaded SUV. But Krista said there were going to be a lot of bumpy unpaved roads on our drive to Landmannalaugar the next morning, so renting a SUV was essential. We parked our gas-guzzler some distance from the other cars.
* * *
Hotel Hellnar, on the southern coast of Snaefellsnes, had the cozy layout of a ski-lodge motel. The cheapest accommodation -- two twin beds in the space of a dorm room -- ran us about $200 a night. But we thought it was still worth it, if indeed the hotel was doing all it can for the planet. It was clear from our previous night of trashiness that Krista and I could not be trusted to do the same.
I did notice, especially at Hotel Hellnar, that the farther we were from Reykjavik, the older the other tourists were. The reason is pretty simple. The outdoor tourist activities one does outside the capital -- from summer whitewater rafting in Skagafjoerdur to dog-sledding near Langjoekull -- are expensive. And that's not adding up the full L.L. Bean ensembles that seem to be part of the lifestyle.
The healthier-looking folks at Hotel Hellnar were gearing up for a climb up Snaefellsjoekull the next day. We just wanted to ease out of our hangovers, and an ocean view would do just fine.
From the grassy 200-foot sea cliffs near the hotel, I was hoping to see some orcas. But as I looked out, the Earth's forces began their seductive, relentless sweep across the senses, with waves crashing so loudly that the ocean seemed just inches from my feet.
I became lightheaded. I was either still drunk or there was a spell here I wasn't prepared for. I unzipped my autumn jacket and let the remarkable chill bore through my thin sweat shirt and scratch my nerves -- as a way to stay alert, to hold on. I did a few jumping jacks.
By the time Krista made her way up the hill a few minutes later, I was feeling great. I think at that moment I lost my hangover the way some people break a fever.
* * *
The next morning, Krista and I began our drive to the hot springs of Landmannalaugar -- on one of Iceland's largest geothermal fields, where the North American and Eurasian continental plates meet -- talking about the whales we didn't see on the coast of Snaefellsnes. Since whaling returned to Iceland in 2003, tension has risen between whalers and whale watchers. It has played out through a brutally obvious circumstance: The best areas to go whale watching happen to be the best areas to go whale hunting, too.
"These whale watchers would go on these boats looking for whales," Krista said, "and just on the other side, they would see these whaling boats looking for the same whales. And the whale watchers hate it."
There were no whales to see in Iceland's southern interior, or any other forms of life: The landscape is a depressing, relentless vision of the End of the World. (About 80 percent of Iceland is uninhabitable.) We spent more than half of the grueling, friendship-testing, seven-hour drive on uncomfortable, unpaved roads. Drab brown-gray rocks dotted the lunar surface; their sole purpose, it seemed, was to show the depth of the nothingness taking shape.
On one particularly unforgiving stretch of rocky road, we came upon a small Volkswagen stopped in the middle of a path. A young couple sat inside, looking as if they were at a crossroads, either in their relationship or on their journey to Landmannalaugar. I was betting on the latter: He wanted to continue and she wanted to turn around. Krista rolled down her window.
"Are you two okay?" Krista asked.
"We're fine," the girl said from the driver's seat. Waving at us to drive on, she looked as if she was about to cry.
Two hours later, I was losing it myself.
"I don't know if I can keep this up much longer," I said.
Krista began to ignore my complaining, which gave me the silence to concentrate on the hypothesis I'd been toying with the previous day. I'd skipped out on eating the rotten shark, and I hadn't dived into the pool of green slime. I thought: Maybe this was the trial by fire I was looking for. Maybe this was my ultimate sobriety test. I popped in the Heartless Bastards again, took a deep breath and committed myself to the long haul.
At a point when the land of Mordor couldn't seem more impenetrable, off in the distance a sprinkle of yellow dusted the side of a hill. The same thing happened in green, orange, rose -- a rainbow range of rhyolite hills started to appear out of nowhere.
We rounded a mountain and came upon a green valley, with campers and tents strewn across. Heads and naked shoulders could vaguely be seen within the far-off phantasms of rising steam.
Krista and I needed to get back to Reykjavik the same night to meet up with a friend, so we could only stay a few hours. We didn't waste any time: We put on our bathing suits in the car, threw on our jackets, grabbed our supplies and raced toward the hot springs before the mountain's freezing shadow had the chance to latch onto our bare legs.
At last, the plunge.
The perfection of the water temperature came from two different sources -- one volcanically hot stream and one glacially cold. It was a joining of the waters' two temperatures, not a cancellation of them -- that was what perfection felt like. That was what Iceland felt like. And as I sank my shoulders further down, watching the steam rise from the surface, I imagined the country's fault lines cutting right through me. This was where the two sides fit: fire and ice, earth and water, North America and Eurasia.
It felt great making peace with the duality of the Icelandic experience, detoxifying as it was intoxicating. It made so much sense that Krista and I decided to share a single can of beer while we gently flowed to the other side of the springs.
New York writer Tommy Nguyen last wrote for Travel on EasyCruise.