ICELAND ADVENTURE - DAY 01 – GRINDAVIK HARBOR

July 01, 2016 • Leave a Comment

August 2016

ICELAND ADVENTURE - DAY 1 – GRINDAVIK HARBOR

After flying all night and landing around 7:30 am, we checked into our hotel (Northern Lights Inn) and caught 4 hours of sleep. This hotel is in the middle of a lava field and a few miles from any other development except the power plant I mentioned yesterday. Of course upon waking it turned out that they had already stopped serving lunch. But, they were able to supply us with bowl of traditional “Iceland Meat Soup” along with bread and butter. This soup is a basic vegetable soup with chunks of meat (pretty sure it was beef cubes) that we’ll see at several future lunches during this trip.

Now that we were fed and somewhat awake we had the hotel drive us into Grindavik - about 2 or 3 miles down the road where we roamed the harbor area. This is a quintessential active fishing village of about 3000. It is one of the few towns along the southern Iceland coast with a harbor. It was first settled by Vikings around 934 AD. For perspective it would be another 558 years before Columbus “discovered” America and another 842 years before the US Declaration of Independence was signed signaling the start of our Revolutionary war. Like they say, “you should visit Europe, where history comes from”. Anyway, until very recently, the economy of Iceland was solely dependent on fishing. This was called the “Salt Fish” industry as most of the fish was packed in salt and shipped to Europe.

Several mini wars were fought between Iceland and Europe (mostly Great Britton) over fishing rights as Iceland extended their exclusive fishing zone from the standard 3 miles, to 6, then 12 then 50 then 200 miles from their coasts. Of course other fishing nations took exception to this and several incidents ensued between Iceland and military ships from these various countries. This included ramming each other and firing deck cannons at each other.

In the last couple of decades though, with the world economy as it is, the production and shipping of dried and salt fish is no longer sufficient to sustain a country so the emphasis has moved to tourism; and the fishing industry, while still present, is a fraction of what it was.

Here’s where we were