Horsies and huskies

So I decided to get out of Reykjavik and see a bit more of Iceland.  Akureyri (ak-u-reh-ree) is a small city in the north of Iceland.  It's about a 40 minute flight up there.  Internal flights in Iceland are done in quite small planes - kind of the size of a big bus with propellers that sound like they've got lawnmower engines.

It's a really pretty little town and when I got there it began snowing; big, fat, fluffy, flurries of cotton wool snowflakes like from English Christmas stories or rom-coms.  

I went horse-riding where you got to wear a nice big orange sumo-suit so you don't freeze your bits off.



Giddy up

I also went down to the local ice-hockey rink to see my first ice hockey match.  Still not sure of the rules of ice-hockey - that's if there are any rules.  But even in local leagues it's pretty rough and good fun to watch, but kind of like soccer in the fact that one team can seem to have control of the game for 90% of the time and still not win.  Dumb.

I also did a tour out to Lake Myvatn (mee-va).  I got on the bus and was like aww crap - I was the youngest person on the bus by about 30 years!  But the people on the tour were lovely.  There was an English couple - he sounded like Ringo Starr and she sounded like Mrs Bucket.  And they were all well travelled interesting people with lots of stories and places seen and adventures had, it was great.  I even had dinner the next night with a couple of them the next night.

Our guide who was a tourguide/hairdresser/bodybuilder took us to see the lake and there was a dog-sledding competition.  But when I went for a closer look I realised that all the people on the sleds were kids!  It was pretty cute.

I'm calling these guys Kujo and David Bowie

 
One of the places we went to on the tour was a place the guide called the Dark City.  It was like these amazing lava columns about 20 metres tall.  They spread out as far as the eye could see and with all the fresh snow looked amazing.  We stopped at a lookout to view them, but along the bottom there were walking trails and apparently it's a great area for hiking in the Summer.  So another reason to come back to Iceland in the Summer!!