REYKJANES: 1^st STOP, THE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE CONTINENTS

I remember looking down at the lava-covered ground as the plane came in to land the first time I visited Iceland. I saw little lakes and puffs of steam here and there, and understood how the land’s first settlers could have mistaken this for smoke, thus naming Reykjavík and Reykjanes – ‘smokey bay’ and ‘smokey peninsula’ in Icelandic. But it wasn’t until I’d been here some time that I discovered that Reykjanes is a worthy destination in itself, not just for the airport and the Blue Lagoon.

On my most recent afternoon trip to Reykjanes (yesterday) I took my parents to see a few key sites, and the bridge across a fissure between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates was our first brief stop. Looking down from the simple footbridge into a shallow river of dust between the rocky crags makes it easy to visualise the geology of the country as a whole, straddling as it does both continents – some would say culturally too.

The bridge over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is sometimes called ‘Leif the Lucky’s Bridge’ to honour Leif Ericsson, first European to travel to North America – about half a millennium before Columbus, not that Icelanders like to brag…