Almost two years ago now, I went to Iceland in April of 2016. I went primarily because there was a fanfest for an online game I was playing a lot of at the time, namely, EVE Online. I posted about some of my adventures in the game here and even made a few videos.

I was quite into EVE (addicted?), and I thought it would be fun to go to the annual fan meetup in Reykjavik, Iceland, where the fanfest is held since that’s where CCP, the company that develops of EVE, is located.

So I bought a ticket to the fanfest as well as a flight and hostel tickets. The day came, and it already started off with a hitch. My first of two flights was extremely delayed due to the pilots simply not showing up. I guess it was too early for them…

Since my first flight didn’t happen at all, I was put on a later flight, which of course meant that my connecting flight would be missed. In the end, I got to Reykjavik in the late evening when I should have arrived in the morning. I did, however, get a free bump up to business class which was kind of cool because I got to sit in the exclusive business lounge and drink unlimited beer from tap (which was about 60% foam, but hey, it was free).

I had booked some extra time outside of the fanfest so I could check out Reykjavik for a few days before the fanfest started, and that I did.

 

 

I checked out the previous locations on the first day I was there. I decided to wake up the following morning to go to Mt. Esja and hike up it.

Mt. Esja proved to be more difficult to get to than I had anticipated. There are busses that take you there, but you need a connection, and it still takes a while. The major caveat was that I wasn’t 100% sure on which stop I needed to get out at. I was told that it was the “Hiking Center” stop (which makes sense), but I wasn’t positive. In any case, the bus driver had been stopping at every stop along the way, so I figured I would just let him stop there and if it looked right, I would hop out. Well I guess that stop is where the driver only pulls over if you click the button to signal that you want the bus to stop. Since I didn’t click the button, we just sailed by as I realized that, “Damn, that totally was my stop…”

I immediately clicked the button and I figured that I would just get out at the next one and walk back. That should have been no big deal. Enter the next problem: the next stop was about ten or fifteen minutes later. Driving down the highway for 10 or more minutes put a lot of walking distance between me and my destination when we finally did reach the next stop.

I was dropped off at a bus stop, so I thought I would just cross over the road and catch the next bus back. The next bus was more than an hour later. It started to seem like destiny was working against me that day.

Determined, I started hiking alongside the highway back to the Hiking Center. I stuck out my thumb while walking in hopes that someone would pick up this poor hitchhiker. Nobody did. That was, until it started heavily raining. Before anyone pulled over, water started falling around me in a gentle patter. That wasn’t too bad, but the rain kept increasing and after about 5 minutes, the rain had picked up so much that I thought I had accidentally walked into a monsoon. With my thumb shivering as I dredged alongside the road, someone finally pulled over and let me and the 10 liters of water that had soaked into my clothes into his car.

He was a pleasant fellow who I had a nice conversation with. He told me about all the things I should do while I was in Iceland, but I had to cut the conversation short as we came up to the Hiking Center. I thanked him for the lift and got out of the car, already regretting leaving the comfort of the heaters in his car.

Luckily, however, the rain had ceased and I could start hiking without getting any wetter, if that were even possible. Already soaked and freezing, I started my slow ascent of Mt. Esja to the snow-capped top.

The hike was easy enough with there being a well-defined path that wasn’t very steep. I had the trail to myself since I suppose nobody else wanted to go hiking when it had just been raining enough to warrant the consideration of making an arc. I was alone and it was great. As I got higher in elevation, the wind got chillier and the path slowly became more and more obstructed with snow. It was still possible to see the path with the recession it caused in the snow and I kept pushing forward.

There was still a way to go before I got to the top, but the summit kept getting more and more obscure. I was high enough that I found myself in the middle of a cloud that had moved in and it was making it hard to see very far. To make matters worse, the cloud itself started releasing snow. It started off slowly, much like the rain earlier. I should have seen that as a warning, but I think my brain was still wet and chilled from the earlier rain. The snow got thicker and heavier, and my visible range got shorter and shorter: no more than one hundred meters, then fifty, then ten.

After not very much time at all, my vision was limited to just a few meters.

I was alone and afraid of getting lost and freezing to death.

I turned around, but like trails often do when they get closer to the summit and it gets rocky, there really wasn’t much of a trail to be seen. With a layer of snow over everything, one could not detect the trail anymore. My footprints were still in the snow, though, and I simply started backtracking.

The snow was coming down so heavily that it was filling up my previous footprints. The further I followed my self-made trail, the older the footprints were and the more they were filled in with snow and therefore unnoticeable.

I lost the trail. I couldn’t see any more footprints from the way I had come, and I hadn’t even walked farther than a few hundred meters since I had decided to turn around. I looked around helplessly at the oppressive wall of whiteness that surrounded me. Without any better idea, I simply started heading in what seemed like the direction I had been going, trying to go downhill at any possibility.

I stumbled around for about half an hour, and either due to my descent in altitude or just a lessening of the storm, I could see farther. I could make out the valley beyond, and I knew which way I needed to go.

As a side note, the entire time it was snowing, the wind was blowing so hard that I had to wear my sunglasses just to keep the snow from needling my eyes. I even wrapped my (thankfully) long around my mouth and cheeks to also keep the snow from stinging my face.

I luckily found the path again and made my way out of Mt. Esja alive and even colder than when I started.

I had to wait a while for the bus, but it did show up and I got back into Reykjavik. I wanted to properly thaw and I found a spa on my tourist map so I made my way to it.

I arrived at the spa, ready to soak in some hot natural spring water and get over the ordeals from earlier that day.

The spa was closed.

I can’t recall exactly what was up, but the spa had extremely odd hours. I think they closed in the afternoon for four hours or something and only opened again later in the early evening. In any case, I would have had to wait for a few hours, so I moped my way back downtown with my soul still frozen.

On the way back, I did run across the Perlan, which provided a nice panorama view of the city.

After that, I resumed my trek toward downtown. With no spa to warm me up, I went into a craft beer bar that I had previously spotted instead.

The beers were tasty, but were they expensive! Everything in Iceland is expensive since they have to import almost everything except fish. In addition to heavy taxes, beer is pricey. I think most cheap beers were around eight to ten Euros (which is about the same in dollars).

The craft beer bar, however, had “exotic” beers, and they charged quite the premium for them. I recall one of the beers I had only being served in a 250ml glass (about 8fl oz), and it was thirty Euros! I had one or two more beers, but with a tab of more than fifty Euros, I didn’t feel much warmer in my consciousness, and like my body, I needed to put a temporary freeze on my expenditures.

I went back to the hostel and warmed up under the blankets where I eventually drifted off to sleep in order to wake up for the EVE Fanfest which started the following day.

There’s not many pictures from the fanfest that would be interesting for those who don’t play EVE, so I won’t bother with too many. Not to say that the fanfest wasn’t fun; it was great and I met a couple people who I hung out with most of the time. There were presentations about what to expect in the future as well as some competitions you could watch. They had some developmental games you could play as well which was fun. Over the course of the three days, we also went on a pub crawl and in general just drank a lot. (Remember how I said beer was expensive? More on that later.)

On one of the days, a few of us went to the CCP (developers of the game) headquarters. Outside is a monument dedicated to the players of the game.

On the base of the monument are all the in-game names of the characters that were active during the tenth-year anniversary of the game’s release. As I was playing at that time, my character’s name is indeed on the monument.

We then went into a bar below the CCP office where we drank some specially brewed beers for the EVE Fanfest. It was pretty cool because we got to drink with the developers and talk about the game.

During the last evening of the fanfest, there was a big party with a few different bands including Permaband, CCP’s inhouse band.

After the party, I went to the hostel and slept. The following day simply consisted of going to the airport and flying home.

Alcohol is expensive in Iceland (and all of Scandinavia for that matter). I was there for less than a week, but I had spent around six hundred Euros in booze alone. Granted, we were all drinking a lot, but the bill would have been substantially lower in another country.

I had a good time in Iceland. I don’t play EVE anymore; I miss playing it, but it just took so much time that I just don’t have for online MMOs anymore.

In any case, I really want to go back to Iceland in the future. I would like to get further out of the city and do some backpacking—maybe rent a car and do a road trip. Who’s in?