Monday 28th July

On Monday we checked out of Loftleidir and into Hotel Island (pronounced "ease-land"), in order to "start" our driving tour. This was a bit daft as the internal flight was conducted from the airport next to Loftleidir, and we were only in Hotel Island for one night! However there was a hidden advantage to moving to Island as it put us right opposite Reykjavik's biggest swimming pool. This is a complex of open-air pools including an Olympic 50m pool, four hot tubs, a hot area, children's area and a really cool twisty slide accessed by climbing up a tall tower.

We had tremendous fun playing on the slide-chute which was genuinely fast and exhilarating. There are also four hot-tubs at the (open-air) pool, ranging from pale pink to red (the darker the hotter). We were unable to go into No.4 but managed No.3 with some deep breaths and mind control. It's not too hot once in the water, unless someone else gets in which causes a wave of hot water to blast you and remind you just how toasty it is. Once out, we felt amazingly well insulated against the cold breeze. Once we had swum a kilometre each and played on the irresistible slide some more, at 6.30pm we decided to go and have dinner. The pool is on the edge of a park which appears to be Reykjavik's main 'green' leisure zone, and includes a small boating lake (complete with toy boats, remote-controllable and free), a remote-control toy-car rink, a replica viking longboat for kids to play on, a look out tower, mini-golf, and a most impressive mini-road-circuit for children complete with little electric cars, road signs, a bridge, a little filling station and even working traffic lights! I was amazed at the ingenuity and delightfulness of it. There was also a little circuit for electric karts and a sandpit with miniature working mechanical diggers, ingeniously constructed and all free to use and no doubt kept going with help from Iceland's abundant supply of virtually free electricity. I was very impressed at this and marvelled at how clean, efficient and well thought out it was. As a child I often used to dream of a place like this. Icelandic children are very privileged to live in a country which has evidently spent some serious money in an effort to encourage children to participate in stimulating and enjoyable activities, giving them opportunities to experiment with fantastic toys and showing them what they can do rather than emphasising what they cannot, which unfortunately is the attitude of petty bureaucrats in local councils in the UK.

As it was our last night in Reykjavik we decided to go to the Laekjarbrekka Restaurant, situated on Bankastraeti 2 in the central eating area of Reykjavik. We had liked the look of this place in passing, and had planned to visit it. Laekjarbrekka (the main restaurant, not the fish buffet which is a sister venture) is a charming old wooden building with some wonderful furniture, very interesting ornaments and interesting pictures on the walls. It also serves rather excellent food.

A fish soup starter was truly excellent ­ perhaps the best fish soup I have yet tasted, sporting a really broad depth of flavours and with really solid, juicy taste coaxed out of the bits of fish, prawn, lobster and mussel floating in it. Wonderful. The bread was a bit boring here though, as with everywhere in Iceland, and I was beginning to tire of the Icelandic fascination with white bread only (and stodgy white bread at that). No restaurant we went to served brown, unless you count glutinous dark rye bread as such.

A main course of broiled mountain lamb was superb and outshone its humble description. This dish took the form of an arrangement of several little hillocks of lamb each in the shape of a small beehive, coated with some herbs of some kind and served in a rich, dark, wine-bolstered sauce with a small nugget of potato dauphinoise carefully insinuated into a pastry case. The dauphinoise was done well. Vegetables such as sliced carrots and baby corn were dropped around the meat and half-in/half-out of the sauce. The lamb was perfectly succulent, oozing a moist, slightly gamey, bracken-like taste with incredible depth. The superb sauce united the lamb, vegetables and gratin potato element taking the whole meal onto a higher plane ­ worthy of anything Le Pont de La Tour could conjure up. Dessert of chocolate cake was served in the form of a very sticky, smallish slab of very gooey chocolate cake (warm) with ice cream (cold), fluffy whipped cream (somewhere in between) and freshly cut strawberries around it all. Heavenly. Coffee, as I tended to discover everywhere, was first rate. This is not a cheap place to eat although we did not feel they were asking too much: about £75 for a meal for two with modest alcohol. This compares favourably with London for quality and price, whereas most other places were 30­60% more expensive than comparable food in London.

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© Richard Harrison

All photographs are © Richard Harrison and Samantha Coe 1997