Am I actually going to do an Iceland haul? I don’t do haul posts very often. I believe I once tried a Christmas one but it’s long-deleted and I don’t think I’ve done another since. Hauls have gone out of fashion. Nonetheless, I want to show you what I brought back from Iceland in April – it’s a mix of souvenirs, shopping, food, scrapbook stuff and there’s definitely a bit of a theme to my Iceland haul.
Eldhestar t-shirt
You might have spotted this in various blog posts, or on Instagram and you’ll definitely spot it in the vlog. I got back from a long day of horse riding and hot river hiking in the pouring rain and I was soaked to the skin. Actually, my clothes mostly weren’t so bad because my waterproofs are pretty good – better than 66North’s gorgeous rubbery orange ones, in fact. But my cuffs were wet from pulling them below the sleeves of my waterproof jacket and everything was very sweaty so once I was left to dry off and warm up at Eldhestar stables, I ran across the garden to their hotel and bought a t-shirt. I meant to go for an XL but in my haste and in their minor chaos on the t-shirt shelves, I accidentally grabbed an XXL. It’s cosy. It was dry. I wore it quite often in the evenings and I flew home in it – it’s a bit big to deliberately wear out and about.
Birth of a Volcano by Max Milligan
I looked at this book a couple of times before I actually invested that much money in it. £14 for an A6 book is quite a lot of money but it’s such a beautiful book. It’s packed full of photos of the new volcano and in broadly chronological order so you can watch the eruption grow and the new craters appear and then cool. It hasn’t even gone on my cool-books shelf yet. It’s still on my desk where I can look at it.
Volcano socks
Look, at least I didn’t buy the volcano hat. But I couldn’t quite resist the socks. They have a picture of the new crater pouring red lava and just in case you’re not sure what it is, it says FAGRADALSFJALL VOLCANO ICELAND 2021. I want souvenir socks from all interesting things from now on.
Yarn
My friend Tom knits. The white/neon/pastel hat you saw in the hot river post is one of his creations, as is the teal-green and rainbow brioche hat that appears in some of my hiking posts. So a display of yarn at the airport caught my eye when it wouldn’t have done previously. Now, I’m no knitter but I thought I might give it a go and if it’s that far beyond me – which it will be! – I’ll commission Tom to make me something from it. His professional opinion is that it’s good enough quality wool and the reason it’s a bit coarse is that it’s untreated. Fresh from the sheep, as it were. At the moment, my two balls are lying on the floor in their bag but I’ve had my hands full lately. Might be a winter thing when I can’t go out canoeing, kayaking or camping every weekend.
Icelandic chocolate
I had some Sirius chocolate on my very first trip, back in 2011, and wasn’t overly impressed which is why the only time I’ve had it since was when Francois handed out some of the orange variety on day four of the Laugavegur trail back in 2018. Thought it was time to give it a fair test, so I brought back two biggish bars of Sirius and one of Freyja. The taste-testing (against Swedish Marabou, Norwegian Freia and Finnish Karl Fazer) will be coming soon.
Sky Lagoon body scrub recipe
Now. The Sky Lagoon didn’t have its special body scrub in stock when I was there, although it announced on Instagram only a week or two after I got home that it’s back in stock. That’s probably a good thing because it would have been very expensive and I’d have either dithered for hours and missed the bus or spent that fortune and then not be able to bring myself to wash that much money down the plughole by actually using it. And at the moment, you can’t buy their stuff online, so umm… if you’re going to Iceland anytime soon and want to bring me back a pot as a present, I won’t say no.
Instead, vaguely remembering mention of eucalyptus and orange, I invested in some essential oils and attempted to recreate the signature scrub in the bath. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded because no one’s entirely sure of the recipe and every review of the Sky Lagoon includes a different mix of oils (I’ve seen one that seems to be just a list of carriers) but at the very least, I’ve created a body scrub inspired by the Sky Lagoon’s Ritual scrub. At this point, I’ve been enjoying my own creation for two months (huge glug of almond, three drops of orange, two drops of eucalyptus) and I almost don’t care anymore what the official recipe is.
Islenskt Stjörnusnakk
This is the one foodstuff I really missed from Iceland. Star-shaped crisps, preferably in sour cream flavour (the green ones) but I’ll take the slightly hotter cheese (red ones) if that’s all that’s available. You’re not supposed to eat a packet of these by yourself every day but… I pretty much did. I brought a packet home – managed to resist the urge to eat them while I waited for the bus, managed to resist the urge to eat them on the bus, and then I just inhaled the lot the first morning I was home. So much for saving and savouring them. I could do with an empty suitcase just to load up with these things, although I notice they’re getting harder and harder to find. I cleared my local store of the green ones on my first day and they didn’t get restocked. I had to venture further afield, right down to downtown Reykjavik to find the ones I brought home!
Postcards
Do postcards count? I sent some to friends because that’s a ritual I think needs reviving and I collected some for my scrapbook, which I haven’t even started yet. I like postcards with views, preferably no people in the way, and definitely no text or borders. I want them to look like paintings or works of art, I don’t want to be reminded that they cost 500kr and are intended to chuck in a postbox. They’re the beautiful photos I didn’t have the skill or circumstances to take myself.
Rocks
This one is a little contentious because you’re not really supposed to take rocks but two of them are from the gravel pit crater we visited on the Golden Circle tour – the one where the rock is being scraped up and sent to Sweden for building roads. Under the circumstances, no one’s going to care that I took a small red piece and a tiny grey-green piece. The one I sort of feel bad about is the small sample of lava from the new volcano. There’s a page in my beautiful book showing a small child holding a piece of lava the size of its head with the captioned “Though outlawed, every house has some lava” and my piece is very small. I’m endlessly fascinated to compare it with the piece from the 2014 Holuhraun eruption – in that case, our tour guide blithely said “there’s enough for everyone in the world to take 14kg” or something thereabouts and therefore if those few of us who made the journey out to it wanted to take a small sample, that was fine. They were similar eruptions, both effusive with fire fountains and forming baby craters and great rivers and lakes of lava, with occasional bouts of too-much toxic gas. You’d think the lava would be similar but it’s not.
Is that everything? I think that’s everything. I don’t generally do a lot of souvenir shopping in Iceland these days – this was my fourteenth visit, I think, so I pretty much have all the souvenirs I want by now. I did have a look for more cloth badges and to be fair, there were a few but I was specifically after a Fagradalsfjall one and in that I was disappointed. Again, if you’re over there and you see such a thing…