In my last Iceland post (£27 jacket vs Icelandic winter), I alluded to going to Perlan and made mention of the observation deck and the ice cave. Now I’m going to reveal all to you, for this is the post about my adventure to Perlan and the Wonders of Iceland.
Perlan is a very distinctive building in Reykjavik, one of two buildings that mark Reykjavik’s skyline from any other city. It’s the first landmark you see on your way in from the airport, it means the Pearl and I have never yet failed to mutter in my best Jack Sparrow – sorry, Captain Jack Sparrow – voice, “It’s the Pearl…” when I see it.
It’s six 4-million-litre capacity hot water tanks with a glass dome on top. It’s the first thing you really see as you arrive in Reykjavik from Keflavik airport and because it sits on the second biggest hill in the city, it’s pretty visible. It’s also kind of space-age, in a 60s retro way. In fact, it was opened in 1991. The six tanks were built to store the geothermal hot water that supplies the capital but they realised fairly quickly that just four tanks will do the job. The empty two have been home to this and that over the years – when I first went to Iceland, the Saga Museum lived there. I went to Perlan in February 2015, since I was staying at the Natura Hotel at the foot of the hill but back then there was nothing particularly exciting in it. There was an artificial geyser – an underwhelming fountain that jetted up to about the fourth floor every five minutes, with none of the heat or steam or drama of the real thing – and the dome housed a quite-expensive restaurant and it was free to go out on the observation deck. Later, you had to pay to use the deck and now it’s included in the Wonders of Iceland ticket.
These days the restaurant has been replaced with a cafe that’s open all day rather than just the evening and there’s all-access with a ticket, which is actually a silver paper wristband. I believe you can pay just for access to the observation deck but given no one ever looked at the wristbands, which were hidden up sleeves, I’m not sure how they enforce “this person can go here but this person can only go there“. At reception, you can either go to the Forces of Nature exhibit, timeline, Látrabjarg and virtual fish tank through the hidden sliding door, turn right into the Northern Lights cinema or go through the turnstiles to head for everything else up and down the stairs. The Northern Lights show runs every hour, I think, and it had just closed as I was handed my wristband so naturally I went downstairs first to the Volcano Show.
There’s a small room, presumably in the water tank directly underneath the Northern Lights cinema, draped in black, with three rows of chairs and every fifteen minutes they show an 8-minute film about the 2021 Geldingadalur eruption while piping in the delicious smell of an eruption to make you feel like you’re there. I’ve seen a lot of videos of this eruption – indeed, I recognised a few shots from the photographers on Instagram – but this one is well done. It’s very high quality. There’s one shot, of splattering lava shot into the air where I particularly notice what high resolution this must be. I wish it was available either online or on DVD but so far, no luck.
Next, I walked through Forces of Nature and the Icelandic timeline. This is kind of museum-y and thus I find it boring. I need to be entertained! I did enjoy the short video about the power of Iceland and nature – there’s an Iceland-shaped seat to sit on and the show is projected onto the seat, and tectonic faultlines glow different colours as different events happen on the screen. That’s a fun touch. That’s the kind of entertainment I’m talking about. I’d far rather watch a video with a bit of fun accompaniment like that than walk through an exhibition. The Iceland timeline goes through the creation of the land and the various creatures and plants that make it their home and again, I skipped through.
On the other side is a recreation of Látrabjarg. That’s the famous seabird cliff. The reality is up to 440m high, up in a corner of the Westfjords. This version is only 10m high but it’s covered in birds and lichen and bird deposits and it has digital binoculars so you can pretend it’s so big you need them for a better look. It’s fun.
Then there’s the virtual fish tank which again, didn’t capture my attention. It’s an oval section of the room walled off with a large screen. To be honest, I didn’t even realise it was a fish tank. I was interested in what came next – the Ice Cave!
The Ice Cave occupies an entire floor of one of the water tanks. It’s genuinely made of ice, 400 tons of it brought from the nearby Blue Mountains, built into an artificial freezer. They recommend putting your coat on here as it gets to -15°C in here. A tunnel has been carved through the ice, with a few detours for fun. You can see the last remaining piece of the “dead” glacier Okjökull – when I say “dead”, I mean that Iceland held a funeral for it after it retreated so far it ceased to be considered a glacier. Then you go around a corner and come face to face with a throne of ice.
I defy you to resist your inner Elsa when faced with that thing. Actually, I had a go at a more despotic ice monarch, sprawled with my legs thrown over the arm of the throne but it turns out chairs made of ice are really slippery and when you’re trying to hold on, that Jacob Rees-Mogg pose looks really forced and awkward. Also, it’s ice so it’s kind of transparent and you can hardly even see it in this photo.
When you leave the ice cave, you follow winding stairs up and find yourself on the next floor of the water tank where they have a big light and airy glacier exhibition. There’s a curved screen and you’re supposed to be able to stand on marked footprints along it, hold up your hands and use them as VR controllers to point to various items of interest. I could only get them to work about two times out of ten and I could never grab the items of interest and open them up before the exhibit moved away to a different part of the screen. I also quite enjoyed a timelapse video of the movement of two glaciers over a decade or so. First they retreated, then they rebuilt, then a red line was drawn around their largest part and the glacier was shown retreating again, this time even faster, so you could visualise properly how much it had shrunk. I don’t necessarily think this shows quite such a glacial crisis as it’s played as – glacial tongues aren’t necessarily a statement on the health of the entire glacier, especially when it’s as big as the Icelandic one in this video – but it’s interesting to see where there was a thick river of ice there’s now a muddy pond. I don’t want that statement to be read as me being some kind of climate change denier, by the way. It’s entirely possible for one tongue to vanish but for the ice cap on top to be putting on weight and forming new tongues elsewhere.
Outside, a walkway takes you back to the centre, into the small ICE-SAR exhibit – incidentally, I saw some of t the Icelandic Search & Rescue team in their full uniform and carrying oversized bags on the plane, presumably on their way back from helping with the Turkish earthquake effort. From the fact this isn’t on the official Perlan map, I presume it’s a temporary exhibit. The main one, which I did backwards, is the Water in Icelandic Nature exhibit. I wasn’t sure how the display of shelves of rock tied in with the water theme and the microscopes of glacial bacteria was a bit icky, but I suppose it’s educational in that I didn’t really realise anything lived in glaciers, except the kind of frozen hellbeast that certain horror movies or TV shoes (cough-Fortitude-cough) make such good use of.
Up another floor and out onto the observation deck. It’s cold! It was so much windier up there than it had been at ground level! I’d put on my coat before I went out but I had to drag out hat, scarf and mittens too, determined to make a full circle of the deck and take lots of photos. Not everyone managed it – many people stepped out and immediately shot back inside. You get a 360° view of the capital area – in one direction you can see downtown Reykjavik and Esja, in another the domestic airport and the bay beyond, in another the Blue Mountains and in the fourth, right along the Reykjanes peninsula. I bet you got good views of the 2021 and 2022 volcanoes here – or at least, the plume of smoke and the red glow. You can see Keilir from here, a particularly noticeable volcano that’s almost perfect triangle. It’s fifteen miles away. I suppose by road you have to take a bit of a right angle out of the city before you get on the main road along Reykjanes which is why it feels a lot further than fifteen miles. Last time I was up here it was a bit cloudier but it was also a bit warmer. Good views but very cold.
I retreated eventually inside, strolled through the gift shop without anything catching my eye, strolled past the ice cream parlour – I was tempted but I needed real food before ice cream – and I went upstairs to the revolving cafe, which wasn’t revolving. I wonder if this feels more restaurant-like in the evening and if it does still revolve? Anyway, at this time of day it was full of people stopping for a coffee and a piece of cake. Somehow I found myself a table near the edge of the dome, got a hot chocolate and a croissant with jam and sat down to enjoy the view. I suppose at 4,990ISk (£29) it’s not worth the price of admission for the view alone but I’d enjoyed the view, the observation deck, the Volcano Show, the Ice Cave and bits of Forces of Nature and I still had the best bit to come.
Oh yes, the Aurora Show. You go into the other dome and take your seat in a big cinema where the screen is pretty much circular and most of it is above your head. The popular seats are in the back row where you can see more of it spread out before you and less of it literally above your head and it’s pretty amazing. You do get Northern Lights dancing across this vast screen but you also get the scientific explanation (it takes 18 hours for a solar flare to reach Earth, for example, and did you know several other planets and moons in our solar system also have aurora?) and myths from across the north of the planet, the tale of the dawn goddess Áróra – this is really just the Icelandic spelling of the word Aurora, Iceland not actually having a goddess of the dawn – and of course, lots of vivid green streaks dancing across the whole screen. It’s very easy to forget you’re looking at a screen, except that there’s the light of a fire exit directly underneath and a whole theatre full of people around you. Yes, I enjoyed this one. I’d personally skip through several of the exhibitions in Perlan but I’d make a special effort to see this one. If you’ve never been hunting for the Northern Lights for real, it’s very cold and if you see anything at all, it’s likely to be something underwhelming, at least to the naked eye. Guaranteed Northern Lights here, and in a warm comfortable chair.
And I think that was everything. If you’ve got half a spare day in Reykjavik, particularly if the weather’s a bit rubbish – or indeed, if the weather’s good and you want to enjoy the views! – then definitely take a trip out to Perlan. If you don’t have a car, tour companies will offer trips up there but it’s only 4km from downtown on foot or you can take bus 18 from Hlemmur or Snorrabraut, it’s only three or two stops respectively plus a five-minute walk.