Aurora Borealis (The Northern Lights)
Woke up late post-nap. Already it’s 7pm and we have to be at the bus stop for our Northern Lights tour at 8:30. Good thing I have a list of affordable restaurants nearby.
Bio Borgari is a burger joint known for organic and sustainable ingredients and happens to be across the street from the hostel! Memorable: the fresh potato chips...totally worth $5 a bag. The burgers? Eh. The meat was good, I enjoyed mine more than Adam did. They put “tomato sauce” on the burger and I thought it would be ketchup-y but really it was odd to us to have tomato sauce on a burger. But for $18 a burger, certainly we both will finish it!
More importantly: the Northern Lights tour. We were super excited, this is the main reason for the Iceland trip. It’s a big tour bus that picks us up, there are tons of people waiting at the bus stop for all different companies. We used Reykjavík sightseeing. It’s obvious that all travelers to Iceland that are here at this time of year, are here for the same thing.
Our tour guide, Alex, was nice and informative. The tour sounded online like it would be more on constellations as well as Northern Lights so I was a little disappointed that I didn’t learn anything about constellations. False advertising there. We drove outside the city to get away from the light. Then, Alex pointed out that there was some light activity outside. This “light activity” actually looked like a faint cloud. They stopped the bus, we got out, it’s freezing and windy, everyone is setting up tripods and I can’t figure out why anyone is taking pictures where there is essentially nothing to see. Neither mine or Adams cell phone camera picked anything up. I tried to use my fancy digital camera buttttt I’m really not sure how to take pictures at night and it seems sensitive to the cold.
After about 45 mintures, we board the bus and start to move. Adam and I were feeling very disappointed. Basically, what you see in pictures is not anything close to what we saw. I thought the northern lights were a sham and I had been fooled. Luckily, we had one more stop to see the lights. Again, it was very faint so we walked down to the black sand beach (black sand = dirt...) and looked up at a lot of beautiful stars. Let’s try to enjoy the clear sky since there isn’t much else to see.
Then I found the tour guide taking photos of people and when he took the photos on his professional camera, the faint white “lights” that I thought looked like clouds—suddenly looked green! So we got a picture that looked cool and felt better about the experience.
Just as we were about to leave and boarding the bus, Alex came running and said “come back out! It’s getting really good!” and oh my goodness was it worth it.
Suddenly the sky was lit up with a big line from one end to another, maybe not as bright green as the photos but certainly much more green than it was before. Next, God started painting the sky. The only way to describe the sky was like watching an abstract painting appear without anyone painting it. Lines appeared and disappeared, reappeared in other parts of the sky and everyone cheered and gasped and yelled as we watched the slight after phenomenon. Tour guide Alex said it was one of the best he has ever seen.
In the midst of the excitement and chaos, we found Alex to take another picture of us, this time with brighter and better lights behind us. It got so bright that Adam’s Phone was able to pick up some photos.
It was amazing. Definitely worth the trip here just to experience this.
Northern Lights, mission accomplished.
(Oh and when we arrived back in the city at 1am, we went to Iceland’s most famous hot dog stand. Famous hot dog: raw onions, fried onions, ketchup, mustard, mayo. Yum. Yeah I smelled pretty badly after that.)
