Indira drove us to James Jackson's house, from where we took a rather large taxi to the airport. The flight out to Iceland from Stansted was very easy, and from Keflavík it was even easier to find a bus taking us to the Hotel Cabín, a rather swanky hotel which doesn't have single rooms. To avoid the horrible business of sharing rooms on the first night (!) Dan got us each twin rooms on the third floor.
At 6:30, John Maclennan arrived with the Toyota Van with which we'd be driving round the island. Our first trip out, however, was to downtown Reykjavík, and to the 'ice-breaker' for the IAVCEI conference in the Nordic Volcanology Centre, modelled, it appears, on a rather back-to-front volcanic crater. There we met Issy Sides, Marie Edmonds, and Seb Watt, now going into his third year of the PhD at Oxford. I was also introduced to Karl Grönvold, apparently a big name in Volcanology, with whom I chatted for maybe 15 minutes about everything from volcano-seismicity to melt compositions and movement (he now believes that melt is transported directly up through the crust, with relatively little lateral transport).
After one glass of wine, we said our hasty goodbyes (after all, we had gatecrashed without invite or name labels!) and adjourned to a very fancy lobster restaurant, guided by Karl, who went to school in the area.
To eat, the elders (Dan, JJ and Karl) had whale sashimi, whilst we had smooth, slightly oily, beautifully tender Guillemot with apricot (1800Kr). The main meal was extremely fine Arctic Char with Goat's Cheese (3480Kr) with Skyr for dessert, which is a thick, strained white cheese (much like Bulgarian yoghurt, great to clean the palate; 1400Kr). Even without wine, that came to £44 per head. I dread to think how much the Chablis was ... but the meal was nevertheless easily one of the best I've ever had (although The Crown in Southwold still wins!).
Returning to the hotel was amusing - the roads were nearly empty, despite us being in downtown Reykjavík. Getting back to the hotel was fine, but finding the way in (which was round to the right) was too much for Dan, who was forced to take us a very long way round the road system and ended up taking a short cut up over the pavement, kerb and grass, and into the car park that way!
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