Reykjavik, Iceland

Reykjavik is one of those capitals that has a village feel to it, certainly in the centre with is old corrugated iron buildings, and stone Nordic architecture you get the feeling of an up market Norse fishing settlement. Th picture above is th eoldest building in the city.

The harbour was no more than a minutes walk from our hotel and the small lake where we managed to see glaucous gull. scaup, eider and whooper swan merely another three minutes!

Iceland’s has a trap in store for your body clock though. For a start you’re flying an hour ahead of our time but because of its latitude it doesn’t get and the dark until much later. In May we were sitting in a restaurant at midnight and it was still twilight. I asked our guide what it was like tin the winter. ”Not to bad” he replied ”It gets light at noon and dark again at half past two in the afternoon!’