I honestly wasn’t entirely sure why the train trip from Amsterdam to Copenhagen had to take fifteen hours. Leaving at 7.00 pm on a Sunday night and pulling into the station at 10.00 am on Monday felt like a painfully slow crawl across the map.
I booked it because, truth be told, it was the easiest and cheapest way for me to make the journey. Sure, I know I could probably have hunted down a budget airline ticket. But sometimes you just reach a point where you want to completely bypass the hassle of baggage limits, security queues, and schlepping to airports located in the middle of nowhere.
Plus, catching the train came with a hidden bonus: I essentially scored a free bed for the night, saving me from booking a hotel room. So yeah, at the age of forty-seven, I can officially say I’ve caught an overnight sleeper for the first time in my life.
Turns out I’d also totally underestimated the length of the flight. My booking showed I’d be in the air from 1330 until 1500, and I’d naively assumed Iceland and Denmark shared the exact same time zone. Completely forgetting that Iceland stays on GMT year-round and doesn’t bother with daylight saving, the actual flight time blew out to a solid two hours and fifty minutes.
Not that I minded—the time flew by because I was glued to the window. We passed over some striking, rugged rocky islands down below. At first, my mind jumped to the Faroe Islands, but we weren’t far enough into the flight path yet, so I figured they must have been wild little isles just off the coast of Norway.
Every now and then, I flicked on the in-flight entertainment screen for a bit of amusement, which happened to be playing Dinosaurs: Dawn of the Ice Age. To top it all off, the on-board food—a simple baguette—was surprisingly good and didn’t cost a fortune.
As we came in to land, I looked down and noticed a striking absence of trees across the entire landscape. Instead, flat rocks stretched everywhere, blanketed in a low, heath-like vegetation. Eager for the best view possible, I grabbed the front seat on the bus for the one-hour journey into Reykjavik. As we rolled along, that flat terrain quickly transformed, giving way to massive, dramatic mountains capped with snow.
The first few hours in Reykjavik were spent settling into my apartment—which is genuinely lovely—and making a pilgrimage to the local “Bónus” supermarket. I stocked up on enough food for the next few days, well aware that since most food in Iceland is imported, it comes with a hefty price tag. Seeing a total of 3,500 ISK flash at the register totally did my head in until I quickly converted it back into Australian dollars for some context. Once I had my head around the exchange rate, it honestly didn’t seem all that bad after all.
Later that evening, after twenty-four solid hours of travel, I headed down to the local public pool to unwind and experience firsthand why these spots are such a cornerstone of modern Icelandic culture. Reykjavik has seven of these council-run pools for a population of around 120,000, and they are fantastic. They’re all thermally heated, with hot pots ranging from tepid to over 40°C—a bit too scorching for my sensitive skin! Open right up until ten o’clock at night, they draw quite a crowd, though I only spotted a couple of people actually swimming laps. Most folks were just happily soaking in the communal pools, catching up with family and friends.
