Góðan daginn Iceland

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Pug1

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Yes it was Good Morning, (or Good Day), Iceland on the 17th July for me and my lovely wife. Since this is my first trip report and I‘ve never uploaded pictures to AFF I ask for forgiveness in advance if I mess up.
We are doing an APT cruise on Ms. Hebridean Sky and joined her in Reykjavik on 18th July. It‘s a clockwise circumnavigation of Iceland and we have nine nights on board.

This is the proposed route, which seems to be the standard cruise route judging by the number of cruise ships going around there at the moment. The map is courtesy of the APT Touring website.
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This is Hebridean Sky.
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We understand that APT is part owner of Hebridean Sky with Noble Caledonia of the UK. She is the almost identical sister ship to “Island Sky” and “Caledonian Sky” and they take around 100 to 110 passengers with a crew of approximately 70. It's the size we like and we’ve done two APT cruises on “Island Sky” and were very happy with the ship and the service. I will upload some more pictures of the ship along the way. Since we are circumnavigating clockwise we chose a cabin (Suite!) on the Starboard side of the ship and in this case a nice corner cabin on the Mawson Deck.

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Getting there
We flew in PE on a 777 with Cathay Pacific via HK. It’s CX100 from Sydney and CX237 from HK to LHR. Our seats were 32HK all the way, in the 32 seat premium economy cabin just behind J.
We got a great view of the Sydney CBD and harbour on the way out of Kingsford Smith. Our PE seats have seatback screen, good earphones and small kit that we didn't open that we think has socks, eyeshades, toothpaste and brush. We got welcome sparkly, juice or water plus a hot towel. Then offered drinks about 20 minutes after take off, which was on time.
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This was our menu for the SYD to HK leg.
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My wife and I chose the Ling with fried rice for lunch and it was very tasty.
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She had a red and I chose the Pinot Grigio, sadly both in plastic.
We left HK on CX237 around 1am, which was late because they were flying a shorter route of 11.5 hours and had to arrive after the 6am Heathrow curfew. Our route took us across China and Northern Russia and down over Estonia and Denmark. Heathrow air traffic control made us do a few wheelies around the Thames estuary at 5.50am because “you can't land that plane here ten minutes early mate”.
Our menu for the second leg is below but we skipped supper as we didn't feel like eating at 3am.However breakfast about an hour out of Heathrow was an excellent meal. I had the Omelette.
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I love a good cruise (well any cruise really :)) so I'm aboard and all ready.

The Icelandic title is very classy :)
thank you. I tried to use it but the locals spoke such excellent English I missed out. We found out that Icelandic is the Old Norwegian as spoken by the Vikings and is one of the oldest languages still spoken
 
One gripe about Cathay is their PE seat controls, which I've found on more than one flight need Tarzan muscles to recline and restore the seatback. My wife's seatback was completely stuck and I saw lots of passengers struggling to move theirs. The second flight seats had the leg supports but again you had to practically stand on it to get it back under the seat. Other than that minor quibble we have always found Cathay to be very good.

Arrived LHR on time at 6.15am and had prebooked a room at the Hilton at Terminal 4. We took the free train transfer from T2 to T4. It's a bit of a walk along tunnels and walkways to the station but OK? You have to take a free ticket from the machine and insert into the entry and exit gates, easy. This is the Heathrow Express side of the terminal, not the underground; you can transfer via the underground but you pay for that.
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The Hilton is not exactly inside T4 and you get to it from departures level 2 and about 8 minutes walk along a covered walkway to the hotel. Here is our cosy little room. The walkway also serves another hotel the Premier Inn.
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This is a business style hotel with a nice feel, good lobby bar and restaurants. We booked through Qantas and got 6 points per dollar. However I think you miss out on Hhonors points by not booking direct. Since I am a Hhonors member we got free wi-fi.
Not wishing to waste our day we hopped onto the Piccadilly line tube at T4 and went into Green Park. Our day excursion ticket cost £12.70, (a return tube ticket would have cost £12!) each and allowed travel on all central zones. It was very hot at 29C in London! Sad to see Green Park and St James Park so dry. We walked across to Horseguards Parade and caught the end of the changing of the Guards with massive crowds around Buckingham palace. Then had a light lunch in the little cafe in St James Park and caught the tube back to Heathrow.
Back at the Hilton we went to Oscars restaurant off the lobby for a light meal and enjoyed a delicious meze plate with glasses of beer and wine. It cost £18 for the meze, £3 for my small beer and £9.50 for my wife's glass of red. Plus VAT and 12.5% service! Shame our dollar value is so low.
 
Heathrow to Keflavik was on Icelandair for the first time. It's a 3 hour flight. They are a low cost airline with a fleet of Boeing 757.200 with Saga/business at 2+2 and economy at 3+3. Leather seats were a bit worn. You buy food, drinks and headsets on board and with credit card only, but tea and coffee was free. It was a full flight. We were not seated together but that was my fault for not checking.
Service was good from a tall Icelandic crew and we noticed you can also book day and other tours on board.
From overheard conversations we noticed that a lot of the passengers were going to Canada or the US and using Icelandair to break the journey. It has a very extensive route network from Europe to US and Canada via Keflavik. We also saw that they offer a stopover of up to 7 days in Iceland with no additional charge on the airfare.
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Not a lot of room in Y but it was quite OK for a short flight. Not sure of the price for this leg as APT arranged all of the flights for one total cost. We arrived in KEF to be met by our APT arranged taxi driver for the 45 minute drive to our hotel for the night, the Radisson Blu in the centre of Reykjavik. The drive along excellent freeway roads was across our first sight of treeless flat lava fields common in Iceland.
 
We had one night in Reykjavik before boarding Hebridean Sky and booked the Radisson Blu right in the centre of town and a short walk to the ship. Small ships dock in the centre close to the lovely Concert Hall but the big cruise ships are a coach trip into town. Iceland is expensive which we knew and were to have confirmed. APT charged us AUD$870 for the one night at the Blu, which we accepted because we also got an allowance having done many tours with APT. We could have booked the same room/same date for about AUD$695 that is still not cheap.
Here is the hotel and our room.
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The building is 1919 and nicely restored in simple style. It's location is the feature.
 
I agree with the others, a good TR. Please keep it coming.
 
While there is no such thing as a bad trip report, this is great so far. Looking forward to more.
 
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No problems uploading photos :)

Good start
 
Thank you everyone for all the kind comments. I was unsure about uploading the photos but that seems to work OK. I meant to include the following photos in the London stop. Our Meze plate at Oscars in the Heathrow Hilton, and the guards returning to base after the trooping of the colour, with police equestrian escort.
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First full day in Reykjavik and our quick discoveries and Icelandic terms
We very soon established that:-

Telstra has no coverage in Iceland, Vodafone does. We bought a local Simcard with 5Gb of date for around $30.

This wasn’t going to be a Tee shirt and shorts tour as the temps were around 8 to 14C.

We had about 22 hours of sunshine to enjoy.

It was going to be expensive to eat in Iceland when off the ship.

Icelanders still eat Puffin, Whale and horse! We did try the Artic Char, which is a lot like trout and very tasty - see photo of Iceland Platter menu.

The pictures are of a couple of local menus we saw where the Fish and Chips cost around $27 at a rough conversion of ISK80 to AUD$1. The Icelandic platter with Puffin is around $45

At first we found the names of places hard to get our tongue around but you can get a pretty good idea of the geography in Iceland from the names:-
Jokull means there is a glacier, Foss is a waterfall, Vik is a harbour or bay, Fjall is a mountain, Kirkja is a church, Etc.


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