Blue Lagoon
Iceland is a hotbed (literally!). Living on a volcanic island, Icelanders make good work of the water all around them. The runoff from Europe's biggest glacier goes right into the pipes and into people's homes, untreated. It's also, naturally, bottled and sold as the purest H20 in the world. (It really is quite good.) And then there's all the bubbling happening below ground. Icelanders use the bed of hotwater for geothermal heating, which is what deems this one of the greenest countries on the planet, environmentally speaking. But they also have fun with it. Hydrothermal pools dot Reykjavik and surrounding areas. The biggest is Blue Lagoon, about 50 km from town. After a day of walking around the city, I signed up for the "romantic" twilight trip.

Blue Lagoon is the byproduct of a local geothermal power plant. A mix of fresh and seawater is heated up to 240 degrees beneath a layer of porous volcanic rock and emerges to the earth's surface. Apparently, in the early days of the plant, operators would send overflow water to a nearby bed of rock, assuming, I guess, that it would evaporate or leak back into the earth. Instead, the minerals in the water reacted with the rock and sealed the bottom, causing the dry bed to fill with water. Not long after, locals began showing up. And now, of course, the locals charge the tourists for the privilege. Many people apparently lay over in Reykjavik for 3 or 4 hours and hop on the bus to Blue Lagoon -- or at least it's suggested in the pamphlets that many people could do this. Everyone receives a wristband with an embedded RFID chip (did i mention this is an incredibly wired place? there's ubiquitous wifi and cell coverage), which opens lockers and keeps you from having to carry a key.

It's an extremely chilly first dozen or so steps into the pool, but after that, downright toasty...about 100 degrees. Closer to the feed, it's probably 10-15 degrees hotter still. There are small buckets of white mud everywhere, containing naturally occuring silica, blue-green algae, and minerals, all of which are supposed to be great for the skin. As for the romance portion of the program, well, I must say there was a good amount of making out going on. These people are, at their roots, Scandinavians, after all, and so are irresistible, even to each other. Oh, one last thing. I boarded the bus around 915 with the sun still pretty high in the cloudless sky, and quickly noticed an American family sitting across the aisle. Two prep-school teens complained loudly about everything until one darted back to the snack room for one last bag of Doritos. With the kid gone, the parents filled the bothersome silence. The mother yammered worriedly about how her son was going to miss the bus. When she stopped for a breath, Dad chimed in with this pearl, "Oh, I forgot," he said, reacting to nothing in particular. "This is the place where it never gets dark."