Saturday night in Reykjavik is all about the Runtur.
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If you Google the term, YouTube videos of bored-out-of-their-skulls twenty-somethings driving in circles around small town Iceland appear. Luckily, the big city take is more of an all night pub and club crawl than a parade of Range Rovers and Peugeots.
First, we build ourselves a boozing base at Orange where dining gimmicks are taken to a gastronomic level. Our first course comes with a side of dry ice poeykjavikured over the table to create a smoky eating surface. There are prawns served from a metal basket suspended from a helium filled balloon that zips towards the ceiling as soon as the last shrimp is eaten. We cleanse our palettes with a game of bingo before finishing up with liquid nitrogen ice cream that looks like popcorn.
The pace of the Runtur that follows is perfect. Instead of getting bored of a bar and ordering another drink to spice things up, we hop to the club next door. As the night goes on, the music gets louder and the puddles of vomit along the Laugavegur become an obstacle course for tipsy walkers.
Our last Icelandic experience is saved for the Runtur’s morning after. I worried that the Blue Lagoon was going to be Iceland’s version of Wild Water Kingdom with rowdy teens pantsing each others’ swimsuits in the geothermal pools and lifeguards screaming “no running on the deck” as kids cannonball into the steaming water.
It’s not. The milky bath is an instant cure for Saturday night’s shenanigans and smoothing on a face mask from bowls of silica sand on the edge of the spring makes up for days of minimal sleep. A Blue Lagoon skincare line incorporating the geothermal spa’s miraculous mix of minerals, silica and algae is available online with plans to launch its creams and serums in Canada in the next two years.
