07-17-2026 Visiting a Volcanic Island, Heimaey

Our view from the front of the Explorer Lounge on our last day of the cruise

I woke thinking about the day to come, realizing that this would be our last full day on the Neptune. The days have run together, and even remembering what happened yesterday begins to fade. Each port we have visited has had its own unique character, and yet the overall feeling is always about spectacular, dramatic, overwhelming beauty unlike anything I have seen anywhere. 

Recent volcanic deposits on Heimaey are colorful

It is like a concentrated beauty somehow. Unlike the many beautiful places we have been in the US, here it slaps you in the face from the moment land is visible in the early mornings from our balcony until we watch the rolling seas and the setting sun after 11PM.

The charming reindeer hides shed horribly so we flipped it over

Our ship was scheduled to anchor in the harbor at Heimaey, in the Westman Islands of Iceland, after 9AM. I signed up for the simple included walking tour of the town as our excursion for the day, and it wasn’t scheduled until after noon, so we had time to relax after breakfast in our favorite spot in the Explorer Lounge.

Settling in with coffee in our comfy chairs, where we could watch the tenders coming and going, was the perfect way to spend the morning.

The charming guy from Shetland

I looked up from my reading to see a tall, lanky, gray-haired man standing at the window in front of us. His eyes looked kind and he wasn’t intrusive, but somehow I knew he might like a bit of conversation, so I asked him where he was from.

I was delighted when he said one word, “Shetland.”

“Oh!” I said. “I have wanted to see Shetland ever since we watched the series on BritBox. It was a favorite of ours, so much so that we watched it three times.”

The two of us then proceeded to talk about what a great pair Jimmy Perez and Tosh were in that show. I mentioned the tiny, narrow, one-lane roads that were photographed from a drone, showing no cars anywhere, and he said that is exactly what it was like. He told me he had been a fisherman all his life and that now he was dealing with Parkinson’s. He still lives on Shetland, not far from Lerwick, the town I always wanted to see.

It was such a sweet and delightful interaction. I felt grateful for the time with him, sharing what it is like living on the Shetland Islands.

Tender navigating the narrow harbor from the ship to Haimaey

Mo and I went one last time to the Pool Grill for a bit of lunch before our scheduled tour at 12:30. The trip to port through the narrow harbor was fascinating, and I tried so hard to get photos of all the birds we could see nesting on the cliffs through the windows of the tender. No luck. All were fuzzy in the final shots.

The Viking tour coordinator that made our day perfect

Once off the tender, we were met by the red-coated Viking tour guides and discovered that we had missed our walking tour by almost an hour. I was standing there with my walker, feeling devastated, and asked if there was a map we could use.

The woman who had often made sure we were on the right tour said, “That would mean that you wouldn’t see the best part of the island. It is almost 4 miles to the volcano museum. Let me see if I can get you on this bus.”

As a result, a missed free tour gave us the opportunity to enjoy the not-free bus tour of the island, and anything less would have been such a loss. Just one more instance of how well Viking made sure I had the best cruise experience possible, even with my limitations.

The only photo I took of AJ

Once on the bus, we were treated to what may have been the most entertaining bus guide we experienced on the entire cruise. The young man, nicknamed AJ, was born on Heimaey. He teaches at an elementary school in winter, runs a karate club, and fronts a rock band at night. It seemed the kid had at least six lives. He introduced his driver as half the island’s “A-team” because they hadn’t had an accident in at least two weeks.

Then his deadpan tour of the town was so funny. Two supermarkets, schools, and quick, get out your cameras, here are our two traffic lights. His delivery was charming and hilarious and had us all laughing throughout the tour.

A pro at only 15 years old

He drove us past a giant cliff where his 15-year-old student was demonstrating spranga, the traditional rope-swinging/cliff-descending technique once used to collect seabird eggs. Just wandering around town, we would have definitely missed that.

Then he told us the story of the “pufflings,” baby puffins.

The pufflings emerge at night, but some burrows face town, so the babies glide in the wrong direction. AJ described it as “it rains pufflings.” The whole community goes out with flashlights and cardboard boxes. Someone spots one and yells, PUFFLING! They scoop them up, take them home overnight...

...and AJ says, “And then the next day we eat them.”

“Nah, I’m kidding.”

Then they take them back to the cliffs and send them toward the ocean. AJ himself was featured in a New York Times Animal podcast episode about the puffling rescue, and his band even made a death-metal puffling song for it!

Along the route, we saw the beautiful grounds of the Westman Islands Golf Club, one of the most dramatically situated golf courses in Europe. Opposite the golf club were the Elephant Cliffs, and after AJ pointed out that elephant shape, it was impossible not to see it.

Find the elephant

AJ, being a musician, also had to point out the location of Þjóðhátíð (the National Festival), held on the island every year.

Location of the music festival in August

AJ stressed that the festival was not only about almost 20,000 people coming together to celebrate the music, but that it was about love. On the last night of the festival, in a tradition called Brekkusöngur, literally “slope singing”, thousands of people sing familiar songs, many of them love songs, together in that natural amphitheater. The festival song he sang for us was a love song, and he described it as being much like Iceland’s version of “Amazing Grace” in the sense that everyone knows it.

And then AJ burst into song, singing for us as the bus maneuvered along the narrow roads leading toward the volcano.

But the emotional heart of the bus tour was the story he told about the 1973 eruption that very nearly destroyed the island and the town.

I don't remember which house belonged to AJ's grandfather

AJ pointed out the house his grandfather built in 1968, which survived the 1973 eruption. His grandmother and mother evacuated, but Grandpa smuggled himself back onto Heimaey, eventually joining about 200 local men who had returned. When lava threatened to close the harbor, they worked around the clock pumping seawater onto it. They knew that the harbor was the lifeblood of the town and that if the flowing lava closed it, their community might never recover. AJ said his grandfather believed that if they had begun one week later, the island would have been lost.

AJ ended the story with a marvelous finale. Grandpa developed leukemia in 2002, and doctors gave him two years to live. AJ’s parents hurried up and married so Grandpa could walk his daughter down the aisle.

Except Grandpa didn’t die.

He is still alive at 80, playing with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

So AJ’s punchline was essentially: my parents got married for nothing.

Our bus tour ended with admission to the spectacular Eldheimar museum, at the edge of Eldfell, the volcano that buried nearly 400 houses and buildings during the 1973 eruption. I did look wistfully at the steep trails with many stairs that led toward the top of the crater. But I have stood on the slopes of Etna and hiked to the top of Vesuvius, so I wasn’t terribly disappointed that I wouldn’t manage to hike to the top of Eldfell.

The entire museum has been built around what remains of one of the homes buried in the eruption. We were given audio guides that shifted the story with each section of the museum that we entered. The museum was a dramatic depiction of what it must have been like to experience that eruption, part of the story that has earned Heimaey the description “Pompeii of the North.”

The imagery and sounds of the displays were dramatic and very well done for what was a small museum on a small island off the east coast of Iceland.

We would have missed so much if the Viking cruise guides hadn’t made room for us on that tour bus.

Neptune from the tender

Once back on the ship came the dreaded job of repacking everything and making sure our large bags were outside our stateroom door by 9 PM. This may be the least exciting part of cruising, and trying to figure out what we absolutely need in our carry-on that night and the next morning until we land in Portland can be daunting.

I have been writing almost every day about each of our days on the Neptune, and I have decided that I will leave you, my faithful readers, on the Neptune, peacefully anchored off Heimaey, for a few days before I return to writing about our trip back to Portland and at last to Sunset House.

Maybe in that final post I will add a few thoughts about Viking and our ship.

There were puffins on the island but we never managed to get to the cliffs where they were located

Till then, enjoy floating around in the North Atlantic and the Westman Islands of Iceland.