Insider Iceland

Alda Sigmundsdóttir has been a reliable source of information on Iceland for over a dozen years now. I’ve been following her Iceland Weather Report blog for just as long. It was a must-read during the 2008 kreppa and its aftermath, when her opinions were featured in numerous articles and even on BBC broadcasts!

Although her old blog is pretty much dormant, you can still get a glimpse of her activities at her FaceBook page. Alda has kept writing about Iceland and now heads her own mini-publishing empire. Although I’ve got most of her titles, and have even been a beta reader for her last two, it is still a thrill when I get one of her books in the mail, complete with Icelandic postmark and personal inscription:



This is the book I was looking for seventeen years ago when I first started visiting Iceland. It is concise, packed with information about Iceland and its current “tourism situation” as well as a rumination on what a tourist in Iceland can expect and how a tourist should behave to maximize his or her experience. This is a far cry from the usual guide book. If you are thinking about going to Iceland, get this book! As I intimated last December, the Icelandic coverage at FITK is diminishing, I’ve done it too long, things are changing there so fast that now I’m too far out of the loop and another trip back doesn’t seem likely. So I say hats off to Alda, for this labor of love, for keeping the dream of Iceland (and its sometimes bitter truths) alive.