For the Coolest Holiday This Year, Try Iceland

Miz

utani-San and her three tea ceremony students are staring down a snow-filled crevasse, contemplating the best route to the bottom. More than 1,000 years ago the world's first parliament met here, on the banks of Thingvalla Lake in Iceland, so tribal chieftains could hash out disagreements without resorting to violence. Its origins may be civilized but the icy gorge is a far cry from Mizutani's school in Tokyo. "You won't get me down there," says Odin, our tour guide, as he watches the four ladies flounder through the thigh-deep snow. Having traveled halfway around the world, the women aren't going to let a little bad weather stop them from admiring the basalt cliffs that border the country's largest lake—and from taking in a little history while they're at it.

We are spending the day touring what is known as Iceland's Golden Circle, a 200-km-long loop east of Reykjavik that links the nation's most popular thermal, natural and historical sites. As we plow effortlessly along snowy country roads on a Winter Wonderland tour in a humvee hybrid, Mizutani admits that this is her second trip to Iceland this year. And this outing is a good diversion while she and her students wait for what they really came to see—the northern lights.

For many Asian travelers Iceland has become the hot new winter destination. Young Asians are joining their European counterparts for all-night revelry in the hippest clubs in the capital, Reykjavik, which is rapidly becoming known as the Ibiza of the North. Other Asian tourists are drawn by the Christmas and New Year festivities, winter sports and natural attractions. "The Japanese want the northern lights," says tour operator Thorir Gardarsson, whose fleet of superjeeps regularly conveys convoys of Japanese and Taiwanese around the country. "The Taiwanese demand snow. They love snowmobiling although they're a little bit dangerous; they don't really listen to the guide."

True to stereotype, my Japanese companions on the humvee have no interest in machines. "Iceland's clean and healthy," says one, of the qualities that lured her so far from home. "We like the Blue Lagoon," says another, referring to the mineral-rich hot springs where visitors can soak in milky-looking 38C water while snowflakes fall lazily on their heads and shoulders. "And," she adds, "we want to try Icelandic food."

The Japanese eagerly tuck into grilled puffin, raw seal and lamb's head jelly. Taiwanese tourists, on the other hand, mostly just want to eat Chinese food. "We get lots of Taiwanese in here," confirmed a chef at Shanghai in Reykjavik, who is an escapee from China's northeast. And what brought him to Iceland of all places? "Well, the weather's actually better than in Liaoning province," he grins. In a neighboring bookshop a volume of famous Viking sayings is available in Chinese, and the owners are hoping for a jump in sales when Germany relaxes visa restrictions for mainland Chinese in 2002; some of the influx are expected to hop on the daily Frankfurt to Reykjavik flight. Currently the biggest draw for visitors from Hong Kong and China is New Year's Eve when residents and guests alike detonate mammoth fire crackers—the kind usually forbidden to nonprofessionals. Iceland has no army, but veterans of the event say that for two hours civil war seems to erupt.

For now peace reigns and we continue on to the raging waterfall at Gullfoss, then to nearby Geysir, which lends its name to geothermal waterspouts the world over. It only erupts four times a day but neighboring Strokkur Geyser obliges every five to seven minutes, teasing many a click from an itchy shutter finger as it bubbles over before gushing skyward.

At the gift-and-snack shop where we stop for a cup of hot chocolate, employees are grumbling. "I like a white Christmas," says one, "but this is too much, too soon. Last year we had no snow at all, nor two years before that." Then how could Odin call his tour Winter Wonderland? "Oh, we can always go up to a glacier," he says. "On this tour, snow is guaranteed!" It's also guaranteed at Akureyri, a center for winter sports, in the north where there is a greater chance of seeing the unreliable northern lights. A 45-minute flight from Reykjavik, the city of 15,000 holds special holiday events through December, and tourists from Kobe have come to watch the mayor switch on the Christmas lights. Then they head off to shop at Jolagardinn, Iceland's only year-round Christmas store. But what they're still wishing for at Christmas is for someone to throw the big switch to power up the lights in the sky.