Welcome to Iceland Guest - Your Online Travel Guide.

Iceland Guest is an information website for your travel to Iceland. On this site you can get all the tourist information you need for your vacation in Iceland. We hope that you will find this online travel guide useful in planning your holidays in Iceland.

About Iceland
Iceland is a refreshingly unconventional travel destination. The Icelandic nature is unspoilt, exotic and mystical with its spouting geysers, active volcanoes, tumbling waterfalls, towering mountains, vast lava plains and magical lakes. Iceland’s fjords, glaciers and highland plains present visitors with some of the most beautiful and enchanting places they will ever see, as well as a rare feeling of utter tranquillity.

For travelers on a quest for action, Iceland’s pristine nature offers great potential for outdoor activities such as snowmobiling, horse riding, cave exploring, hiking, swimming, skiing, river rafting, kayaking and mountain safaris on modified four-wheel drives, to name but a few. Iceland supports a surprisingly diverse Nordic flora and fauna and is an ideal place for ornithology enthusiasts, while also offering some of the world’s best whale watching destinations.

About Reykjavik
Reykjavík sometimes feels like a cosmopolitan capital and a tiny seaside village - all wrapped up in one. But Reykjavík has the best of both worlds; the qualities of a modern, forward-looking society complemented by a close connection to Iceland‚s beautiful and unspoilt nature.

Reykjavík’s legendary nightlife is bolstered by plentiful cultural and social happenings in addition to an abundance of first-class restaurants. The size of Reykjavik city centre is also limited enough to allow for easy navigation by foot. Reykjavík has been described as a young and daring city that is characterized by strong contrasts. Conveniently small, clean and safe, it is more or less free from the major problems that haunt many other capitals. Big city events are frequent, the winter lights festival finished recently with thousands of participants and more tourist at this time of the year than we are used to.

Fast Food

Purple Onion - Hafnarstræti 18 Reykjavik, Tel. 551 5858

Purple Onion

Fast Food with the Magic Flavour of Middle-Eastern Cuisine.

One of the most notable fast food joints in Reykjavík is The Purple Onion. It serves really delicate and wholesome snacks, very common in the middle-eastern country Syria.

The hallmark is the savoury Shawarma, which is made by placing strips of meat or marinated chicken on a skewer with animal fat and an onion or tomato placed at the top of the stack for flavoring. The skewer rotates in front of or over a flame so that the meat is grilled from all sides and cut right before serving. It is then made up into a special sandwich out of Arabic lafa bread with added vegetables and dressing.

The special dressing at The Purple Onion is made out of a secret recipe but its main ingredients are homemade yogurt and garlic. Common dressings in general include tahini, humus, garlic, mayonnaise, pomegranate concentrate and a chili sauce in any combination. Once the sandwich is made up it is normally dipped in the fat dripping from the skewer and then briefly seared against the flame. In Syria and Lebanon chicken shawarma sandwiches are generally toasted after being made up.

Shawarma is one of the oldest existing recipes in the world. It has been said that it possibly derives from the Turkish döner kebab and developed at the same time as the very similar Greek gyros and the Mexican taco. Today Shawarma is served in many different versions in the Arab countries and it is, for instance, considered the national dish of Israel.

Apart from the very popular Shawarma, the menu at The Purple Onion consists of delicate Sheslek served on sticks like Arabic kebab and Arias Maria, a specialty originated from the city of Haleb near Damascus. On the other side, apart from all the Arabic food, The Purple Onion also proudly serves classic “brickoven” Italian pizzas in many versions.