Hi - I realize I'm not in Iceland anymore... But I was just cruising through some photos on Facebook and found this one. That's me. I love how this gives a great impression of scale. The rocks are BIG and I am >tiny<. This is from near Vik, and the photo is courtesy of Laura, one of the other participants in the Icelandic course this July.

heima er best...

Hi

I just got back to my apartment a while ago. Decided that before I left Iceland I needed to visit the local pool and sit in the hot tub one last time.

I fly to London tomorrow morning, spend 24 hours there, and then catch a flight to Toronto... where I will meet my brother (so cool) who is coming to visit me in the lesser London for a few days.

I am not so excited to leave iceland. Had a great time here and learned a lot. My Icelandic is still rough, but a heck of a lot better than when I came. Seems very odd to think that tomorrow I will be in an English-speaking environment again...

I had a fantastic time visiting relatives in the south-east of Iceland earlier this week. MANY THANKS to my relatives there for having me for a wonderful few days. It was really nice to visit again. I hope I get to see them all again soon.

Time for bed. Here are a couple photos from this week - with Asta Sol (program coordinator for Snorri.is) and with some other Snorri participants from various years.

Við sjáumst!

Open doors and open minds . . .

I am in Oslo now. Just spent a quick day in Trondheim, and now about to head down to Malmö and catch my flight back to Iceland Wednesday. I’ll spend another week or so in Iceland before I fly back to Canada on the 5th of October. I’m looking forward to visiting some relatives there again, and also spending some time at the Arni Magnusson Institute, reading some neat books and talking with the people studying there.

More about Oslo and Trondheim another time. For now it is important I say something about Servas. I hope my hosts do not mind me mentioning them here, but I’ve had such a wonderful time with them and it has been such an important part of my trip that I cannot simply leave it out!

Servas is an international peace program and an open-doors program. A person can get interviewed and accepted in his/her home country (I got in while I was in Iceland, which was a bit of an exception), and then you can ask for contact information for “hosts” in various countries around the world. This is not an on-demand type of opportunity. It is a privilege and an opportunity to meet people and spend quality time getting to know them. Getting a place to sleep for a couple nights at a time and a meal or two are secondary (but VERY nice) features.

So. I tried Servas for the first time in Copenhagen. I stayed with Bjorn and his family there, and got to enjoy a wonderful dancing performance by his two kids, Kalle and Sigga. Bjorn was VERY kind and generous and we had a very nice time talking about anything from his work with employment challenges in Denmark, to how he made himself a REAL shirt of chain-mail (weighs more than all my luggage...! and if you know me then you’ll know that I’ve got a lot of luggage!), or how he and his family might move to Canada for a year or so! I think near Vancouver would be an excellent place... but maybe I am biased!

In Odense I stayed with Birthe and Johannes. They are retired. Birthe used to do nursing, and even did trips to the Mediterranean with some groups of patients; Johannes used to work in a small publishing/printing company, and now he is collecting stamps and telling fantastic stories with them, particularly about natives in North America. I got to have dinner with them and their son, Bo, and his wife and two kids. It was really special and a lot of fun, and I learned a lot about Denmark and life there. And the food was oh so good!

In Stockholm I stayed with a family living outside the central city, at the end of one of the subway lines. Ulla and Ulf welcomed me generously into their home, as did their three daughters. It was really neat to talk with them about things in Sweden and Canada and the world, and life in general and specific. I felt very comfortable there, and they even put me in touch with a friend of theirs in Gotland who works as a blacksmith! I’m hoping I’ll be able to correspond with him a bit, or maybe even visit his workshop one day!

In Uppsala I stayed with Eva and Harley. They were amazing! They drove me around over the weekend and we all had a great time visiting runestones, old stone carvings from 2500 years ago, old remains of houses from the Viking-Age and Migration Period, and also Gamla Uppsala and the famous grave mounds there and at Valsgarde. Harley is putting together his new and improved PC, and I wish him lots of luck with it! Eva makes the most amazing tuna casserole thing... and I’d really like the recipe!

I made some snap decisions last week that landed me in Oslo sooner than I had planned (which is a good thing, as it turns out, since I wouldn’t have had much time there otherwise) Anyways. I got a bit stuck cause accomodation can be VERY tough to find in the big cities, even in late September. So I couldn’t find anything, but Liv and Michael rescued me and let me stay with them for two nights in Gjøvik. Gjøvik is a small town, with more grave mounds (actually woke up and looked out the window to see some at the farm just across the road!) and it is a lovely two-hour train-ride north of Oslo. Their family is very musical. Maia Beth, their daughter, has a lovely voice, and played the piano beautifully the first evening I was there. Their son David plays the cello with an orchestra and is also studying to finish his Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering. Liv teaches music, and Michael admits modestly that he is very good at playing the stereo... I had a lot of fun talking with them and learning about how they have moved back and forth from the USA (Michael told me he is originally from a small town called “New York”) and Norway (Liv grew up in Bergen), and how the graduation year in high schools here has a phenomenon known as the “Russ” . . . Sounds like fun, although perhaps not so helpful for exam preparation!

So that’s my experience (in short) with Servas so far. It has been truly wonderful and made my trip much more meaningful and engaging. I plan to become a host myself, although I doubt London Ontario is the most exciting of places to visit when compared with Stockholm, Uppsala, Copenhagen, Odense, or Oslo/Gjøvik.

Many many thanks to all my hosts!

Oslo

Hi - really time for me to fall asleep now, but just wanted to post quickly. I am in Oslo. I took a boat from Stockholm to Helsinki for a few days, visited with my great and wonderful fun friend Rogier there. Then took a train to Turku, a boat from Turku to Stockholm and a train from Stockholm to Oslo. I am tired, but Norway is by far the most beautiful landscape I've seen in Scandinavia so far! Lots of gorgeous trees and big hills and lakes and fjords. Helsinki definitely wins for most amazing architecture. Stockholm has the most beautiful architecture I've seen in these parts.

Going to see some more viking ships tomorrow! :-)

Time for sleep!

Stockholm and Uppsala

I entered Sweden through Goteborg, and visited a small museum there, as well as the Museum of Natural History, which boasts the only stuffed blue whale in the world. This guy is a baby boy, measuring some 16 metres (an adult could be over 36!). I think the vast majority of my time in Stockholm was absorbed in the historical museum, and particularly in their Viking exhibit. It is a huge and very impressively put together show. They have some swords, and the one in the middle here is clearly pattern-welded. You can see the visual effect on the blade. They also have a famous and unique iron staff from a woman's grave. This staff was perhaps part of the tool-kit for a sorceress of sorts. You can see the unique house-model on the top, and the basket design in the middle of the shaft.

Stockholm is of course also the site where the Nobel Prize is awarded. The gala and dance happen at the "City Hall", which is a fairly new building (built in the early 20th century) but VERY spectacular. The dance happens in a hall that is entirely coated in gold. It may seem impossible, but the whole hall used only some 14kg of gold.

I am in Uppsala now, and heading back to Stockholm tomorrow, and then to Helsinki tomorrow evening. One of my friends from the summer course in Icelandic is teaching Dutch in Helsinki, and he invited me to visit, and the ferry is fairly cheap (cheaper than a passenger ticket to Victoria from Vancouver I think! But this is a 17 hour trip!), and I'll never be closer than here, so I'm going! I think I may take the train north through Finland and then south through Norway. My trainpass lets me do that, so why not?!

In Uppsala today I saw the famous grave mounds at Gamla Uppsala - these are from around 600AD, the time of Beowulf. I also got to see the much more prolific (in terms of rich goods and treasures) mounds at Valsgard, also from about the same period. There are runestones EVERYWHERE around Uppsala, from about 1000AD. They usually mark the death of someone, and detail the names of the wife, brothers, sons, or other relations, as well as who paid for the stone to be raised, and who actually carved the runes. It is very easy to see them anywhere really, and it gives a neat impression that these stones (and perhaps less lasting runes in wooden monuments and such) may have been the equivalent of modern-day advertisements and such, marking popular river-crossings and high-traffic areas with the idenities of major families and poliitcal powers.

Visiting Icelandic relatives in Denmark

Some of my Icelandic relatives moved to southern Denmark, to a town called Svenstrup. I got to visit them briefly for a couple days and it was really really fun and special to see them again (it's been three years since I last saw them). Svenstrup and environs are kind of surprising I think. At first glance it seems like a beautiful and quiet farming area with not much in the way of industrial or commercial development. But then there is Danfoss. Danfoss is a HUGE company with connections all over the world, and they have the Danfoss Universe nearby Svenstrup. This is a sort of technological scientific park and museum where you can play with all sorts of very neat things and learn about how things work by making them work. Very fun. I don't have much time right now, but the photos show the blue cube, with a glacier exhibit inside (with real ice glaciers and a lightning machine and a lava room) and me on a swing machine that moves as you apply force, and then the newest building, Cumulus, named and shaped after the cloud-type, in which you can learn about how the digital world works.

Time for bed now. I'm in Stockholm now. Spent a day in Goteborg yesterday, and will spend another day or so in Stockholm, then go to Uppsala, and then maybe to Finland! Sadly the Viking-Age village and archaeological site named Birka is closed now for the 'winter' season (which is unfair cause it's still sunny and warm and rather summer-like, and I really want to see it, so it should still be open I think!) But I got to see an AMAZING exhibit on medieval archaeological finds today. There was a pattern-welded sword from the Viking Age, which made me very excited. Also LOTS of other iron objects and finds, including the most impressive find of smithing tools from the Viking Age EVER! Very very very exciting place for me, and I spent three hours ONLY in the Viking Exhibit, and only got about half way through it. It is a big place. That's just the one exhibit too. There are many other exhibits in the same museum. I'm going back there tomorrow!

busted stuff . . .

here are a couple photos from the Bymuseet (city museum) in Odense. A sword-blade dating from about 900AD that has been bent before it was tossed into a bog. Not exactly sure why people did this. Maybe it was a way of disposing of enemy weapons after a battle so that they couldn't be used again, or so that their 'power' was removed?

The other is a brooch, from 900AD also I think. You can see the two animal figures (lost heads over 1000yrs!) looking at one another. Where they thought to be communicating with one another? What? Why? Why the arrangment with the other 'nodes'? What did it mean to wear something like this?

Odense and Als

I'm in Als now, in a small community called Svenstrup, visiting some Icelandic relatives. I don't have much time to post now. I spent two days in Odense and saw some neat museums there, one with spear-heads from the stone-age and swords from the Viking-Age! Also saw the HC Andersen museum (Odense is his hometown) and a fantastic train museum. Also got to see the remains of St. Knut at the big church in Odense!

That's all for now. I'm going north tomorrow, to Fredrickshavn, and then taking the ferry to Gotheborg where I will hopefully get to see more viking ships and such before heading to Stockholm and Uppsala!

Copenhagen

I flew to Copenhagen on Monday and I've been having a great but exhausting time exploring everything I can while I'm here. Time for some sleep now, so this'll be brief. Attached photos show Christiansborg, the royal palace (Denmark has the oldest monarchy in the world, or something like that? Definitely the oldest flag - made/found in the 12th century). This palace was built in the 19th century, but two previous versions were constructed in the 18th and 17th centuries. Both burned to the ground cause of fires in stove pipes. Before that, a fortress was errected here in the 12th century, and there is an archaeological exhibit under the current castle that shows the layers of buildings over 900 years. Very neat.

Canals are all over the place in Copenhagen. Here are some flatwater kayakers! Also some swords at the National Museum here. Sadly the pre-historic section is closed for rennovations, so these are mostly from the 12th century, which is a bit late to appeal to my PhD-tastes, but I still think I can see that the central blade is pattern-welded, which is kind of exciting (for me anyways . . .)

That's it for now. Time for sleep! I'm off to Odense tomorrow. Also visited the Viking Ships Museum in Roskilde yesterday!

Vik

Ok . . . so at the end of my camping trip I spent three nights in Vík on the southern coast of Iceland. Vík is a small town of about 300-500 people depending on where you draw the boundaries. It is a really nice place, and I camped right on the beach almost, listened to the waves all night, and ate my breakfast and dinner watching the beach and all the sea-birds. It was the perfect way to end the trip, and I'd been looking forward to returning to the beach there every since I first saw it in early July.

There is a glacier nearby, called Myrdalsjökull, and several headlands with big cliffs where various gulls and puffins nest. The grasslands nearby are home to one of the largest breeding colonies of Kría or arctic tern, and also the largest colony of mice in Iceland, not to mention also having some snails apparently. I heard the mice running around in the darkness, but couldn't see any. Never found any snails. Saw LOTS of kría, though! They are beautiful birds. I love how fleet of wing they are, and how protective of their territory. Basically wherever they are (regardless of whether it's a nesting ground or just their hang-out for the next 30 minutes) they attack you quite intently if you get too close. They are the farthest-travelled bird in the world I think - all the way from the south pole to Iceland, the UK, and etc... each year!

You can see the neat rock formations off the coast here. Supposedly two trolls came along and tried to either make off with a three-masted ship, or to take the entire island of Iceland away with them. The sun came up and turned them to stone. You can also see my tent in the arial shot of the beach - that subtle little speck of orange?

I spent another night at Skógafoss before returning to Reykjavík. I saw some neat old farm storage houses built into rock-faces, and when I walked all the way to the shore of the ocean I saw a whale skeleton. Skógafoss is where they filmed part of Beowulf and Grendel I think - the scenes where those dirty pagans were being converted in the icy cold river? I´m not sure, but I think that's the same place. But photos from Skógafoss will have to wait for a while . . . I'm going to Denmark on Monday and will be going about the mainland to see some museums that I hope will have inspiring and informational stuff in them for my PhD project! So . . . I should be able to post again over the next weeks while I'm there. I fly home to Canada on October 5-6, so hopefully see you in a month if you're in the London (Ontario) area!

Holaskjol

On the bus leaving Landmanalaugar we passed a very small campsite named Hólaskjól - this translates roughly as 'shelter of cliffs or rocks', and for good reason too. The campsite is located at the base of a cliff, sheltered from the oncoming weather (except not really - you just can't see it coming until it's on top of you, or this was my experience at least!). Along the hiking trail there are also a number of neat hidden shelters in the rocks. This is from an old lava floe called Eldgjá from about 1000 years ago (about the time when Iceland was settled and some of the action from the early sagas was happening). The lava is covered in thick thick moss (nearly a foot deep and VERY soft in most places) on top of rocks that (where they are exposed) are still very sharp and can grab hold of you and your clothes as though they've got grippy microscopic fingers like some bugs do. The shelters I found were all barely big enough to hold me (I took some photos, but they have sadly gone missing in the transition between camera and laptop) and I could even walk straight through some of them to another entrance. The photo of the trail here is one of my absolute favourite spots ever - the trail meanders between two elevated banks (maybe 7-10M high) for a long while, and it just feels very neat to walk through there.

I had planned to go to Laki (the BIGGEST lava erruption in recorded history), but decided instead to return to Hólaskjól. I still really want to see Laki someday, but I had a wonderful couple days at Hólaskjól. I think the place is underestimated simply because people don't think there's much 'to do' there. It has not been the subject of tourism and there are no detailed maps or hiking guides or anything frabricated to give context or direction to the place. It's very quiet. Not many people seem to camp there, and those that do are usually just passing through quickly en route to or from Landmanalaugar. There´s just one simple trail that follows the gorge and seems to be made by sheep more than people. The rest is just up to you.

There were two fox cubs living behind the bunk house. Their parents were killed - the fox population in Iceland is 'controlled.' There is one female cub (in this photo) and her brother. They were 10 weeks old when I was there, and depend mostly upon the ranger who lives there for their food. They are VERY cute.

There are two rivers that flow through here. One is in a gorge literally right beside the hiking trail in the photo. The gorge is maybe 60-100M deep, with vertical stone walls on either side, and there is a big waterfall squeezed into a narrow but deep bit of the gorge near the campsite. The other river has a much different appearance. It has a wide floodplain with black sand flats on either side. The water makes very interesting designs with the various colours (and weights) of sediment. There are no trees around at all. I found one token tree about 3 feet tall, protected by chicken wire right beside the bunk house. Otherwise the tallest vegetation is the mounds of moss-covered lava. It all seems very lush and nice.

A place called Landmanalaugar

This is a place called Landmanalaugar. I don’t know what else to say about it. I really can’t describe it, so I hope the photos help. It is AMAZING and VERY STUNNING. When I was hiking around here in the wind and rain I’d stop every now and then to look about, and regularly just drop my jaw and stare in wonder for a minute or two – it is too much to absorb, for me anyways! The colours and scale and diversity of the landscape make a big impression. I only got to see it in rain and mist and wind, so I can’t imagine how it might be in better visibility. It was certainly very surreal in the mist and rain!

There is a lot of obsidian in Landmanalaugar, and the rain makes it very reflective and shiny. The campsite at Landmanalaugar is right at the base of a huge lava floe (see the third photo here) and it’s a pain in the arse – it’s on about 1 inch of soil (if you’re lucky!) and then gravel and big rocks. It’s windy (or it was when I was there) and rainy (again, it was while I was there). So . . . pitching the tent was exciting . . . People use huge rocks to anchor their tents so they don’t blow away (since the pegs don’t get fixed very well in the ground), but a lot of the big rocks are rather porous (so not very heavy) so it’s a little comical.

There is a world-renowned hike from here to Þórsmörk that seems to take people anywhere from three to five days. I’d love to do it sometime, but want some friends to come with me – anyone interested?

There is a thermal stream nearby (from hot springs) that mixes with icy glacial water and makes a pretty decent hot bath-stream thing that people go and soak in after their hikes. It´s really nice, but very very cold to undress to your bathing-suit in the rain and wind. Not so bad to get out after a long hot soak . . . VERY NICE! If you sit for too long in one spot, or if you dig into the gravel at the bed of the stream, you find yourself getting VERY hot because of the hot springs!

Astropia!

Yesterday I went to see a recent release in movie theatres here. On the left is Tara Þöll, Atli, Júlia, me, and Breki (some of my cousins here). I met everyone last time I was here, so it's a lot of fun to be meeting them again (they all grew up so much in just three years!) and speaking much more Icelandic with them this time! Tara is a big Jonny Depp fan, and she also really likes Abe Sapien from the Hellboy movies and comic books. She also likes horses a lot. Breki is a big Star Wars fan and one of his favourite actors is Harrison Ford (also a big Indiana Jones fan, and we both agree that the one with Sean Connery is the best!). Júlia likes rock - Pearl Jam, ACDC, Iron Maiden - and she doesn't know how to window-shop: she always has to buy something . . . Atli likes techno, but he does not dance.

The movie we saw is an Icelandic movie called Astrópía. I don't think there's need for a translation - it's just Astropia, like Astronomical and something diminutive too . . . It was a lot of fun, and I didn't understand everything, but my cousin Breki (far right) answered a few questions quickly while we enjoyed the movie. It was not a difficult movie to follow, but it was quite clever and funny too!

The basic plot is that a Paris Hilton-type girl named Hildur falls into a tough spot when her boyfriend is put in jail for some sort of financial electronic scam or fraud. She manages to fall into a job at a comic-book geek-fan-type store with everything from Star Trek to D&D to other role playing games . . . etc... Basically exactly the place you would NOT expect to find a Paris Hilton working. But even though she initially knows nothing about any of it, the sales at the store go way way up cause she's there. She tries RPGs and kinda likes them (after first making horrible fun of it all, of course), and she sort of falls in love with one of the 'geeks,' who is a really cool elvish type guy in the RPG world, much like Legolas from LOTR. The movie has two or three 'worlds' or 'modes' - one is real live action in an every-day suburb of Reykjavík. Another world is a comic-book version of that same every-day world. The third world is the RPG world, which takes you into the spectacular wilderness of Iceland with characters resembling LOTR etc... and D&D. All three worlds eventually combine when the evil jail-break boyfriend kidnaps the Paris Hilton girl (who by the end of the movie is quite un-like a posh and princess-like Paris Hilton and much more . . . er . . . human and real?), and she is rescued by a band of RPG players in the fantasy world, and then the movie ends with a look at the real-life scene of car-wrecks and such that the RPG players supposedly accomplished in dealing with the bad guys . . . Of course Hildur kicks ass in the rescue too! It was a lot of fun and we had a great afternoon.

The only bat in Iceland . . .

Hi there -

This post is special. It's extra-especially for Christina and Erin! The bat girls (and all their fellow batty bat-people too!) who study bats (or have studied bats) in London Ontario, near London Ontario, and in Greece and all over the world. Bats are fun. Bats are nice. Bats are cute. Bats are REALLY fascinating. And bats are VERY important! I like bats. Maybe sometimes they seem scary or icky or whatever, but give bats a chance. You might be surprised how much you grow to like them! If not . . . and if you don't care to like bats at all, or even try to like them, and would prefer to be as far away from bats as possible . . . well . . . that's ok too I guess. You can just come to Iceland. NO bats here. I guess it's a bit tough to be nocturnal AND eat bugs when the bugs are mostly out during the summer . . . and when the sun is always out too during the summer . . . But not all bats eat bugs - some just eat fruit. You should talk with Christina or Erin if you have questions . . .

I met a guy from Quebec when I was at Ásbyrgi. His name is Sebastian and I tried really hard to speak French with him, but my French gets all mixed up with my Icelandic right now, so it's kinda funny. Anyways. He is a 'wildlife technician' working in Quebec on wind-farm surveys, figuring out how wind-farms affect bats. This was quite a coincidence, since Erin and Christina just gave some excellent workshops in Ontario on the same topic . . . Small world, eh?

Anyways. This is the one and only bat I've found in Iceland so far. It's on the side of a restaurant in downtown Reykjavik. It shares company with Mr. Spock and Dolly Parton. This demonstrates very clearly how alien the bat is (as well as Dolly Parton and Mr. Spock) to Iceland . . .

There is, however, a word for 'bat' in Icelandic. It is leðurblaka. It's feminine, so if you want to say THE bat, you would say leðurblakan. Leður is a word for leather, and blaka is a verb for flapping. The word for Biology in Icelandic is Líffræði, life-learning or -knowledge. A biologist is a líffræðingur. Dýr is a word for animal or beast. Dýrafræði is Zoology. A dýrafræðingur is someone who studies zoology, a zoologist. Christina and Erin are women, so we'd call each of them singularly a dýrafræðing, whereas we'd call Johnston a dýrafræðingur. Dýrafræði and Líffræði do not decline depending on what case they are used in. I like using words that don't decline - they are our friends, just like bats!

starry starry night . . .

Here is a shot I tried to get of the stars on August 13th at Hólaskjól. It was damn cold outside, and my camera batteries don´t last long in the cold, and I didn´t have any way of recharging them at this campsite, so I only tried one REALLY LONG exposure . . . which is fun, but maybe not so helpful for identifying neat constelations, and probably not the most interesting thing one can see when in Iceland, but I was thrilled to see stars again! (How is that for a run-on sentence from an English PhD, eh?!) I expect there is at least one or two people reading this who are savvy in constelations and such and can suggest some formations for me to look for that I might not see farther south? I found the big-dipper here . . .

Autumn in August?

So . . . I apologize for the disrupted chronology here, but I´d like to jump forward from my camping trip to the present tense. I don´t know if it was just two days ago, or maybe three, but things here have changed suddenly. It was fairly sunny and warm over the weekend. 'Warm' in a relative sense, since it really never gets above 20 here in Reykjavík, although it can in other areas in Iceland. But just the other day I went out to meet some friends and it smelled like fall, there was cold rain in the air, a chilly wind, and leaves were on the ground in suspiciously colourful hues . . . This is not overly unusual in other places where I´ve lived long enough to see some seasons change (Maple Ridge BC, London Ontario, Victoria BC). Sometimes there is a pre-fall, or a fall preview in late August or early September, and then another few weeks of hot and summer-like weather before the autumn really gets going in earnest. I'm not sure this is how things work here in Reykjavík. One of my relatives confirmed for me last night that, yes, indeed, autumn has arrived here, and it will be increasingly cold and wet and dark from now on. No more summer. So we'll see.

If anyone is under the impression that Iceland is always dark and cold and icy and such, perhaps you should come here during June-August to have your perception changed. I´ve got a tan (and I didn't do so on purpose), I´ve had at least one sunburn, and I did pack t-shirts and shorts, and I have used them, along with sandals. It can be a nice place in the summer. I've never known it to be otherwise, but I've only ever visited during June-August, so I'm interested to see what September is like!

Above is a photo taken from the top of the Ráðhús Reykjavíkur (the Reykjavík City Hall, my favourite building in the city!) looking at a lazy evening post-rain sky over the city as the sun is low on the horizon behind me at about 10pm. Only two months ago the sun would still have been quite high in the sky at this time of night, and would only have touched the horizon at a few moments past midnight. Now we get honest and truthful darkness here for about two hours every night, sometime around 1am I guess. You can see stars (when the skies are clear) and when I stayed at Hólaskjól I saw the first stars I'd seen since visiting Christina's family cottage back in late June in Ontario. I also got to see the Perseid meteor shower that night! Very spectacular! I saw the moon for the first time when I was in Mývatn, but I only saw it for two nights, very low on the horizon, and I have not seen it since . . .

Myvatn & environs

The second major stop on my trip was Mývatn. I spent five whole nights camping there, mostly just cause there was so much to see, but also cause it was just a really nice place to be. There is such a drastic difference in the landscape everywhere in Iceland, but Mývatn is a stunning example. You can have volcanic fissures barely 30 years old in one direction (see above photo, with steam rising from a hot-pool I visited, which is not unlike the famous Blue Lagoon in the south-west), and you can have green lush farmland and even forests in another direction, and then if you walk just five minutes in another direction you can run into the Dimmuborgir lava field, where the release of steam from under a lava floe created the most ridiculous and amazing formations, such as ´Kirkjan´, The Church, a cave with two ´doorways´ that seem like human architecture, and a very spacious and acoustically pleasant interior. I got to listen to an annual Sunday afternoon church service there, with Ragnheiður Gröndal and her brother performing on the clarinet. They are quite a popular pair in Iceland right now, and Ragnheiður´s voice is very beautiful and (what´s better for me!) she ennunciates very clearly so it´s not too tough to understand her lyrics.

North of Mývatn is a volcano named Krafla, and several very large black lava floes that cover acres of land. There is a powerplant there, using hot water and steam to provide about half of Iceland with energy. The ´silencers´ were going at full ´steam´ while I visited the powerplant, and it sounded like the biggest and most pissed-off tea-kettle in the world. VERY LOUD! I wonder why they call them ´silencers´?

Mývatn also boasts one of the most diverse breading grounds for birdlife in the world. Over 15 species of ducks (including Harlequin and Golden-eye), swans, kría (aka arctic tern), song birds, and of course the elusive but ever-present birds of prey too. The ravens here are HUGE (you can see one at a distance in the photo of the lava-rock fence above) and always seem to travel in pairs or larger groups sometimes too. They have deep funny articulate voices that you can never mistake for anything else, and you can always hear them from a long ways away. Óðinn (the Norse god) was known to have two ravens (Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory) as companions who did searches of the world for him. He was always scared that Huginn would not return, but much more terrified that Muninn might not come back to him . . .

In Mývatn I hiked through Dimmuborgir, up and around the crater Hverfjall (the biggest of it´s type in the world, at about 150M deep and 1km across, from an erruption 2500 years ago), went up to Krafla, biked around the whole lake (it may be the third-largest lake in Iceland, but it still only takes a lazy day of biking to get around it) and hiked over the lava floe west of town. Mývatn has only about 300-400 inhabitants I think. MANY more tourists this time of year!

I´ve updates some of my earlier posts and added photos of the Harry Potter release.

The first days of my camping trip . . .

Hi again -

Will try to catch up a bit on some more details from the last three weeks. Attached here are some photos of the volunteers I worked with on trails - in the Vesturdalur valley not far from Ásbyrgi, at a place called Hljóðaklettar, (Resounding Rocks), in Ásbyrgi eating lunch in the rock face. Here is also a photo of me, Rogier (left) and Nils (right) at Þingvellir. Ásbyrgi is a giant canyon formed from a lava erruption about 10000 years ago, and then carved into the shape of horse-shoe by a glacial surge (from more volcanic activity) about 6000 years ago. The glacial flood-surge was so powerful it all happened in about 6 weeks. That is a LOT of rock to remove in a very short time! Hljóðaklettar is likewise a volcanic landscape carved out by water. The rocks you see in the distance used to be magma tubes, that cooled and then the surrounding rock was washed away by the glacial surge. Þingvellir is also rather volcanic. It is right on one edge of the rift between two tectonic plates, so you can see the fissures opening everwhere, and the other side of the valley is the opposite edge of the massive fissure that forms the valley, widening every year!

I attached a shot of Ásbyrgi to try to give a sense of one side of the horse-shoe. In the early 20th century the farmer who owned both the farm named Ás (God) and Byrgi (Fortress) decided to re-name this area as Ásbyrgi, the Fortress of the Gods. He created the myth that Óðin´s eight-footed flying horse Sleipnir had come too close to the ground, and hit it with a foot, making this gigantic valley. Neat story . . .