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 . . .

Happy Birthday, Reykjavik!

Here´s my favourite shot from the fireworks tonight! Spent the whole day visiting art galleries, neat shows, dances, performances, plays (including one IN a pool!), funny street-performers, concerts by various Icelandic and Faroese singers . . . Time for bed now!

3 weeks exploring

So . . . Just got back to Reykjavík yesterday after what turned out to be a three-week trip around Iceland. Here´s the general summary, and this map should help - I went clockwise along the blue line . . .

1) Went from Reykjavík to Akureyri over three days, driving with friends from the language course - Rogier from Holland (teaches Dutch in Finnland) and Nils from Germany (works with fisheries in Greenland). We stopped at Geysir and Þingvellir (parliament site, where the oldest parliament in the western world was formed and met annually starting in 930AD). We spent a night at Sæberg. On my first night camping I instantly recognized that I had underestimated how cold it would be at night! If you ever plan to camp in Iceland, bring a warm sleeping bag and extra longjohns! Second night was at Akureyri, the second-largest city in Iceland, with a whopping 5000 people! We also stopped at the cathedral at Hólar.

2) Volunteer work in Ásbyrgi. I spent four days volunteering with a group - part from the UK and part from Iceland. We fixed up hiking trails in Ásbyrgi and the nearby ´Valley of Echoes.´In return for the labour, we got food and a place to stay in a park ranger house. Both places are spectacular and have some really fascinating geographical formations, mostly from lava floes about 10000 years ago, and a HUGE glacial flood 6000 years ago that carved out neat shapes in the land. The other volunteers were really nice, and I had a great time practicing Icelandic with those who spoke it. I miss them now: Andrés, Vígfúss, Sígrún, Svava og Dórotea . . .

3) Using buses and hitching I went south to Mývatn (spent five nights there) through Sprengisandur and the highlands, spending two nights at Landmanalaugar, two at Hólaskjól (near Eldgjá), one at Kirkjubæjarklaustur (try to say that five times fast!!!), three nights on the black sand beach at Vík, and one night at Skógafoss.

It was a fantastic trip! Got great weather - some rain and some rather fierce winds, but really nothing at all compared to what could´ve happened! Mostly sunshine, and temperatures upwards of 24 degrees C. in Vík and Mývatn, and as low as 5-6 in Landmanalaugar and Hólaskjól. I saw my first stars in two months at Hólaskjól, along with the Perseid meteor shower! By the time I got back to Reykjavík it was certainly dark enough to see stars, and tonight we had fireworks to celebrate Reykjavík´s birthday (not sure how old the city is today . . . will have to ask around . . .)

I´ll update more and post some photos when I get more time . . . Two best places (in my opinion) were Mývatn and Vík, but Landmanalaugar is certainly spectacular!