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!