Shorely

Another day, another bus tour. This one took us along the south shore, past farmlands and open fields, volcanoes and waterfalls, toward a small village called Vik, where we stopped for a quick lunch at a service station before turning around and heading back the way we came. It was a rainy, soggy day.

First stop at Seljalandsfoss. Yes, I had to re-Google most of these names.

Volcanic ash/soil/sand. Great for farming. Terrible for rivers (great for floods).

Wool factory in Vik. Though "factory" might be a stretch. It's really a big, open room with a bunch of workstations. Which makes what they do there all the more impressive.

Black sand beach in Reynisfjara. Fierce waves. Craggy rocks. Foggy day.

Take shelter.

Meltwater and ice from the glacial tongue at Mýrdalsjökull mixing with volcanic ash from neighboring Eyjafjallajökull's 2010 eruption.

Mýrdalsjökull is one of the bigger glaciers on Iceland (Eyjafjallajökull, on the other hand, one of the smaller ones), and sits atop Katla, an active volcano much larger than the one under Eyjafjallajökull. Each of Eyjafjallajökull's known eruptions in the past have preceded a larger and more violent eruption from Katla by a few months, so Icelandic folks are basically expecting this guy to go any day now. The biggest problem is flooding caused by magma melting the glacial ice. So yeah, that's what living near volcanoes is like. On the other hand, erupting volcanoes are great for tourism, so there's that.

Anyway, it was still raining by the time we passed through, in late afternoon.

Our next stop was at the Skógar folk museum, founded by Þórður Tómasson, who started collecting Viking artifacts when he was 14. Dude's 92 and still hanging out at the museum, greeting guests and rocking out on this traditional Icelandic instrument that I've forgotten the name of.

Icelandic fishing boat. 17 fisherman would work off this thing, which may look fairly impressive here, but is no more than a glorified raft with sails. Tough livin'.

Fish skin shoes. Trips used to be measured not by their physical distances, but by how many pairs of these bad boys you'd wear out on the way.

Hollowed out piece of whale vertebrae, used for storage on fishing boats. Also the baddest-ass chair, probably.

Skógafoss, one of the bigger waterfalls in Iceland.

There's a hokey joke the locals tell all the tourists that goes, "What do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest?" "Stand up."

Sunset on the ride back to Reykjavik.

Kris snoozin' through it.

Oh well.

More sunset for the rest of us.

Ice Pack

It's been a strange, wonderfully mild winter in New York. Back in October when Roy, Kristine, and I booked our tickets to spend a week in Iceland at the end of February, we had assumed the island nation, which usually trends a few degrees warmer than New York this time of year, could offer a very small but hopefully tangible respite from a presumably biting New York winter.

Then winter never quite showed up in New York, though it did opt for its usual time share in Iceland. And so our week there saw a good amount of rain and snow amidst some lower temperatures, but the sun still found some time to shine every day, and the trip wound up offering very much more than just a tangible respite. It was five and a half days of discovery, exploration, and uncommon beauty.

I've got a deluge of pictures, but I'll unload them over the course of a few posts over the next couple of days (hopefully, assuming I don't get, y'know, lazy or anything). Here are some shots from our first couple of days there.

After taking an overnight flight (an easy 5 hours from New York), we landed outside Reykjavik around 6 in the morning. By the time we got to the hotel, through the circus of other travelers in the lobby, and into our room, it was close to 10. We had scheduled a half-day's tour to the famed Blue Lagoon Spa at 11 that morning, which would have been fine if any of us had actually decided to sleep on the plane instead of watching Date Night and Max Payne. In any case, we all (or at least I) more or less zonked out for the entire bus ride there, which, if the groggy 6 or 7 seconds I was awake for were any indication, actually had some pretty spectacular views of fog-wrapped peaks.

The spa itself ended up being the perfect way to rejuvenate. Nothing like lounging in piping hot geothermal waters in the open, wind-blown, just-below-freezing air to wake you up and soothe your soul at the same time. I didn't bring my camera, but I stole some pictures from Kris.

Mud on my face.

We wandered around Reykjavik a bit that night, eventually finding our way over to Þrir Frakkar (or Three Fathers. That "Þ" sign is basically a "th" sound), a restaurant a friend had recommended to me last Christmas for its minke whale steaks. Naturally, we also tried the smoked puffin appetizer. A little on the salty side, but altogether not bad.

Like regular steak, just a bit fishier.

Reykjavik is built of the same mix of quaint and cosmopolitan concrete usually making up other Eastern European capitals.

The next morning we embarked on a tour of the Golden Circle -- a collection of Iceland's most famous attractions and the most popular tour to take.

First stop was þingvellir, which is where Icelanders founded the world's first parliament in 930 AD, and also the borderland where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are moving apart from each other. I'm pretty sure I learned something about this in that one geology class I took in college, but yeah, y'know.

The ridge in the foreground is North America, the lowlands below are Europe. And it's sinking.

Down in the lowlands are several rifts that are filled with crisp, clear water. Travelers throw coins into them for luck, as you can seen from the shimmering bunch that line the bottom of this stream, about 12 meters down.

The second stop was Gullfoss, one of the biggest waterfalls in Iceland, which flows into a canyon.

The third stop was the geysers in the Haukadalur valley, including Geysir, which is the OG geyser that gave all other geysers their name.

Geysir doesn't erupt as regularly anymore, but Strokkur, which sits a few hundred feet away, chucks up every few minutes.

After a visit to another hot spring and a delicious dinner of lamb (with a seriously dope Icelandic mousse for dessert), we went hunting for the Northern Lights.

Spoiler alert -- we didn't find them. This would be the first of 3 attempts to hunt them down over the course of the trip, but there was simply too much cloud cover that week. Next time, I guess.

There was a bit of an opening in the clouds that first night, though, that lasted for about 10 minutes. While it was there, I figured I'd grab some long exposures of the stars.

And what do you know -- we couldn't see it with our naked eyes, but the camera picked up a hint of the Northern Lights' signature green band. I guess it was there the whole time.