South Again

Wednesday August 8th. Morning broke cold and rainy. We rose early and made the sometimes hairy drive along rough dirt roads to an amazing  waterfall called Dynjandi. Even with the rain coming down, walking up to this massive curtain of falling water was simply amazing. There are no guard rails or signs warning you away, you can simply experience the thing. Very different from a similar natural area in the States.

The past couple of days had taught us that the roads in the West Fjords region were a great deal slower than we had anticipated. This was especially true in the rain. Jen and I decided to forgo our plan of circumnavigating the entire peninsula and instead heading down to the passenger ferry in the town of Brjanslaekur which would bring us to Stykkisholmur. No, I'm not making these names up! This would turn a seven or eight hour drive into a three-hour boat ride where we could relax a bit. Definitely worth it. The ferry ride was a bit bumpy but uneventful.

On our drive south we were treated to the brightest rainbow I've ever seen. It stayed with us for a good twenty minutes. It was absolutely stunning. If you looked close you could actually discern the green-blue-purple transitions with shades in between. Stunning.

We treated the rest of the day as a travel day to set us up for some things we wanted to do in the Central-South Iceland region. It was a long drive but we made the town of Vik (yes, that's it just "Vik") in the early evening. We had rain the entire way and we decided to get a hotel or hostel room for the night. Ah the best laid plans... There was not a room to be had in Vik. In fact one hotel woman said that they had been calling around for overbooked guests and there was not a room to be had in a 100 km radius of the town. Thank goodness I brought my tent. We found a camping area and settled in for the night. We had rain all night, sometimes coming down in great quantity, but my tent passed the deluge test and we made it through the night relatively dry.

Thursday August 9th. We arose and treated ourselves to a hotel breakfast and then headed off to the black sand beach. Yes, another beach for my collection. This one is dark black volcanic sand. I have another cool black sand beach in Bequia in my collection, but this one is even darker. We hit another beach site but the wind and rain made it difficult to spend much time appreciating the place. While I know there is no such thing as bad weather, just different kinds of good weather, this good weather was pretty cold and damp. We worked our way along the southern coastline and found yet another very cool waterfall called Seljalandsfoss which falls straight down 60 meters to crash and send spray whipping in the wind half way back up again. The raw power of this place is sometimes overwhelming.

After a couple of false starts, we eventually found the road up to one of the local glaciers. There are glaciers all over this part of the island, but they generally require four wheel drive to get to. The road we took up probably required a 4x4 as well, but our little trooper of a car made it up to the top. The mountain spirits gifted us with a lift in the rain and the cloud deck even rose a bit. This afforded us a chance to hike up to the glacier and even climb a bit on its leading edge. This mass of ice was as big as some of the ones I saw last summer in Alaska and there was no way were going to hike very much on the ice itself. We had neither the gear nor the expertise to do that sort of thing, but it was great to see the huge, beautiful glacial valley and enjoy this awesome natural phenomena. It's not looking like we're going to have too many of these ice sheets in our near future, so I feel privileged to have witnessed them in three different parts of the world (Alaska, New Zealand and now here).

Friday August 10th. We found a great little guest lodge west of Vik. When I say "we" I of course mean the excellent internet surfing skills of my travel partner Jen. She has been our accommodation wizard and I'm sure if I were here alone, I'd be sleeping in the tent a great deal more!

After a phenomenal Continental breakfast (they do a REAL European Continental breakfast here in Iceland) we headed back out. Today was our day to be tourists and we visited the three major stops on the "Golden Circle". First was Pingvellir National Park, the site where you can view the rift valley. This is the spot where the Mid-Atlantic ridge can be seen separating the North Atlantic plate from the European plate. For a science geek such as myself, this was a cool place to experience. The area was quite beautiful and again the rain paused long enough for us to get to see it. We spent about an hour walking around the rift and I really enjoyed seeing the unique rock formations.

Stop number two was at Geysir - the original thermal feature for which the English word "Geyser" comes from. It was here that I first really felt like a tourist. Geysir has a huge Visitors Center which is really just a giant gift shop. There were people everywhere and a constant stream of busses came in and out of the huge parking lot. We stood around the thermal pools with nearly a hundred people to see the bubbling water and one geyser shoot off. Frankly, Yellowstone is much more impressive and Rotorua in New Zealand much more so. Time to move on.

Our last stop of the day was also filled with huge crowds. However, this was a sight to behold. It was another waterfall, and the granddaddy of them all, Gullfoss. I don't have the words to describe how magnificent this huge mass of water is. There is so much water falling into the gorge below the lower falls that you cannot see the bottom for all the spray. I could feel the power of the water as a bass rumble against my chest. Amazing. Again you can get very close to this huge water feature without much in the way of safety. I suspect that if you tried to sue Iceland for hurting yourself for doing something stupid, you would be laughed at.

Tomorrow we are back in Reykjavik and Monday we leave for Boston. This has been an amazing, amazing vacation. 

West Fjords

Tuesday, August 7th: Today found us in the north western part of Iceland. This is an area called the "West Fjords"  and is among the most wild and remote parts of the island you can reach with a regular (non 4x4) automobile. Our little car has been a trooper. It is smaller than the my first car, a 1973 Ford Pinto, but charges up rutted dirt roads and zips along these narrow highways. Jen and I have the thing packed full with camping gear, shoes and assorted gear. Bags full of crackers, cheese and other sundries that can survive a lack of refrigeration complete our little mess in the back.

The going is slow, but the sights are amazing. Each bend in the road brings a new vista of sea and volcanic cliff. This place is just one amazing view after the other. The clouds have moved in but the rain has held off so far although the remainder of our week looks bleak. 

We didn't make it as far as we thought we would and evening brings us to the town of Patreksfjordur. That actually isn't the proper spelling, however this computer doesn't have the font for the two letters (the "o" and the "d") that don't occur in the English Language. It's a quaint little town nestled in a deep fjord on the west side of the peninsula and we find a little rooming house for the night. Since it will still be light for hours, we drove over to a special little beach at the end of a long, very sketchy road about 30K from town. The beach is called Raudasandur (again not the exact spelling). It's claim to "fame" other than being a truly spectacular place, is that the sand here is bright red/orange. The color comes apparently from a specific type of volcanic rock in the region. We parked next to an amazing little church sitting all by itself just above the high tide mark. The tide was low and in the misty rain we passed several intertidal sheep and trekked the kilometer or so to the water's edge.

The sand was an amazing red color and I duly collected some for my collection. Many who know me know that a hobby of mine is collecting sand from beaches I've visited in my travels. Between grad school, SEA, SFS and other assorted opportunities, I have a lot of sand. This one is going to stand out in the collection.

On the beach was a dead Minke whale. It looked to have been there no more than a week or so as it was pretty much unmolested and intact. Sad to see, but it was fascinating to get so close to such an amazing animal. Walking back to the car we met a German couple camping near the church with their car. They were on a month-long vacation and we discussed the merits of the American versus European vacation plan. Hard to argue our side of the difference! 

Grimsey

Monday, August 6th: Morning dawned early as always and I was up by 6:00. There was a bit of a wrinkle to my plans for the early morning however. I learned (the hard way unfortunately) that "white spirits" in Iceland, is not the same as "white gas" in the States. It is in fact turpentine and not very suitable for my camping stove. No coffee this morning. Sad.

We broke our little camp, decidedly uncaffeinated, and drove from the backyard of the school to the reason for our trip to Davick: the ferry to Grimsey Island. Grimsey is a small island north of Iceland, known for two things, fishing and the geographical oddity of spanning the Arctic Circle.

Now, for my non-nautical, non geo-geek friends, the Arctic Circle is not just a Utah fast food chain. It is the imaginary circle around the pole where on the Summer Solstice the sun just touches the horizon but never sets. 24 hours of daylight. This line is "imaginary" like the equator and its sister the Antarctic Circle, but it is cool landmark nonetheless. I had never been that far north and was excited to get there. 

The ferry was fairly small, able to transport three or four cars and maybe 75 passengers. This trip had one small pickup truck and perhaps 40 folks, mostly tourists like ourselves, intent on seeing the island. The weather was windy, the seas quite calm for such a high latitude and the skies were amazingly clear. The passage took about three hours and we even saw a humpback and Jen reported Orca, but I missed seeing them. Soon enough we were landing at the small pier which was the lifeline for the 80 or so people who live on the island.

There's not much to do on Grimsey but walk, and that's what we did. We passed the three-hole golf course, took a picture of the signpost that listed distances to remote places like Sydney and New York and headed north toward the sea cliffs. Our crossing of the Arctic Circle was uneventful. There's no marker or sign and I marveled at the fact that I was in the real, Gods-honest Arctic walking around in my shirt sleeves. There are many the dead Viking and long-gone polar explorer who are quite annoyed with how easily I just strolled into territory they had to spend a life's effort to explore. What a world.

As we got further north on the island, we encountered high sea cliffs with huge numbers of Puffins nesting on the cliff face. I've seen these birds before in Maine and Nova Scotia but usually only glancingly as they flutter by at sea fishing. They are awkward fliers but graceful swimmers, gifted by evolution for some reason with the brightly-striped beak of a parrot. The beak is good for fishing, but very funny looking on a sea bird. These guys were everywhere, sitting in large groups on the sea cliffs and weaving by as we sat on the grass watching them. Amazing to get so close to such a beautiful animal.

We only had three hours or so on Grimsey until we had to reboard the ferry and head back. The trip was totally worth it. Six hours on the boat enjoying the Iceland coastline and three beautiful hours on the island made for a wonderful day. Returning to our car, we headed out of town.

We had about a two-hour ride along the north coast heading back to the west. It was a beautiful coastline and we stopped several times for pictures. Jen is actually very patient as I constantly request a "quick stop" to photograph this or that piece of stunning scenery. If one out of twenty of my photos come out at all, I'm going to have a great collection to show from our trip. 

The only other event of note was the series of tunnels we passed through on our way out of town. The Icelanders, faced with huge fjord cliffs have chosen to drill directly through the volcanic rock to get from valley to valley. Jen was driving and I'm not sure which one of us was more unnerved by the new game of "Icelandic Chicken" we were learning. These tunnels were one single lane with traffic going both directions! Every so often there would be a small indentation where you could pull the car over if a car was coming the other way. It definitely leant a degree of tension to the drive. We made it through unscathed however and got to Skagafjordur where we found a boarding school that acts as a hostel during the summer. We got a cheap room in the mostly-empty place and crashed for the night. 

Heading North

Sunday, August 5th: 

Sad day, today we had to give up our Ikea catalog apartment and pack up to leave. We had a quick breakfast, packed and then walked down to the bus station. The car wasn't much bigger than a Volkswagen Bug, but it was a hatchback, so for two of us, it worked out perfect. Two backpacks and plenty of room to pull stuff out as needed. A quick stop at the grocery store and we were on Iceland Route one on our way north.  

The drive was stunning and relatively uneventful. Traffic is incredibly light in the north part of Iceland. There were half hour periods where we didn't see more than two or three cars going the other way. The views were stunning and the weather perfect - blue skies and mild temperatures. By late afternoon, we found ourselves in the town of Akureyri on the central portion of the north coast. Iceland is not a big place.  

We had a great fish and chips meal at a little hole in the wall and then spent an hour or so in the town walking around and enjoying the waterfront. The city sits at the head of a beautiful fjord and as the sun sank lower, the long shadows spread a wonderful light on the large central church and small shops on the main street. As the sun continued to drop lower on the horizon we headed north to Davick, our destination for the night. 

Davick is a tiny little town sitting in an absolutely gorgeous fjord. By the time we got there (around 9:45) the town had pretty much closed its doors and rolled up the sidewalks. We followed the signs to the local free camping area, which as it turned out was the football pitch for the local school. We set up the tent and hit the hay. Tomorrow we had a boat to catch.

Reykjavik

Aug 5: Jen and I have been having a blast in Reykjavik. We spent our second day walking all over the city. According to her pedometer we covered 14 miles and that doesn't count a ferry trip out to a local island and then back along the waterfront. The city has a remarkable amount of open space and I'm continually struck by the large amount of residential space right in the city. Three blocks from the shopping/tourist district and you see small single-family homes each with their own neatly-kept yards. Many of the buildings are built out of concrete, which I imagine is a cheap building material for a nation that has to import nearly everything. Many buildings are unpainted, but a lot are painted in bright primary colors which reminds me of Nova Scotian towns like Lunenberg. 

Yesterday we took our first foray out of the city and went sea kayaking in a fjord north of the city. It was one of the few "packaged" tours that we plan to take, as getting our own boats here would not have been possible. The guides (one Icelandic, one British) were great and we had a too-short paddle down a magnificent landscape that was once home to British and American naval vessels. Across the bay was a whaling station that is still occasionally used. Iceland is still a whaling nation, much to the consternation of those who want to halt all whaling. We saw an anti-whaling group gathering petitions at the dock where the tourist boats come in to town. 

Last night we went into town, walking into the bright sunlight of 9:30 p.m. We walked around a bit and found a pub with live music and had a pint. Beer like everything else is expensive here but it was pleasant to sit and listen to the music and watch the local scene. Later we walked out into the twilight and strolled down along the waterfront. We didn't get home till nearly 1:00 a.m. but it was never fully dark. The entire western sky remained lit with a soft light making it difficult to see even bright stars. Jen and I tried to pierce together a couple of constellations and we figured out where the North Star was. Here at 65 degrees north, it is quite high in the sky!

This morning we are picking up a car and heading north. Accommodations will likely be a combination of camping and small hostels, so I don't know how often we'll have internet. 

Iceland

I had a great day with my friend Karen in Massachusetts. We had a great breakfast and I enjoyed listening to that great accent. After generously picking me up, putting me up and dropping me off - I met Jen at the airport for yet another long airplane ride.

While Delta is not nearly as cush as British Airways, the flights were uneventful and we landed in Reykjavik to a brilliant blue-sky, crisp morning. As we glided across smoothly paved highway on our way into town. On one side of the bus was the blue Atlantic, on the other flat volcanic plain, strewn with chunks of rock. It was remarkably reminiscent of the plains of Amboseli National Park - without the herds of zebra of course.

Our veranda looking north

We are staying in an awesome little fourth floor flat a short 15 minute walk to the center of town. We face south west and our landlord pointed out a distant glacier across the water of the Bay south of the city. Magnificent. After quickly checking out the place, we promptly walked into town. We strolled along the waterfront enjoying the mixture of utilitarian cement and stone building mixed with very modern glass and steel buildings. The town is tiny, considering that it is a national capital. We plan to be here a couple more days and then we will rent a car and circumnavigate the island. I don't know how often we'll have internet access, but hopefully I can post an update.

35 Hour Monday

Our departure from Kenya was uneventful. The four-hour drive from the Center got us to the airport at 3:00 for our 11:15 p.m. departure. This early drop-off was necessary as it isn't safe to drive after dark due to crazy drivers and a lack of headlights on many vehicles. What this meant was a long, relatively boring wait to check in and eventually board the plane. I amused myself by browsing in the many duty free shops and taking thirty or so dollars off of Jim in Chinese Poker. 

Our trip to California entailed leaving Nairobi just before midnight Monday morning, traveling 8.5 hours to London, a 9 hour layover there, and then 11.5 hours to San Diego, landing at 6:00 the same day. Monday just wouldn't end! The plane rides wouldn't end and in fact I am typing this in the air a mere 19 hours later as I make my way back eastward - heading to Boston. 

The flights were uneventful and the only reason I'm describing this portion of our "adventure" is to mention our London visit. With the prospect of sitting for nine hours between two long plane flights, Jim and I decided to take the tube into London and walk around. We got into Picadilly Circus around 8:00 and enjoyed our first real cup of coffee in two weeks. Kenya, a world-class coffee producer exports its crop to the world, leaving its citizens to drink instant.

We had arrived in London on day 3 of the Olympics and while we had no time (or budget!) to attend any of the events, we did get a nice flavor of the city and the excitement of the games. There were Olympic banners everywhere with road closures and bike parking areas seeking to channel the flow of attendees to the various events. We walked past several venues as well as several landmarks like Buckingham Palace. The day before, I had watched a portion of the cycling event on a small television in the staff area of Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Now I was crossing the course on my way to Paddington Station. What a world. 

In Paddington Jim and I enjoyed a 10 a.m. pint. It was far later than 10 a.m. on my personal clock and in fact I couldn't wait to have a second pint with my fish and chips which we proceeded to do. The Brits can certianly do beer! It would have been nice to see an event or two, but frankly I can't see myself paying several hundred pounds on a ticket! I'm not surprised to see all the empty seats on the TV in the pub. 

The remainder of the trip went well and it was nice to be welcomed by Michel at the San Diego airport following our second long flight. I am now heading toward Boston to again cross the "pond" for two weeks in Iceland. I'm looking forward to this trip to be sure, but I'm pretty tired of airplanes! I land at Logan at 11:40 p.m. to complete a short Tuesday to partially balance the Monday that would not end.