In Iceland, A Child Calling You A Walking Piece Of Shit Is Totally Normal.
I've been a little quieter than usual lately, at first for slightly unfortunate reasons - I went down with an unpleasant stomach bug - and then for very good ones; I've been having adventures in Iceland with my dad! My mum found Iceland an unappealing prospect, so Dad asked if I wanted to go with him instead.
I wrote this entry while repeatedly listening to 'Þú ert stormur' by Una Torfa, an Icelandic song I heard on the radio during our holiday.
Iceland is a land of strange contrasts. I've seen landscapes there so beautiful they didn't seem real; I've seen some of the most offputting scenery I've ever come across. It's like being on another planet sometimes, when there's nothing but flat black sand or strange bulbous stone shapes all the way to the horizon. We were driving for forty minutes from the airport before we first saw a tree.
It's weird when it never gets dark, too; it never entirely feels like a new day has started. You go to bed when it's light; you get up when it's light; it's light if you wake up at one in the morning. The sun did technically set (11.30 in the evening) and rise (3.30 in the morning), but it never went far enough for true darkness. When I glanced out of our hotel window at half past midnight, the scene was cast in a half-hearted twilight, like someone had just thrown a light blue filter over the world. I'd occasionally find myself thinking 'what if we have to find our way back to the hotel in the dark?' and then remembering that that just wasn't a concern.
But I saw such cool things in Iceland! I'd never seen geysers before, or glacial lakes, or ice-strewn beaches with black sand, or a waterfall on the scale of Gullfoss Falls; I'd never relaxed in a hot spring. On the drive back to the airport, we caught tiny glimpses of distant erupting lava out of the car window.
We passed through the perpetually foggy Vik, which apparently boasted a lava show. The website gave the alarming description 'LAVA SHOW recreates a volcanic eruption by superheating real lava up to 1100°C (2000°F) and then pouring it into a showroom full of people.' We decided not to attend the lava show.
There's so much about Iceland that you can't really capture in a photograph. I can take a picture of some big rocks, but I can't convey the sense of looking up at these boulders and knowing that they are so big and you are so, so small. But here are some photographs nonetheless!
Gullfoss Falls was absolutely stunning. I've never seen anything like it.
The beach at Vik. The contrast between the black sand and the bright water is really striking. Mum thought my photographs of it were in black and white.
The weather was atrocious when I took the second of these pictures. 'It's the last day of May today,' Dad said, wistfully, as we trudged through the wind and rain. Later, we drove past a little cluster of sheep taking shelter under the overhang of a big boulder, which was cute.
The highlight of the trip was the glacial lagoon Jökulsárlón. It was brilliantly sunny; the mountains and the ice and the water were stunning under the light. I thought I was just walking up a slope to get a better look at a beautiful snowy mountain; I lost my mind with excitement when the ice-filled lake came into view!
I had a similar 'holy shit' moment when we parked up at a very ordinary car park ten minutes away from the spot I'd taken the above pictures, turned around to look at the very ordinary bridge behind us, and saw this through it.
The ice washes up on the nearby Diamond Beach, which was scattered with small icebergs. Dad stole some of the glacial ice from the beach and put it in our drinks, which was almost certainly a bad idea, but we seem to have come through without any ill effects.
'You missed the Icelandic cod brass band,' my dad said, when I emerged from a building in Reykjavík to meet him on the street.
'What?' I asked.
We caught up with the brass band as they paraded down the street, waving fish banners in the air. They were playing, perplexingly, the Spider-Man theme.
Later, things got even wilder. Did we just happen to show up in Reykjavík when a sea monster and a fisherman were having a showdown, or do they do this every day?
(We learnt the answer from a newspaper the next day; we'd happened to show up for the opening of the Reykjavík Arts Festival, apparently!)
I didn't see any mammals that were new to me (there are so many horses in Iceland! what do they use all the horses for?), but here are the new birds I spotted on my Icelandic adventures:
- Eurasian oystercatcher! Pecking around in the grass, where it seemed unlikely to catch any oysters.
- Common eider swimming alongside small icebergs at Diamond Beach.
- Snow bunting, hopping around in the Diamond Beach car park, determinedly and repeatedly trying to flutter into a parked car's grille.
- Arctic terns everywhere, but my favourite sighting was the terns hovering above the waves at Diamond Beach and then plunging suddenly into the surf.
- I got a good look at a couple of whimbrels, with their long curved beaks. They let me get fairly close, but when I got too close they departed at a rapid faux-casual strut, rather than flying away.
- A redwing hopping around in Reykjavík.
- I might have spotted a great skua in flight from the car, but perhaps that was just wishful thinking.
I tried to find puffins, but I had to abandon the exercise because the wind was blowing so hard I was afraid it would knock me off a cliff.
There were also some birds I'm familiar with from home: seagulls, greylag geese, wagtails, crows, starlings, mallards. I thought for a while there were no pigeons in Iceland, but I spotted a small handful hanging around together in Reykjavík.
There were a lot of swans, too, usually just hanging out in grassy fields rather than at bodies of water. At one point I saw about fifty swans sitting in a field next to our hotel, so I asked the receptionist whether the swans were being farmed or just liked to be there. They just like being there, apparently! The farmers had recently fertilised the field, she said, which attracts birds - perhaps because it also attracts insects?
In conclusion, Iceland is a really interesting place! I'm glad I went. It's good to come back to the things I previously took for granted, though, like 'trees' and 'getting dark at night' and 'summer temperatures of over 10°C'.
I wrote this entry while repeatedly listening to 'Þú ert stormur' by Una Torfa, an Icelandic song I heard on the radio during our holiday.
Iceland is a land of strange contrasts. I've seen landscapes there so beautiful they didn't seem real; I've seen some of the most offputting scenery I've ever come across. It's like being on another planet sometimes, when there's nothing but flat black sand or strange bulbous stone shapes all the way to the horizon. We were driving for forty minutes from the airport before we first saw a tree.
It's weird when it never gets dark, too; it never entirely feels like a new day has started. You go to bed when it's light; you get up when it's light; it's light if you wake up at one in the morning. The sun did technically set (11.30 in the evening) and rise (3.30 in the morning), but it never went far enough for true darkness. When I glanced out of our hotel window at half past midnight, the scene was cast in a half-hearted twilight, like someone had just thrown a light blue filter over the world. I'd occasionally find myself thinking 'what if we have to find our way back to the hotel in the dark?' and then remembering that that just wasn't a concern.
But I saw such cool things in Iceland! I'd never seen geysers before, or glacial lakes, or ice-strewn beaches with black sand, or a waterfall on the scale of Gullfoss Falls; I'd never relaxed in a hot spring. On the drive back to the airport, we caught tiny glimpses of distant erupting lava out of the car window.
We passed through the perpetually foggy Vik, which apparently boasted a lava show. The website gave the alarming description 'LAVA SHOW recreates a volcanic eruption by superheating real lava up to 1100°C (2000°F) and then pouring it into a showroom full of people.' We decided not to attend the lava show.
There's so much about Iceland that you can't really capture in a photograph. I can take a picture of some big rocks, but I can't convey the sense of looking up at these boulders and knowing that they are so big and you are so, so small. But here are some photographs nonetheless!
Gullfoss Falls was absolutely stunning. I've never seen anything like it.
The beach at Vik. The contrast between the black sand and the bright water is really striking. Mum thought my photographs of it were in black and white.
The weather was atrocious when I took the second of these pictures. 'It's the last day of May today,' Dad said, wistfully, as we trudged through the wind and rain. Later, we drove past a little cluster of sheep taking shelter under the overhang of a big boulder, which was cute.
The highlight of the trip was the glacial lagoon Jökulsárlón. It was brilliantly sunny; the mountains and the ice and the water were stunning under the light. I thought I was just walking up a slope to get a better look at a beautiful snowy mountain; I lost my mind with excitement when the ice-filled lake came into view!
I had a similar 'holy shit' moment when we parked up at a very ordinary car park ten minutes away from the spot I'd taken the above pictures, turned around to look at the very ordinary bridge behind us, and saw this through it.
The ice washes up on the nearby Diamond Beach, which was scattered with small icebergs. Dad stole some of the glacial ice from the beach and put it in our drinks, which was almost certainly a bad idea, but we seem to have come through without any ill effects.
'You missed the Icelandic cod brass band,' my dad said, when I emerged from a building in Reykjavík to meet him on the street.
'What?' I asked.
We caught up with the brass band as they paraded down the street, waving fish banners in the air. They were playing, perplexingly, the Spider-Man theme.
Later, things got even wilder. Did we just happen to show up in Reykjavík when a sea monster and a fisherman were having a showdown, or do they do this every day?
(We learnt the answer from a newspaper the next day; we'd happened to show up for the opening of the Reykjavík Arts Festival, apparently!)
I didn't see any mammals that were new to me (there are so many horses in Iceland! what do they use all the horses for?), but here are the new birds I spotted on my Icelandic adventures:
- Eurasian oystercatcher! Pecking around in the grass, where it seemed unlikely to catch any oysters.
- Common eider swimming alongside small icebergs at Diamond Beach.
- Snow bunting, hopping around in the Diamond Beach car park, determinedly and repeatedly trying to flutter into a parked car's grille.
- Arctic terns everywhere, but my favourite sighting was the terns hovering above the waves at Diamond Beach and then plunging suddenly into the surf.
- I got a good look at a couple of whimbrels, with their long curved beaks. They let me get fairly close, but when I got too close they departed at a rapid faux-casual strut, rather than flying away.
- A redwing hopping around in Reykjavík.
- I might have spotted a great skua in flight from the car, but perhaps that was just wishful thinking.
I tried to find puffins, but I had to abandon the exercise because the wind was blowing so hard I was afraid it would knock me off a cliff.
There were also some birds I'm familiar with from home: seagulls, greylag geese, wagtails, crows, starlings, mallards. I thought for a while there were no pigeons in Iceland, but I spotted a small handful hanging around together in Reykjavík.
There were a lot of swans, too, usually just hanging out in grassy fields rather than at bodies of water. At one point I saw about fifty swans sitting in a field next to our hotel, so I asked the receptionist whether the swans were being farmed or just liked to be there. They just like being there, apparently! The farmers had recently fertilised the field, she said, which attracts birds - perhaps because it also attracts insects?
In conclusion, Iceland is a really interesting place! I'm glad I went. It's good to come back to the things I previously took for granted, though, like 'trees' and 'getting dark at night' and 'summer temperatures of over 10°C'.