Iceland: Part 1

"I should imagine that no place on earth can show anything to correspond with [Iceland], and there is nothing that one has learnt to consider beautiful or ugly with which it could be compared. It is quite unique, offering no single point of contact with any of the beauty-values that civilization has taught us."

-Glaciologist Hans Ahlmann

“Incongruent with our beauty-values” was a phrase we jokingly used often in Iceland as we marvelled at bizarre lavascapes, moonscapes, and icescapes throughout the country. We spent 8 days driving around the island visiting waterfalls, glaciers, volcanoes, lava fields, hot springs and geysers. We covered 2800 km of paved and unpaved roads (see below for Indiana-Jones style map), slept in 5 different parts of the island, and saw every major site accessible by 2WD (and some that probably shouldn’t have been). Many of the places we saw really did feel other-worldly, like the set from a movie or an Apollo moon mission.

Our flight from London landed on Saturday morning, and we discovered a rocky and foreboding place made all the more unwelcoming by the freezing rain that was falling. Our trip to Iceland was inspired completely by our friend Duane from Pittsburgh, who said that rather than visit us in England, he would meet us in Iceland (Iceland!?). We were set to pick Duane up the following morning, but first were to meet another friend of Nick’s from high school who also ended up being there for the first 3 days of our trip. We make the 50 minute drive from the airport to capital of Reykjavik across strange rocky lava fields, and got there just in time to meet Scott at the statue of Leif Erickson in town. Wasting no time, we hopped in his rental Yaris and headed out of the city for the afternoon to see what this land had to offer.

Many of the main roads in Iceland are sealed but a good section of the far eastern ring road and most roads off of the ring road are still just gravel, so it is a pretty harsh island for rental cars. By the end of our trip we had pushed our Ford Focus station wagon (or 'estate' as they're called in England - strange!) about as hard as I think it would go…but that tough made-in-America car stayed together and flat-free. With Scott we headed south of Reykjavik onto the Reykjanes Peninsula stopping at a black sand beach, some bubbling mud pits, and finally finishing of the day with a nice long soak in the famous Blue Lagoon. The lagoon is a rocky outdoor lake filled with hot mineral water pumped from the ground, next to a geothermal power plant. The bottom is covered in silica mud and the water is a milky blue color, with the eerie effect of steam rising everywhere into the cold air. It was a great place to spend a cold and rainy afternoon, since the water was super warm and surprisingly energizing.

The next morning after a night in Reykjavik I went out to the airport to get Duane…and waited 4 hours to no avail: the flight came in with no Duane. We emailed and called him, but finally figured we had better make the most of the day and if he came in somehow, he could meet us at our hotel. We visited the three sights of the “Golden Circle” popular with tourists: Thingvellir, home of the first Icelandic Republic in 950AD; Geysir, site of 3 geysers and the namesake for all geysers; and Gulifoss, one of the largest waterfalls in Europe. All three were quite impressive, but Gulifoss was our favorite, and the raw power of an unbelievable amount of water pouring over the rough river in torrents of whitewater was hypnotic. We got the all-you-can-eat Viking stew at the restaurant by the falls and headed back to town to look for Duane and check out the city.

No luck with Duane, and after another round of calls to his cell phone and concerned discussion, we headed out to check out the busy streets of Reykjavik. We had heard that places there don’t get busy until 2am on a weekend, and that seemed to be true, with most restaurants and bars quiet. Generally we were pretty impressed with the food options in Iceland, and in many ways they seem better off than England…the gas stations around the island manage bacon-wrapped hotdogs (Nick’s main breakfast on the road) and Betty Crocker cake mix, two items you can hardly get anywhere in England! In the end we found a café in town and ordered a round of Viking brand beers and some nachos…very Icelandic.

The next day I made another trip to the airport, enjoying another sunrise drive to see if Duane caught the flight from NYC on Monday. No luck again, and I returned, really worried about what could happen to someone to keep them from coming on a trip they were so excited about, and not telling the people they were meeting—we were getting really worried. We emailed friends in the US to see if they could keep calling him, but figured we had to make the most of our time and get moving if we wanted to make it around the island in a week. We set off with Scott for a long drive east along the Route 1 ring road to another waterfall then something I’d never seen before—a glacier!

After a 5 mile drive on a poorly-built jeep track through black sand and lava rocks, we arrived where ice meets rock at the edge of a huge glacier (named “M” then lots of letters that aren’t on my keyboard). The glacier was like a giant mountain but made of ice, and to get to it we had to follow a river across black sand (some of which was quicksand) to an ice-cave that the river was flowing from. Though innocent looking, walking on the glacier was so dangerous…the combination of melting ice and gravity could kill you in a variety of ways. In many places the ice was too steep to walk on without slipping, and if you slipped there were plenty of dark crevices, razor-sharp projections, and holes that disappeared forever into the heart of the glacier. We made our way carefully to the far side of the river into the ice cave, which was amazing: the ice was all different colors, but looked like polished blue crystals in many places and formed incredible shapes. We left as it started to get dark, and the ice was much more slippery as the air cooled and the surface re-hardened. I was struck by the cold brutality of the ice, and even being extremely careful, glaciers seem incredibly dangerous places to be.

After our death-defying glacier walk, we parted ways with Scott and continued east to the fishing town of Vik where we spent the night in a hostel, saving our first night camping for the following evening. We fell asleep happy to be having such adventures, but wondering what event might have befallen our friend and trip-inspirer Duane. The possibilities did not seem good.

The next morning we went to the post office to check email and voicemails, and were dumfounded when there was still nothing from Duane. We sent a few more pleading emails and headed on, continuing our counter-clockwise island circle. After a futile trip to the ocean to try to see some Puffins on the sea cliffs, we took to the road again and were struck by the emptiness of the island as we moved away from Reykjavik. We passed fewer and fewer cars, and it really was just us, the landscape, and Justin Timberlake (one of the 2 CDs we had for the rental). The road cut across yellow and black deserts, where you apparently cannot cross in heavy winds due to the terrible sandstorms that blow up. After a few hours we started to see more mountains (all snow-capped) and glacier tongues, and crossed these vast black flood plains with various river courses carved into them, like the water picked a new way to flow each morning. There were simple bridges where the road crossed some of these rivers, but it was clear from the massive flood plain that the river must get many, many times bigger with melt water in the spring.

We pulled off at the start of the largest icecap in the world outside of the poles and Greenland, the Vatnajokull glacier, to visit the tourist office at Skaftafell National Park. There we learned about the geologic history of the area, including the unbelievable phenomenon of sub glacial volcanoes. Vatnajokull has several active volcanoes under the 1km of ice, and in the 1990’s one of them erupted for days, taking 2 days to melt its way to the surface and creating an enormous reservoir of melt water under the ice. When the water gets to a certain pressure, this lake is able to lift the glacier (since ice floats) and, like a bathtub, the lake drains. We saw a video of the flood and the water ripped through the side of the ice, carrying chunks of ice the size of 3 story buildings out to sea, and utterly decimating all in its path. The bridges on the ring road snapped like toothpicks, and later that day we saw two giant steel bridge girders that had been twisted and driven into the ground by the flood. Nick took a moment of silence.

After hiking around the National Park for the afternoon, we drove on along the southern edge of the glacier to our campsite for the night: the amazing Jokulsarlon lake or “Iceberg Lagoon”. This lake is a surreal phenomenon (i.e. incongruent with social beauty-values) where a lake has formed between the glacier and the sea. Giant icebergs break off (calf) from the glacier and slowly melt, flip, and break up over 7 years until they float out the river to sea. We arrived just as the last boat tour of the entire season was out among the icebergs, but the operator said that if enough people came he would run one more tour. Lots of people stopped in, so we got to take the very last boat tour till June of this lake…some pretty nice luck. The icebergs are all different colors and shapes, some black from volcanic ash, some white from the sun causing air bubbles near the surface, and some are crystal smooth blue, if they have recently flipped over. I took like 100 pictures out on the boat, then we walked along the shore as the sun set in a crystal clear evening sky. Sunset on the lake was a photographer’s dream, and one of the highlights of the trip.

But where was Duane!? Would we survive the freezing cold night camping? What else did Iceland have in store for us? Will I ever finish processing and uploading our ridiculous quantity of photographs for you to see?

Tune in next week for the dramatic conclusion to our Iceland adventure!