How does one describe an ice cave?

Gravel moraine left by the retreating glacier

“The cave I was going to take you to is filled with water today, so you might die if we went there. Instead, have you heard of Crystal Cave?” Our guide, looking ruthlessly Icelandic with his ice blue eyes far over my head, seemed to be asking a rhetorical question.

“Yes!” Answered Ben, the member of my little trio who had done all the research.

“We go there.” Answered our guide. Excess verbiage does not survive the climate, perhaps, where the garrulous are prone to frostbitten tongues.

This raft was tied up at the entrance for days when the
river was running to high to enter on foot

My two friends and I joined the guy who runs the Arctic Arts Project and his Icelandic guide/coworker/friend on the benches of a familiar family-roadtrip bulky van from the 1970s, with one significant difference: this thing was lifted five feet off the ground on monster truck tires. I thought it a tourism affectation...until we hit the gravel moraine left by the retreating Breiðamerkurjökull glacier. Then the timpani of tires, the artillery of airtubes, the titans of tread, all made sense.

“Think the Dacia could make this?” asked Oshyan, the third member of our traveler trio, referring to our funky little white rental SUV.

“That's why the rental companies hate you,” answered the Icelandic photographer from the Arctic Arts team. (Hastening to assure us that he was joking, Icelanders don't actually hate anyone.) The dashboard of the Dacia featured a prominent sticker warning us that river crossings and off-road terrain were not covered by the insurance policy, and we would be liable for all damage.

The five of us bounced around the benches like lotto numbers, attempting conversation in short intervals, whenever clavicles weren't hitting the roof or sternums smacking seat-backs. They told us of a film crew from Outside magazine who had taken two jeeps into the highlands, and in their bravado and foolish showmanship, gotten hopelessly stuck.

“They had sunk all the way past the tires. People had to go pull them out. They were all thrown in prison, for damaging the land.” A country that imprisons people for damaging the land? Add this to Iceland's criminal prosecution of bankers for their roles in the financial collapse, and I think I've found the nation of my heart.

Our guide wasn't listening, peering instead into the white abyss. “This is the hard part” he confessed. “Finding a small hole in the glacier, all this gray and white, can be hard. And it moves. Ah.” Such is the Icelandic version of “Eureka!”

The opening looked mysterious. Welcoming, promising and forbidding. The sort of place that inspires troll legends.

“We are the first here, but there will be more. Make the most of your time.” More taciturn advice from our guide. I was lifting my camera as we went inside, but it froze halfway up, and my jaw dropped, breath caught, eyes wide. How do you describe an ice cave?

Blue.

Blueblueblueblue. Cold. Crystaline. Motionless and mobile. Water overhead and water passing your ankles. Snow in cones under shoots. Icicles grow in the corners, but the ceiling is a reverse bubble, faceted but smooth. Eternal and ephemeral, ice from millennia ago in a cave that will be gone within weeks. Ancient and newborn. Blue. White. Gravel. Such stillness.

I had hoped to let the images speak for themselves, but to my frustration, the files I brought back do not match the corresponding memories of their creation. I had hopes of digital editing salvation, but here I am, laundry almost done, last leftovers disappearing off my plate, and a plane to catch in not so many hours, and the answer to that riddle still escapes me.

They're still not too shabby, though.

But for further ice cave images I recommend my friend and co-traveler Ben's flickr stream here, and the Arctic Arts project on facebook.

Cathedrals of stone (made by men) are impressive. Cathedrals of redwood trees (made by gods) ache with the divine. And now, cathedrals of ice (made by Time) are repositories of chronology, libraries of geologic potency.

There is much to see in this world.

(And a couple more pics on the other version of the blog, here.)

Aurora Borealis makin' me crazy

Aaaaaaarggghhh! I am tearing my hair out on this one. Aurora Borealis. A combination of the Roman goddess of the dawn/sunrise and the Greek god of the wind, the name conjures sweeping colors, crackling cold, and the very soul of Odin looking down at you through the ages...and the experience delivers!

But the weird thing about the aurora, it’s the only incidence I can think of where the camera records it better than the human eye. Normally our eyes trumps the living bejeezus out of any equipment (really, they are amazing), but a camera’s ability to withhold perception for thirty seconds comes in handy with the aurora, slow, subtle, and faint as it often is.

So when we spent a few frigid nights watching muted colors caress the underbellies of the stars, and I looked down (with fully night-adjusted eyes) to see beautiful colors on my magic little view screen… I had high hopes.

So today, trying to get them to look the way they did when I was there….

aaaaaaaaaaarrrrgggghhhh! Why you no wanna werk wif me, stoopid image?

Blaming one’s equipment is a lame excuse at best, if not outright verboden, and I can already see at least one setting I should have changed. And if I was better at editing, I’m sure I could enhance these more effectively. But at the end of the day, it was damn fun to be out there, scrambling around in the dark, nabbing what I could. And I’ll take the learning experience.

We had pessimistic forecasts every day, “solid cloud cover and low aurora activity” the screens would declare, but for the first couple nights, and one towards the end, we had enough clarity and enough activity to marvel at the green glow of ionic mysticism.

The first night was crouching on the ice cubes piled up beside the lake in Þingvellir National Park (Thingvellir), where I, being a complete space cadet, had forgotten to bring my tripod, so rested my camera on the ground.

The second night was an improvement in equipment, my tripod splayed by the road back from Akranes, but the wind was being petulant, and even in the relative calm next to the car, a sharp image escaped me.

The last night was spent overlooking Jökulsarlon, the glacial lagoon that anchors my love of Iceland. I clambered down the gravel hillside and sat alone in the dark, listening to the crunch of icebergs, and the occasional splashes and air-blasts of seals close at hand in the darkness.

The images might not look as good as I’d hoped, but the memories are gorgeous.

Rein or shine, a dinner you'll deerly love

After exfoliating a layer or five off my face at the Horn, the Iceland wind had found its way into my hollow stomach, so we headed to the reputedly better of Höfn’s two restaurants open this time of year, a cabin-looking place of soft light, clean chairs, and hearty food.

I don’t eat much beef (I produce my own fair share of greenhouse gases, I don’t need their contributions on my tab), but a big ol' burger and fries sounded perfect to me. But there, next to the beef, was a reindeer burger.

I've never understood how we delineate which animals it's okay/normal to kill and eat, Pulp Fiction rationales notwithstanding. And it seems like a good idea to...

Keep reading on the wordpress version of my blog, here.

Ice gets up early

I'm not a morning person. "Grab hold of your attitude" I admonish myself, and try to remember the

satisfaction of looking at the clock after a productive day and finding it's only 11:00.

That prospect was paler than the predawn light when Ben's cell phone beeped its excessively cheery tun into the stuffy air of our three-bed room at Gerði Guesthouse near Höfn, Iceland.

It didn't take long to remember where I was, and that if it was raining, I could go back to sleep. One step spanned th emodest room and the photographic shrapnel of tirpods, cases, and battery chargers in it. My sleep-soggy fingers parted the blinds to find...stillness. No rain, no falling snow, no car-tipping wind. Yet.

The rest of the morning, and a gallery of photos, are on the wordpress version of my blog, here.

Have a good, and warm, morning!

Iceland has ponies. Laughing ponies.

Iceland is aptly named, sure, but I'd hate to give the impression that it only has frozen water. It's also got ponies.

Ponies who like frozen water.

Ponies who pose, oh so pretty.

Ponies who endure high winds and frozen manes.

Ponies who smile.

Ponies who laugh.

Ponies who guffaw.

Ponies who photobomb each other.

Ponies who would mock me for being inside on a day as lovely as this one.

Now that's just far too pretty. This is Jökulsarlon.

“Did you make it to Jökulsarlon?” asked a friend, when she heard I was in Iceland. The name didn't ring any bells. “Don't get on the plane without seeing it – really!” This from a woman who has traveled across 97% of the Earth's surface, as far as I can tell.

I followed her link to a website and saw a spray of beautiful images, boats apparently tooling around among gorgeous iceberg hunks of calved glacier. How could we have missed something that beautiful?

I clicked the “translate to English” button, which pondered a moment and informed me that the page had been translated, though there was no visible change in the text. I love the Icelandic language. Anything that confounds google, for that matter, but this language of umlauts, accents and whatever the hell this thing is: Þ

But upon closer inspection...oh, Jökulsarlon is that place! Hell yes we went there. I was just thinking of it as The Glacial Lagoon.

A few centuries back, in the Little Ice Age, the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier dug its way down to the coast, where it met the Jökulsá river. (It's okay that you enjoy the words more than the info.) Normally a glacier digs out a big ravine, sure, but when it's equipped with a river to wash away the sediment it's grinding? It overachieves.

Thus, the Jökulsarlon glacial lagoon, 300 meters deep, and growing in size as the glacier retreats. Fifteen square kilometers in 1998, it looked much bigger to my eye last week. Of course, to my eye it was an entire planet of seductively clear water, murky with cobalt mystery under striated chunks of ice that looked like the furniture of a liquid nitrogen god.

1. Arrive at Jökulsarlon, put on all available clothing layers and get out of the car.

   

   Oh, the thing is full of seals, too.

2. Realize you've just spent an indeterminate amount of time gaping at the blue expanse, frozen yet liquid, immovable but constantly in motion, eternal and ephemeral.
3. Walk down the rock and gravel embankment, aware that sliding into the water would be lethal.
4. Try to take pictures that don't profane the place.
5. Once fingers feel like recent transplants from a corpse, limit yourself to 20 more photos. Okay 50.
6. Get back in car, thaw fingers, and soak in gratitude to this beautiful planet.

We returned to Jökulsarlon a couple times, because there was a whole other side to the place...

(Again, all images copyright, let me know if you'd like to use them. That'd be swell.)

Hornafjordur. It won't notice when it kills you.

Someone lived here.

That's the thing that boggled my mind, as I leaned into the wind, peering at the fuzzy shapes of dunes through the mesh of my cheap hooded shirt pulled across my face, hoping the sweatshop fibers would keep the black volcanic sand from scraping out my retinas.

And I'm not talking about living here nowadays, though that too is impressive, but back in the Xth century. Some Danish king told Bjorkylvörlakvirðerheim Þorlakhöslmangleson (or some such appropriately Vikingish name, I didn't write it down):

“Hey, why don't you move out to the eastern edge of that frozen and geologically genocidal island we found in the icy and ill-tempered seas? You'll love it there. They have sand. And ice. Take your crusty wife and your crusty children too, they'll thank you for it.”

I'm guessing the king didn't like Bjorkylvörlakvirðerheim very much.

You can see the replica settlement in the distance

But he came here. In a frickin boat. Built a homestead, and didn't die. Incredible. Named Hornafjörður, this area eventually grew into one of the larger settlements of Iceland, though it remained remote, isolated, and caustically severe for centuries. The isolation didn't start to thaw until the late 1970's, when the technology necessary to build bridges that could withstand the epic jökulhlaups, or glacial floods, was developed and implemented, completing the ring road around the island.

I shook my head, hearing the percussive scratch of sand whipped against the cloth covering my face, and walked deeper into the black sand dunes, veined with dry grasses as tenacious as any living thing on Earth. I stepped over a jaw bone, bleached white and completely stripped of flesh, the calcium already wearing away at the edges.

This is the sort of place that doesn't even notice when it kills you.

To my right, white-capped waves off the Norwegian Sea hacked the backs of the waves before them into froth in their haste to assault the shore, outraged at sand's impertinence in impeding their icily majestic sweep across the sea. Behind me an American-built weather station, nearly abandoned after the nation politely told us to remove out military presence in 2006, hunkered down in olive green desolation, waiting to die.

But in front of me...

Maybe the aggression of the waves had provoked volcanic obstinacy, a geologic temper tantrum, but whatever natural forces pushed up those mountains did so with a ferocious hand. Edges to break axes, ice-lined heights to turn blood to stone and shatter it with a feral grin, and loose rocky screes that could avalanche over a home in seconds to annihilate all trace of the temerity of mortals.

It was pretty.

I wanted to stare at it forever. Or at least until the brutal beauty either opened my mind or eroded it. But after a few minutes, fingers growing stiff as the ligaments steadily froze, I got back in the car, which rocked in the blasts of wind.

In the shower later that night, my downwind ear was empty but the side that had faced into the fury was lined with a layer of black volcanic grit that had pierced right through the cloth of my shirt. Cotton? That would last an hour out there. But that place, it will outlast us all.

(This place was so brutally beautiful that I'd like to remind you these images are copyright. If you fancy them, let me know, and I'll share them.)

Words didn't happen in Iceland, but pictures did.

Iceland, for me, was a vacation from traveling. I had few cultural experiences there (one that threatened projectile vomit), met few Icelanders (guys in a bar explained how to avoid dating one's cousin in such a finite population), and didn't even try much in the way of new food (except the reindeer burger, which was de-frickin-licious).

This is just alongside the highway.

My normal travel routines and habits didn't fit in the bag among all those sweaters, and words fell by the wayside. I don't know where they went, but it's freaking me out. No, seriously. But if images are really worth a thousand of them, then I've got a few million to share.

Stop off at a lake, and the wind has pushed the ice sheets onshore. Cuz it's Iceland.

If only I knew where to start. I decided to grab a couple to throw on here...and that was three days ago. How about this one?

Why would there not be an abandoned quarry beneath a fortress mountain alongside that same highway?

Note the people on the point, for scale

No? Then do you prefer a tourist destination like Gullfoss, an epic (yet strangely difficult to photograph) waterfall on the famous Golden Circle?

How can going through these take so damn long?

Can I hire an assistant to help? I can pay in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Or carrots. Anybody want to help me for carrots? These guys would. Iceland is full of ponies. Would you be shocked to hear that they eat them?

Then I won't tell you. Maybe I shouldn't tell you what else there is to eat, either...

But I will.

I don't believe you, but I love you anyway

They tell me this is one planet. All the same one. But I'm not sure I believe them.

Because I remember walking down a backstreet in San Salvador, where children stopped their futbol game (played with a clump of garbage) to watch me pass, grandmothers winked at me, everyone said hello, and laundry hung to dry on rusting barbed wire.

There was exhaust, and constant noise, and a large plate of food cost about $3. It was warm to hot, and I needed no vocabulary beyond T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. Violence was a very real possibility and twenty-dollar bills were too large to use most places, tens were pushing it.

But today I rode around in a car, since you can't really walk around Iceland at present, and the sky opened up with an array of things that were all irrefutably snow. People are all friendly, but there is a distance between strangers that even I can feel, I who seemed aloof to the Salvadoran sensibility of space. The cold has perhaps hardened cheeks into a habitual emotional reserve? Or something about long months of darkness, of light, or of the relentless need to work together?

The barbed wire here is clean, and serves only to remind the shaggy ponies that they shouldn't wander into the street. A small plate of food, elegantly arranged, three slices of lamb and some decorations around the perimeter was about $40.

$40? According to this site's data on minimum wages in El Salvador, that would be about a third of a month's salary for an agricultural worker. For a small meal. Ten long days' work, one tasty but unsatisfying plate.

They tell me this is one planet, but I'm not sure I believe them.

But I can tell Them, one planet of more, I love it all. I love the noise of San Salvador, and the silence of an Icelandic field at night. I love wandering a hill town past indigena women in colorful skirts, and bundling up with the armored layers against the cold. I love cheese and ham on toast, and pupusas.

I love the hearty belly laughs of latinos, and the hard-won smiles of pleased Nords. And I love, beyond love, the chance to come and see as much of it as I can.

And the craziest part? I'm saving the best Iceland photos
for later posts. This country is just...preposterous.

I love travel. I love this planet. Hell, I love you too.

The sleepy adventure of a stoned zombie (nearly) in the Arctic

If a plane leaves Toronto at 8:10 PM for a 5 hour flight to Reykjavik, what time does it arrive?

If you said 6:25 AM, you're either extremely aware of time zones and flight itineraries, or seriously bad at arithmetic, but either way, you're right.

Assuming an early bedtime of roughly 10:00 PM, it was a three hour night, but since the plane was full of 6,000 Canadian schoolchildren starting their holidays, plus they had Office Space in their movie selection, I didn't sleep a single airmile.

So I had the distorted reality of the tired traveler when I got off the plane in the bright rays of a dawn just below the Arctic Circle. Luckily those Icelanders run a tight ship, and a zombie could navigate the process of picking up your luggage, getting through customs, and boarding the bus into town. In fact, it would take a fairly sharp mind to do it any other way. (The reward would be saving some money, since nothing on the island costs less than 1,000 krona, about $10.)

Those bright dawn rays stayed with me for the hour-ish bus ride and transfer, and stayed steady while I checked into my hostel then went looking for breakfast. The light and empty streets suggested it was about 5:00 AM, but it gradually seeped into my distorted reality that it had been just after dawn for an awful long time. It was 9:30.

“Woah” I said to myself, exhaustion making me a stoner, “I'm, like, really far north.”

Outside my hostel was a long bicycle and walking path along the icy waters of the North Atlantic, and the waves sent the wind to remind me they could kill me in under a minute if they felt like it.

I walked along the path, found some wine, a Viking-inspired sculpture, and an alien's Rubik's cube. It was Harpa, the new concert hall in Reykjavik, and the bus driver had informed me “it's among the Top 10 buildings on Earth for acoustics, here in Reykjavik, thank you very much.”

It was quite a structure, though I was not lucky enough to hear any acoustics beyond the footfalls of camera-toting tourists. One thing the driver hadn't mentioned was the stupendously inviting couches...long enough to stretch out on...in out-of-the-way places where no one would notice a sleeping backpacker...and the glass walls bring the temperature to a deliciously perfect level in there...

I came close, very close, to napping in the Harpa, but stumbled my steps back into the wind to explore more of Reykjavik.