The Lost Post on Iceland

Lost. With the click of a button, my latest post vanished fading into nothingness like a spilt pina colada into the digital sands of the e world. It was mostly rubbish anyway. Lacking structure and clarity, a few sparse witticisms drowning in a sea of travelogue dithering. Really it was largely me carrying on about all things Iceland, which are my new favourite subjects, being specifically:

• geology;
• economics; and 
• gastronomy

Allow me to precis myself very succinctly: The geology of  Iceland is very interesting and makes for many beautiful waterfalls and snow capped glacial peaks. The food is very good and the people are proud, helpful and friendly.

I guess I can do better than that, here goes in bullet point form:

• Iceland is at 66 degrees north latitude, also the name of a popular and expensive clothing brand
• The mild climate is a result of the gulf stream currents and air flows which keep the country generally free of ice and snow even during the deep long winter, whereas Greenland, which extends much further south is not blessed with the winds and currents is a large ice covered rock.
• The island is shaped by the parting of the North American and European plates that drift apart at 2cms a year. This may not sound like a lot but it is. Trust me. 
• There are heaps of volcanoes, with my favourites being the 2 rather boisterous ones in the Westman Islands that created the island of Surtsey and replaced a nice meadow on the main island with a 700 foot high mountain in 1970 check it out here 
• There's another volcano which has a glacier, known to the Icelanders as Mýrdalsjökull and tourists as "the M one", on top of it and occasionally erupts, much to the surprise of the locals who apparently awake to find a raging torrent of ice, water and lava where their wool shed used to be. We went snowmobilling on it, because we live dangerously!

Shell living dangerously on the glacier. The glacier was perhaps less dangerous than the snow mobiling which gets exciting when the driver hits the power whilst lurching over bumps on the snow.

• The Northern Lights are amazing. We lay in the snow for hours to get these photos!

• Icelanders are very nice, highly educated people that are pretty much all amateur geologists, capable of accurately explaining plate tectonics while serving you food or explaining igneous rock formation processes whilst checking the dents and scratches on the hire car. And they all speak about 19 languages
• The only fossil fuels they use are pretty much fuel for cars, which is on the way out as they attempt to hydrogenise their cars. The rest of their power comes from geothermal and hydro sources, which is cheap, basically inexhaustible and has the added bonus of meaning there is virtually no air pollution at all. On a clear day you can see more than 100kms!
• The effluent from one of the geothermal power stations (hot water) is used to create the nation's number 1 tourist attraction: the Blue Lagoon. The mineral mud is famed for its curative abilities. If one was able to have a hot bath on the moon then I'd imagine this is what it would be like.

 

• The food was tremendous. We ate sushi, sashimi, monk fish, flounder, dried fish jerky, rot cured shark that tasted like eating a shot glass with pure alcohol in it, horse, minke whale, goose, lamb, duck, langoustines with fois gras and truffles, a ham sandwich, croissants, waffles, some chocolates, yoghurt and these strange lollys called opals which were a bit gross but addictive.
• Reykjavik is a nice city and is dead easy to walk around. This is plus since when the wind picks up a normal human can stand to be outside for approximately 23 seconds before freezing to death and being blown away.
• I imagine that Iceland is nicer now with the effective bankruptcy of their country at the hands of 3 banks. Before October 2008, the Pound to the Kroner was about 1 to 120. To put this into context a bottle of beer was usually about 900 kroner, which works out to the princely sum of £7.50 for a beer, or for those back home, $15 which I think is a lot. In the end we were getting 1 to 200 which was pretty good and put most things on a par with UK prices. By the sound of things the whole Icesave banking debacle has stoked some national pride and brought on a groundswell of political activity in a generally subservient population. Apparently it has also had the benefit of curtailing a rather arrogant streak in the locals, but we didnt see any of it and found everyone friendly and accommodating to a fault. 

That was more or less it, although I think it was less interesting on the first pass with the possible exception of the bit about the Westman Islands which I thought I'd written in a lively and entertaining manner. Getting back to the matter at hand, Iceland was a truly amazing country. The scenery, the people, the emptiness and the chance to eat basically any animal unfortunate enough to come within range of an Icelander make this one of the most enjoyable trips on a very long and illustrious list.