Iceland

 

Djúpalónssandur, black sand beach with lifting stones, ship wreckage, and Elves' Church rock

My dad, brother, his college best friend, his son, and I spent ten days living in a van and driving the Ring Road around the perimeter of Iceland.  It was one breathtaking natural landscape after another.  Some landscapes were reminiscent of Hawaii with lava fields separating the ocean and the mountains.  There were almost no trees, just shrubs; as the Icelandic saying goes, "If you get lost in the woods, stand up."  The entire country was so sparsely populated.  I was expecting Reykjavik to be a hip European city for all the EDM it produces, but in reality it was a quirky seaside town.  There were more sheep than people.  This trip was all the more intense for closely following two years of the opposite weather in Taiwan (cloudy subtropical heat and humidity).  Even in the dead of summer, Iceland is sweater weather.  Despite going to glaciers and ice caves, I never saw a single local tour guide wearing gloves, and the al fresco dining scene was probably larger than in Taiwan.

Whales of Iceland museum

 

The weather became suddenly snowy on a steep mountain overpass

One highlight was slipping, sliding, and crawling into a lava tube filled with ice, including stalagmites that had taken 500 years to form.  It was a surprisingly physical spelunking expedition that tested our claustrophobia limits.

 

My only regret was it was too cloudy to see the Northern Lights.  Our visit was right around the time of the autumnal equinox, so the days and nights were fairly even, unlike the drastic daylight imbalances of the summer and winter.  Just over the ten days we were there, the daytime shortened by over an hour, as sunrises got later and sunsets got earlier.  Being so far north, the sun is always lower in the sky than we're used to.  There was an eerie feeling of my sense of time being off, because the midmorning was marked by the intense sideways light of an Indiana summer evening.

Dettifoss

Gullfoss

Skógafoss

Svartifoss, with naturally formed hexagonal patterns of dark lava rock

After a gorgeous super-Jeep ride from the green plains at sea level, through the lava fields, up past the mountains, we arrived at the third largest glacier in the world (after Greenland and Antarctica) to drive snowmobiles.  In addition to playing on top of the glacier, we also rode a Zodiac boat through the iceberg lagoon, where the glacier is slowly calving and melting.  In this lagoon and on every hike, locals would point out how much the glacier had receded in even just the past decade or two, unearthing enormous swaths of land.  A glacier is defined as ice so massive it moves under its own weight.  The ice is so densely packed that it refracts light differently to produce the beautiful pure blue color seen in fresh icebergs.

Seal

A hidden gem of the trip -- Petra's Stone and Mineral Collection

Fumaroles

Geyser that exploded every 8 minutes

When we weren't cooking in the van, we enjoyed meals at quaint restaurants often repurposed from farmhouses.  Local fare included arctic char, reindeer, beef, cheese, butter, bread, jam, yogurt, ice cream, chocolate, beer, and vodka.

A final treat of the trip was going to the famous-among-tourists Blue Lagoon the morning before catching our international flight home.  We enjoyed green juices, beers, face-masks, and waterfall massage in the spa-like complex of pools, naturally heated to 38 degrees Celsius, colored blue by algae, and surrounded by lava rock.  We got the more local experience earlier in the trip when we visited a community center for a much cheaper dip.  While the Finns appreciate a dry heat sauna, Icelanders love a hot tub.  The custom is to first scrub down nude in the hot showers of the heated locker rooms, then go outside in a bathing suit to sit in a mostly non-chlorinated hot tub.  All the outdoor pools at the community center were heated, so despite freezing cold, kids can go down the water slide or swim lengths in the the lap pool.