Love At First Sight

Note: click on any photo to view the pictures as a slideshow.

This was my first experience of  Iceland, in 1993.

The hill I’m sitting on is Sveinstindur, and I’m looking across to Lakagigar, the site of a huge volcanic eruption in 1783. The landscape I was looking at was like no other I’d seen. It was strange, wild and beautiful. It was love at first sight, and turned into a long term relationship.

Twenty years later I’m writing this in a friend’s house on the north-east coast of Iceland. It’s late February and, being just a few miles from the arctic circle, there’s snow, as you’d expect.  Here’s the morning rush hour hurtling by.

The north east is my favourite part of Iceland. The weather here is relatively stable compared with the south, because it’s in the rain shadow of the mighty Vatnajokull glacier which is the size of Yorkshire, and up to a kilometre thick in places.  

 This is the view across the bay of Oxafjorður from the coast road. I’m writing this at a point somewhere out to the left end of that land on the other side.





 The photo was taken one summer as I was driving here from the town of Húsavik; the road goes all the way round the bay and is a very beautiful drive indeed. It’s not unknown for whales to be visible from the road. Húsavik is a highly successful whale watching centre.

Farm in Early Summer, Oxafjorður

Húsavik

By the bye, as I wrote that, a raven alighted in the garden. They come down to sea level here.

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Iceland has beautiful and varied scenery; a spectacular coastline, fjords, sublime and challenging areas such as Askja, which a volunteer team one year christened 'Mordor'; there's green pasture land, deserts, mighty waterfalls, northern lights and glaciers which come right down to sea level. There are ice caps and active volcanoes. Sometimes the volcanoes are under the ice caps with spectacular results. So, beautiful and exciting - what's to not like?

There is no overarching theme to this blog. Subjects are posted as they occur to me or as they happen. It is not chronological: some posts might follow a theme across a number of years; others might be like diary entries, and so on. Where there are a number of post on a particular theme, they will have the same title and be numbered, for instance 'Volcanoes 1', 'Volcanoes 2', etc.