The Adventures of a Wanderer

Jökulsárlón. I try to pronounce the word in my mind a couple of times, eventually giving up. Icelandic is a beautiful language, an almost alien poetry that my awkward and blunt Australian tongue is unable to imitate. I walk down to the shore and find a comfy seat on a boulder while my best friend sets up to take photos. He's a landscape photographer and Iceland has been his dream since I met him 2 years ago; we're going to be here awhile, and I'm elated.

Everything stills. The tourists are leaving, the tiny car park cafe is closed and yet we stay, the Midnight Sun continuing to the light the visual magnificence before us. Grey clouds begin to obscure the sky and provide an eerie and desolate background to the spectral Ice Giants that float across the lake, so quiet, but echoing in the vastness. Each time they gently bump into one another in their sleepy dodgem derby, it sounds as if a mountain is cracking in half. The only other noise that pierces the stillness is the occasional clicks of a camera shutter.

The colour of the Icebergs is almost ethereal, a bright light blue that is visually striking against the seemingly endless white of the glacier in the distance and the steely grey of the cloud covered sky. How is it even possible to find ice that colour? Almost like the bright blue eyes sometimes found in all-white cats, but altogether more otherworldly. They seem to glow. Black streaks mark some of them as if they are so cold they have frostbite, yet the coffee grounds texture gives away that it is dirt. Dirt that has become trapped and will be given a burial out to sea, once the slow procession of icy behemoths makes it's way under the road bridge to my left and out to the ocean.

Despite it being Spring, the chilly breeze that is coming from across the lake is starting to sink into my bones, and I get up and walk along the lakes edge to try and warm myself. Ice sculptures litter the rocky shore, beautiful artistic offerings that far surpass the beauty of any piece crafted by a human. As I bend down to admire one of them I am greeted by the happiest and most out of place noise that I could imagine: wind chimes. I look down, and to my surprise and delight see a littering of tiny ice chunks lapping at the waters edge, tinkling as they hit each other in the rhythm of the tide.

I walk over to my friend for a hug, still unable to get warm, and as we embrace and look out over the water we are silent; just two tiny humans in the presence of Ice Giants.