The World Went Splat!

Þingvellir, Hrafnagjá and Almannagjá

elrina753 — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 12:02:00 GMT

At the beginning of last month I had the good fortune to spend eight days in Iceland, with about five of those days on the ground doing whatever I wanted. Whatever I wanted turned out to be quite a bit, to the point that my bank account is crying for mercy. Every time I look its way I think I hear my wallet weeping.

And me, silly girl that I am came completely unprepared, I blame part of this on the fact that I tumbled off a commercial flight from Munich, Germany crammed myself onto a bus and went home for a grand total of five hours. Just five. I didn't even bother changing out of my uniform, except for the knee high navy blue stockings and the ugly navy blue heels that make me feel like the 80's have come back to devour me alive. I had a few hours of quality time with my slippers, changed out the luggage and then and the heavens opened and the rain poured down and it was off to JFK... again. You know you're loaded down and looking pathetic when people help you onto the bus and then strike up a conversation with you - this does not happen in New York! It breaks the cardinal rule of how to interact with people in NYC and yet there seems to be something about my uniform that says "Talk to me!" Argh. The fact that I resembled a drowned rat probably wasn't working in my favor either: my umbrella, as it happens, is seeing Germany without me.

Anyhow, I've completely digressed from the fact that when I packed for Iceland I somehow forgot that "ICE" is an important part of the name of said country so I should probably pack accordingly and one hoodie, a wool jacket and a pashmina does not accordingly make. I ended up having to buy a hat and gloves as my fingers were still thawing out from certain locales and it was getting in the way of me being a photo-ho. It does no one any good when your fingers are so thoroughly frozen that you can't focus the camera as your fingers simply will not work. They started out just shaking, and when it progressed to me having to will them to move (I believe pep talks were an important facet at one point) I realized something simply must be done. So there I was forking over the credit card (can you hear it weeping? I can) for a lovely wool hat and a pair of plain black gloves, so as to keep my poor abused appendages all nice and toasty. It wasn't until I got home and took a good long look at my bank account that I realized buying a hat and gloves cost me 60 dollars. Just.. Holy CRAP! On the upside, the appendages were all nice and toasty and no more pep talks were called for.

I keep telling myself that the memories mean more then the money, but that fact is sometimes hard to remember when the credit card bills arrive in the mail and you find yourself weeping along with your bank account.

All of that blather was leading up to the fact that I have gotten around to posting some of my Iceland images (I took well over a thousand but have since weeded through them in order to preserve the sanity of those who may view them) and as I normally go from start to finish with a trip, which makes sense when I generally have only 19 hours to pack in as much as humanly possible, this time I had 5 days, so I'm going to start from the end - with the part of the trip that knocked me on my ass and slapped me silly. Seriously, this part of the trip made me its bitch.

I am a geek and this became incredibly apparent as I was in the throes of geek ecstasy whilst I stood beneath the cliffs of Almannagjá and gazed upon the ruin of Hrafnagjá. And yes, I know that makes no sense to anybody but me. I shall explain.

This, dear reader, is Almannagjá. And it's not a cliff, it's the edge of a continent - the American Continent to be precise. It's the edge of a tectonic plate and it is moving. It's not just a pile of rocks or a pretty cliff face to gaze upon, if you are reading this from the comfort of your home in North America somewhere, you are sitting on this thing RIGHT NOW. That just blows my mind and makes me want to count the tweety birds.

Now, my throes of geeky passion has led a few people to inquire what exactly a tectonic plate is when I've been waxing lyrical about the wonders of standing below this cliff and pondering the immensity of it all, so I'm going to give a brief rundown: All of us are sitting on a tectonic plate. Right here, right now, you are on one. Imagine the earth as pieces of styrofoam floating on water. That's pretty much what this is, pieces of rock floating on a sea of melted rock and metal. Now pieces of styrofoam aren't going to sit all nice and pretty and joined together on water (especially if the water is moving), they're going to move around a bit, one is going to go under the other, they're going to pull apart. The earth does this all the time, it's just so big and massive and old that we really don't realize it's going on until the earth pulls the rug out from under us and suddenly there are earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanoes going off all over the place. Iceland just happens to straddle the Mid-Atlantic ridge where two plates - the American and the Eurasian are slowly but surely moving away from each other, sometimes causing all kinds of havoc as they do so.

That brings us to the fact that if you have one tectonic plate, you must have another and this is where Hrafnagjá comes in.

This is Hrafnagjá and it is the Eurasian Tectonic plate. A bit more run down and older looking, more subtle. It doesn't have the immensity of Almannagjá, but it is a continent and like it's American neighbor it is moving - slowly but surely a good 3 mm per year (that doesn't sound like much, but geologic time doesn't span decades the way human time does). As a result of this movement and the steady grind of time, the American plate and the Eurasian plate are miles away from each other and separated by a cold, deep lake in the middle of the rift valley they've managed to create with their ceaseless movement.

This was the part of the Icelandic tour that just knocked my socks off and left me begging for more. In the space of a day I went from Europe to America. Now, I do this quite a bit but there's a big, huge, MASSIVE difference from sashaying onto a plane in America and pulling your tired and weary carcass out of it in Europe. You know you're on a different continent, you've done the time, you've arrived, everything is different. But this had an immediacy and an awareness that being in a plane doesn't give you. Slumbering your way through a flight (or working in my case) and popping a blind to see where you are over the Atlantic doesn't hit you in the face the way this does, you have left a continent, you are no longer standing on a massive slab of earth floating over magma, you've left it and you are on a completely different slab of earth, moving away and taking you with it. There is no confusion about where you are. You can say on one side of the valley: I am in Europe and 10 minutes later you find yourself hiking up a hill to the top of a tectonic plate, looking down at a rift valley and you are in North America. There's Europe in the distance, a hop, skip and a leap away, but you're not there, you're someplace else.

Did I stand there looking up at this massive wall of rock with my mouth hanging open and my brain beating itself against my skull? Why yes, yes I did.

I think I just gave myself chills... I need to go lay down.

As always: my photos can be found on Flickr. So please, look and enjoy and join me in the geekgasm.

The Blue Lagoon

elrina753 — Thu, 10 May 2007 02:17:00 GMT

My trip to Iceland lasted almost eight days and normally there would be planning and decisions would be made about what to do on which day and transportation and where the hotel would be - all the normal sorts of things you do when planning a trip that lasts a decent amount of time.

That didn't happen. At all.

I flew home from Germany the same day I was supposed to leave for Iceland, in fact I walked off the plane, caught a bus to my apartment, changed out my luggage and immediately went back to the airport. There had been no time to buy a travel guide and barely enough time to give the internet a passing glance. I was hoping to pick up a guide in one of the bookshops in JFK, and just my luck, they had every Lonely Planet guide BUT the one to Iceland. They even had the guide to Antartica. I ask you, how many more people are flying out of JFK to see Antartica then to see Iceland? Seriously?

I was fortunate enough to bump into a co-worker who had lived in Iceland before, she gave me a few pointers such as: go see the Puffins (didn't do it), eat a fish called Ysa or something like that (didn't do that either) look at the rock formations (I did do that) and go to the Blue Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon. Okay, not sure what that was, but I dutifully wrote it down on the back of an envelope. It may not have been Lonely Planet, but it was a start.

Fortunately our hotels are taken care of by our company, we just never know where we're staying until we're there. That can lead to some interesting situations and circumstances. I've found that when all else fails and you don't know what there is to do or even what's going on, the best course of action is to either just start walking or rent a car and drive. Seeing as how we were out on the moon in Keflavik (a tourist booth operator in Reykjavik actually described it that way) we hedged our bets with a rental car and a stack of tourist brochures from the booth in the airport.

Everyone we'd talked to had mentioned the Blue Lagoon as the thing to do. The brochure looked promising enough: laughing, happy people basking in mineral rich waters in an ancient lava field. That worked for us, and hey, it was actually the closest thing to Keflavik besides the airport. Finally, something was going my way.

The five of us that went figured that as long as The Blue Lagoon wasn't some Icelandic version of The Polar Bear Club, all would be well in our world. As the point of us being in Iceland was to work (3 days of work, 5 days of play) and we actually had to do earn a paycheck later in the evening we swung by the Blue Lagoon just as it was opening which proved to be an extremely good idea. Apparently if you show up early you practically get the place to yourself. Show up later and it's all lines and crowds.

The Blue Lagoon, we found out, is a geothermal spa. While the air might be freezing the water is warm enough that it really doesn't matter. It really is happy smiling people basking in warm, beautiful water. You get in and you really don't want to come out. The water is inundated with silica, algae and other minerals. I'd heard that it was good for your skin, but I didn't believe the hype until I experienced it for myself. It really is amazing, it does wonders for your skin, I left that place thinking "damn!"

Hair on the other hand, is a completely different story. My skin may have felt like a million bucks from all the lounging and relaxing and mud facials, but afterwards it felt like someone had replaced my normally fine hair with cardboard that was ready to go up in flames at any moment. Tinder might have been the best word to describe the state of my hair. Get a match within five feet of me and it would have been POOF!

And of course the photo-ho in me had to have pictures and lots of them. Watching the cockpit crew slather their faces with white silica mud is great and all but it's even better when you can look at the photos afterwards and laugh. So there I was in my itty bitty bikini trucking along with my Canon Rebel desperately praying that I wouldn't slip as dousing the camera would be tantamount to just chucking it in the garbage. Other people have significant others and babies and cats and dogs to dote on. Me - I have a camera and a serious shutterbug complex. The lifeguards at the Blue Lagoon were wearing thick coats and warm hats and heavy gloves and I was stumbling around the area in a bikini, and to top it all off I already had a cold to begin with. Not my brightest moment, but my quest for pictures really makes me throw all caution to the wind (and my clothes too apparently - but in a bathing suit freezing kind of way)

The most amazing thing about the Blue Lagoon, to my mind, was that compared to everything else in Iceland, it really was decently priced - about 1,400 Kronur for admission and you could stay as long as you wanted.

It was so completely worth it. Even the cardboard hair.

In the land of fire and ice and stuck on a bus bench

elrina753 — Mon, 7 May 2007 02:53:00 GMT

I have so many trips I could segue into on this first post of posts. There's so many places I could talk about that I've had the fortune of visiting. But today, I think I'll stick with where I am now. I'm in Iceland, up in the North Atlantic amongst the cold and the summers of endless day.

I'm here for work, I'm getting paid to be here but it seems more like one long, wonderful holiday. Except for the part where we got stuck in a hotel in Keflavik, which is 45 minutes and 1,200 Kronus away from Reykjavik. I've been schlumping back and forth between the two cities for the past few days getting steadily poorer and poorer. The endless sunlight has thrown me off a bit as well. My second night in Iceland and I'm tooling around Reykjavik with three wonderful Aussies I met on a tour, there was beer and food and good conversation and I glanced at my watch only to realize that it was almost 11 at night and that the bus back to Keflavik was leaving very soon! I'm surprised I didn't get hopelessly lost and turned around, but my directional ineptitude finally decided to leave me alone for a bit and to go bug other people. To bad I didn't read the fine print on the bus schedule. There were no buses running to Keflavik that late at night until May 15th. I was out of luck. In lieu of my oncoming panic attack at the prospect of having to spend the night on a hard bus bench, the wonderful gentleman behind the counter arranged a ride for me with a driver who was going out that way to pick up a flight crew.

I was impressed with the Icelandic people. The guy at the bus counter who helped me out so much seemed almost typical of the Icelanders I've met whilst here: friendly, accomadating, proud of who they are and their country. The driver who was kind enough to bring me to the front door of my hotel was even better, 45 minutes in a van just chatting. What could have been an awkward trip late at night turned into a friendly gab fest.

I don't tend to plan my trips. The most I manage to plan is for the next day. The nature of my job means that I never know where I'm going or what I'm going to do until the last minute. I've found myself relying on happy accidents and serendipity more then once in my rambles around the world. What could have turned into a miserable experience on a hard bus bench instead became a wonderful memory of new friends made and perfect strangers doing more then they should to help someone out.