Hveravellir

Greetings and Salutations!
I've been rather busy this week up in the highlands of Iceland - sheep trader and formerly outlaw country! Had a wonderful time in Reykjavik the weekend before as well - I tell you what the live music scene in Reykjavik puts the scene in Australia to shame - pretty much every venue has live music each night (or at the very least on fri and sat) and most places are open until 6-7 in the morning. I was very impressed with the quality of a jazz band I went to see who started the night with only two acoustic guitarists on stage but by 12:30am when it all finished had three guitarists (on a comb of acoustic and electric) a bass player, pianist and saxophonist. They played a nice combination of jazz standards (encoring with Cantaloupe Island :) ), pop music arranged in a jazz format and they're own work which seemed to be incredibly technically difficult. Very impressed by their improv as well. 

Then off to Hveravellir! My goodness the ride in was long but this was primarily because the bus stopped from seriously significant periods of time at places like Thingvellir (site of the Althing, the oldest parliament in the world which is located in the area where the North American and European tectonic plates are pulling away from each other (a particuarly cheesy description I thought of while I was there was "Thingvellier, uniting Iceland, dividing continents" :) hehe) ) Geysir (exploding hot pools including the hotpool from which all other geysirs get their name!) and Gulfoss (meaning golden falls which is an exceedingly beautiful waterfall in a canyon). After 10 hours on a bus we finally got to our destination Hveravellir, a lovely area tucked between two glaciers: Hofsjokull and Langjokull.
One particular highlight of Hveravellir (pronounced Kevera (with a nice gutteral K, like the h in hava nagila) vet (because for some reason "ll" is pronounced lt) lir. You get 20 points if you genuinely got that one right. This language is imposssible. I can't wait until you guys see the jackets we were given which have the icelandic words for volunteer and environmental agency... oh but while I remember, a fun aside! As difficult as most icelandic words are, when speaking english many icelanders, esp children, can not say sheep properly, they say "seeps". To me this is entirely gorgeous and delightful. The sheep are pretty cute over here as well, they wool is a lot more wirey and they're all a bit shaggy. I don't know how it works with "shearing" time though as its never really that warm and I'd hate to be a newly shawn sheep in icelandic weather (e.g. yesterday it hailed on me for a bit, a week ago we had gusts of 90km/h) . I know most sheep here are bred for meat, possibly meat sheep are shawn before they're slaughtered?)

Monument to Halla and Eyvindur

So, Hveravellir. Back on topic! This is an exceedinly beautiful place - a wasteland of lava fields, grey sand, stones and hotsprings surrounded by glaciers. The campsite also has its own hotpool filled by springs. Bliss! The weather is a little so-so though - a day can start of with a clear blue sky and light breeze and an hour later it'll be raining buckets and blowing a gale (my tent has proven itself worthy many many times), but it adds to the excitment and gives us plenty of opportunities to wear our sexy orange waterproofs. One thing I particualarly love about the region is the lack of infrastructure. Walk 20mins along one of the walking trails and aside from the trail itself there are practically no examples of human existance. Anyway one the second day Anna (lovely french girl who still has her manicure intact? How I ask? Mine are awful and she easily works as hard as me!) and I were doing some raking as a complete twat had decided that doing offroad driving, in the form of doughnuts, in a fragile land was a super awesome thing to do and because the sand is so soft, some of the tracks were up to a depth of about 20cm. We were raking a) because it was hideously ugly and b) broken windows theory - if it's left it's seen as acceptable and more anti-social behaviour occurs. Anyway, it started raining on us in this barren landscape but the sun was still very much present and so as far as they eye could see all of the stones looked liked diamonds. It was purely breathtaking. 

One night was also particularly fun as the horse traders (including the parents of our ranger, Auster) were staying at the camp sight. They were great in that after everyone had spent copious amounts of time in the hottub they retreated to the hut/bar thing and sang icelandic cowboy songs! These fun and raucous (esp this one which sounded a little like raw hide, I can't remember this name of the song but it started with "rithum rithum" and was about running the horses quickly as they tore through the "Mountains of the Thieves"), but I stopped asking what they were about after I was told that one sad sounding song was a lullaby about a woman Halla (one part of the most famous outlaw couple, Eyvindur and Halla (she wasn't actually an outlaw, but followed him out of love) in Icelandic history (spent over 20 years on the run and then were pardoned)) who threw her children off a waterfall because they could barely feed themselves yet alone children. Amusingly the traditional songs were also indispersed with operatic arias from one of the traders (he favoured songs enjoyed by Pavarotti, I personally felt that he should have aimed for more of a Domingo repertoire).

Joe, outfit complementing the landscape

We've mainly done a bunch of small jobs here - repairing/painting benches at the campsite, building small bridges to prevent stream bank erosion, filling in sheep tracks to try and keep hikers on the right paths (which involved me and others getting our Gollum on and digging mud out of a tiny cave where not even *I* could stand up fully. Considering how slow things sometimes felt at Snaefellsness the pace we are trying to keep for Austa (the ranger here who epitomies the term "boundless energy" and is a lot of fun) has been challenging but immensly rewarding. Probably my favourite job was trail marking - Helard, Anna and I were given the task of replacing the stakes along a 6.5km trail. It was bloody hard work (carrying 75 stakes between us), and my arms look as about as appealing as my legs do now (I've been told I look like a battered woman, apparently eating meat here hasn't affected how pathetically easily I bruise) but the scenery here is so fantastic that it barely mattered. I had the task of running ahead of the others and laying down the new stakes before returning to join them to carry the old stakes which suited me to a tee. 

Helard approaching the crater

Our last night was brilliant as well - Joe (this weeks team leader), Helard, Anna and I decided to walk a second trail (10km return) which lead to a crater after dinner (hurrah for long days meaning you can finish a hike at 11:15pm and it's still light out). Words can't begin to describe how breathtaking the walk , and especially the end, a massive volcanic crater was. I'll be uploading a bunch of photos on facebook soon so keep an eye out. It's the first time I've felt like I've been somewhere truly unworldly. It's really the perfect setting for any fantasy novel and I wouldn't have been surprised if elven warriors, hoards of vikings or dragons or anything had appeared. I may have also gotten certain lord of the rings themes stuck in my head ... I embrace the tragedy

A tern for the worse...

The departure from Skaftafell to Snaefellness was a long one - 11 hours travelling in total including a brief dinner in Reykjavik but a heck of a lot of bus stops. Halldor Laxness captured the soul of bus travel in Iceland perfectly in his very silly but wonderful book "Under the Glacier":
The few folk who are on the move... sidle off the bus at unexpected places and vanish into the moorland beside the road as if they lived in some bog there; or else the driver pulls up at some unaccountable point in the middle off nowhere and tosses out of the window some trifle, which usually lands in a piddle: a bundle of newspapers, a small bag, a parcel.
This book quite an interesting read - it just so happened to be set in Snaefellsjokull (jokull in icelandic just means Glacier) which was wonderful and has a very interesting commentary to make on Christianity. 

It goes a little demented in the middle but is generally hilarious (and surprisingly informative, apparently the best time to eat fermented shark is after it has been fermenting for a good 13 years, before that the ammonia hasn't left it. My desire to try this is nominal at best...).
Anyway, so we got into Snaefessness at around midnight and the "sunset" was absolutely stunning (it still doesn't really get dark here at all), the colour burnt orange was everywhere. Also a plus at this site - we were staying in a house! Beds! Joy!
This placement's aim was to put in a wheelchair friendly path in an area called Arnarstapi where this is a massive statue of the giant Barthur Snaefellsas who got pissed off at humans and sodded off the glacier forever and apparently protects the area from evil. Sadly he doesn't do a very good job of it as there are a multitude of evil little artic terns who love dive bombing everyone (it seems that they have singled me out as a character to be particularly mean to. I've been dive bombed countless times, during two of these the arsewipes made contact with my head which hurt a lot and, icing on the cake, one day when I had both hands full one of these bastards shat on my face. Yes that's it, right in the kisser. Thankfully I had my mouth closed, my cheek/hair was no so lucky. The reaction of my charming team was first to laugh and then take photos. Fail. Why do so many animals hate me? A stupid chihuahua peed on my bag in Skaftafell (I would have kicked it but I had steelcaps on), these terns loathe me, what next?? Will I be attacked by a puffin? A skua (I bloody well hope I don't get attacked by a skua, those mofos are big). That said, there was a pretty incredible sight on the second day we were working here, for some reason they terns got all riled up and started bombing horses that lived across the road (Icelandic horses are stunning) and, if you ignore the fact that being bombed by these birds is seriously unplesant, watching these horses tear around wildly was a fantastic sight to behold. 

Anyway most of the work has been great (some is experimental so it feels like significant amounts of arsing around have occurred at various stages which can be a little frustrating but I wont bore you with the details), the work site is just on these cliffs made of beautiful hexagonal basaltic columns, there are huge numbers of nesting gulls who aren't kamakazi birds at all and we've been getting in some pilot shark watching in our down time (we may have seen an orca once and whales are known to hang out in this area but no major sightings as of yet). As well as the path I've worked on fixing a bridge (a poxy job had been done with the rails) and today I helped fix a path on a volcanic crater, Saxholl, as the steps had become dislodged recently due to bad weather.

The crater work was great but my arms are a little worse for wear after having to carry rock from the crater's base to steps/other sections that required modification (the crater itself is very fragile so rocks couldn't be removed from areas off the path). It wasn't that they were heavy, far from it - when they erupted they must have been filled with air pockets - but they were pretty sharp. I'm building up quite a sexy collection of scabs and bruises I must say. Oh and my tan lines are exceptional - sock line, neck line, arm line, I possibly even have a fun little tan on my lower back due to riding up tshirts. I'm quite clearly irresistable :)

Also got to do some touristy things on the weekend - stopped at Djupalonssandur Beach and Dritvik Bay to look at the remains of a ship that had been wrecked there as well as the stunning coastline. They had some fun lifting stones at the beach as well but were used by the old fishing communities for people to prove their strength before they were hired. There were "fullsterkur" (full strength) weighing in at 155kg, "halfstekur" (half strength) at 140kg, "halfdraettingur" (weakling) at 49kg and "amlothi" (useless) at 23kg. If they couldn't at least lift the last two, they could forget it. Sadly my rock skipping skills which improved dramatically due to my trip to Alaska have diminished. Upper body strength has considerably improved though in part due to some yoga positions given to me by Angie, a fell trail teamer (but in a different group) and the work as well. I'm going to have quite the pair of guns by the end of this let me tell you!
Loving Iceland to bits, the weather on the whole has been pretty good and there's nothing like falling asleep on a pile of moss. The only complaint I have so far is that the absense of trees and often rather smooth topography often make it rather challenging for one to see a man about a dog discreetly. This is especially hard when certain tourists follow certain people "too see what nook and cranney they were heading into" while possess freaking telephoto lenses. That tourist fails.

Today involved going into lava caves and observing human feces at light houses. Those tourists fail as well.
More to come as life progresses!