Week 1 in Iceland

"Mother Earth" by Einar Jonsson

I have just had an absolutely fabulous week! Last friday saw me fly into Reykjavik where I frolicked around for a day in a dazed and slightly confused state (approx 3 hours sleep and a 4 hour time difference can do that to you).
Flying into the main Icelandic airport was such a refreshing change to border security in the USA. No one took my finger prints nor did a retinal scan. No one tried asking me questions in an overly aggressive manner in order to try and catch me out on anything. They simply SMILED at me, asked me how long I'd be in Iceland and told me to enjoy my stay.
My baggage was also out for me in 5 minutes and I have a sneaking suspicion that the baggage handlers didn't throw it around. Everything was smooth, efficient and clean. I think I fell a little in love with the place :) 

Mysterious knitted tree

Reykjavik is a lovely little place filled with street art. There's a lot of really interesting architecture and a looming church that just towers over the city. It's fun to play the game "guess who has pure viking ancestory". It's very easy. They're the ones who have white-blonde hair, piercing blue eyes and are far more attractive than they have any right to be. No complaints from this end.

Things are freaking expensive though, food from a supermarket was fine but many other things are just ridiculous (i.e. buying one of those hand knitted jumpers would set you back around 20000 kr ( the exchange rate is something like US$1 is 125 Kr. )) That said I had a lovely morning wandering around the church, headed to the museum (very ambitious of me considering the amount of sleep I'd have and the time zone I was operating on), found some music for a friend of mine and went to some art exhibitions, one which included a knitted tree that was about twice my height. Caught up with Michelle (who I met in Portland) in the hostel which was lovely, also met a couple of guys on their way to Greenland, wicked.

The next day saw Michelle and I head to the bus going out to Skaftafell where we were to spend out training week. The bus ride was fabulous - beautiful waterfalls, haunting wastleland, turf covered houses, fields of green, fields of lupins (boo), sheep! Surprisingly there was only a little bit of ash as we passed Eyjafjallajokull (which I can pronounce there - it's not actually so hard!), sadly there was a lot of low cloud so we didn't see the perpatrator of all the hassel. In an hour or so we head back to Reykjavik so I might have more luck then.
During the bus ride Michelle and I worked out that everyone still on at the end was part of the team. Everyone is absolutely lovely and although I'm sure it will be character building at times due to being around the same people on an almost 24/7 basis, it'll be an amazing summer (there were 9 people on my trail team and this group was subsequently divided into 2). So we met the people running the course, this weeks team leaders (Vasilis and Damien, both experts in shameless greek and french style flirting respectively :P it's all in fun though) set up our tents and wandered around Skaftafell. 

Sel

Skaftafell is a stunning spot, it's at the southern point of a massive ice cap (approx the size of Yorkshire) and we had glacier "tounges" on either side of the park. Apparently the place gets rather exciting every 10 or so years as underneath the massive glacier is a volcano - it erupts, melts ice (but not all of it as the glacier is about 1km thick) and the melt water eventually finally finds its way to the weakest part of the glaciers and spews out. In the eruption that occured in 1996, this was to the tune of 3-4km3 of water in 11 hours. Not a heck of a lot was left after that. I'll have you know that you've all seen a glimpse of Skaftafell, well those of you who have seen Batman Begins - the bit where he goes to tibet to get all trained up was actually done here for reasons beyond my comprehension. 

Tiny tiny hot pool

This week I'd discovered a new appreciation for rocks, primarily because our task was to build a few ditches and drains to help limit erosion (both from spring ice melts and people walking off the trail which is really just a glorified sheep path), and if this week is anything to go by, my dream of having decent upper body strength will certainly become a reality. While the work is exhausting I feel like I have so much energy here, but not like I'm buzzing with it, just that it takes ages for it to fade away. Consequently the hikes some of the guys here and I did after work didn't kill me as much as I had anticipated 
- (i.e. one day we went to a hot springs which was 1.5 hours fast walk one way over gravel. This was a lovely experience especially arriving back at midnight but still having plenty of light (unlike Alaska, it never gets dark here. This is both good and bad, good because you can hike at any time and it's not dangerous bad because my body goes "oh it's siesta time" and I wake up approx every two or so hours.

View from the top of Kristinatindur

Getting back to sleep is usually pretty easy but was less great last night when people were singing "She'll be coming around the mountain" at 2am in Icelandic. The Icelandic people clearly having partying down pat - we were invited to a bonfire at the park a few days ago which was just a big singalong which was fine. Attempting to sing songs in Icelandic is hilairous. One song, however that translated amazingly well was the "Hokey Pokey"- especially the "in, oot, in, oot" part. I would like to add that unlike the lame American version, they have "wooooooah the hokey pokey section. Americans, you don't know what you're missing out on. This has gone rather off topic. Back to the topic )), we also did another one to the top of a mountain called Kristinartindar. We were told it was about a one hour walk from our work site (which is in turn about a 1.5 hour walk from where our tents were set up) so thought it would be fine to go up and get back before dinner.

View number 2

Two hours later we had finally gotten to the top...we got back at 9pm freaking starving as we hadn't really had anything substantial to eat since lunch at 1pm. When I asked Damien (the french team leader) that he'd gotten the time slightly wrong he just replied "Well, it's easier for the brain to think of one hour not two, if you thought two you wouldn't have done it, so it's good, no?" I said something very rude to him in French. 
The food here has been surprisingly good especially skyr a special kind of yoghurt (although some of the confectionary is a little questionable).


Must Dash!


B