shewhomust: (bibendum)
Our holiday in Iceland was booked through Discover the World; it was effectively their Fly, Drive & Hike option, but modified and slightly extended (we flew from Manchester, flights are less frequent than flights from London, and we chose to extend our holiday rather than shorten it). We spent 17 nights in Iceland, staying in hotels with bed and breakfast prepaid, and the cost of flights, car hire and accommodation for the two of us was slightly over £4000. We don't habitually prebook to this extent, so the size of that sum rather took our breath away, but it compared well enough to what other firms were offering, and we were both very happy with our holiday (to the extent that [livejournal.com profile] durham_rambler is convinced that going to Iceland was his idea, and I think it was mine!). Would we use Discover the World again? Probably not, now we know how easy it is to deal with Icelandic hotels in English - another time we would probably travel independently.

There follows, for my own benefit and that of anyone else who might be interested (not to mention setting out some of the feedback I might want to give to Discover the World), a list of hotels, with our impressions: Cut for length and detail )
shewhomust: (Default)
As I was saying, Hveragerði is famous for its geothermal greenhouses; but the urge to grow things seems to spill over into more general gardening. And not just to grow things, but to do so in colourful and inventive ways - to plant posies of daisies in polka dot rubber boots, and hang them from a tree in your garden.

Seamstress Our visit seems to have followed close on a floral extravaganza, and the evidence was still on display, though looking a little the worse for wear: the sports field was festooned with dishevelled garlands, and on the green at one end of the town a small group of elaborate constructs still bore their unintelligible labels. A blanket of flowers tumbled from an upper bunk bed, while a bedside cabinet nearby burst open to display a drawer full of blossom.

My favourite, though, was this seamstress, stitching away at her endless cloth of foliage, coffee pot at the ready. "It's a northern aesthetic," says [livejournal.com profile] durham_rambler. "These wouldn't be out of place in a bus shelter in Unst."
shewhomust: (Default)

Thieving Magpie
Originally uploaded by bob the bolder
I missed Thieving Magpie Morris is the Market Place yesterday; but Bob the Bolder posted this picture, plus a link to this video which conveys the authentic flavour of a morris side in action by fading down the music and focussing on the comments - a loud cry at one point of "He's just making it up!"

In yesterday's Guardian, Carol Ann Duffy commissions new war poems. Her own Big Ask is an explicit tribute to Adrian Mitchell, but the poem which reminds me most strongly of Mitchell's voice - think of To Whom It May Concern with its incandescent, barely restrained contempt - is Sean O'Brien's Of Course If I Can Help in Any Way.

John Ryan, creator of Captain Pugwash, and also of Harris Tweed, has died, at the age of 88 - I'm sorry to hear he has died, of course, but pleased to learn that he had not died long ago. Captain Pugwash was a childhood favourite, and I still think of the television series before the books - which is unusual for me (also, I realise, I think of it in colour though I must have watched it in black and white). In his memory, a rousing rendition of The Trumpet Hornpipe (which you may know as The Black Pig).

SeltĂșn geothermal area II have started posting my photos from Iceland to Flickr. There will, in time, be many, many more of them, and no doubt there will be posts here as well, where there are thoughts or stories to accompany the pictures. But I'll try to resist posts where all I have to say is "Wow! Look at that! It's a [what it says on the label]. Isn't that amazing?" (Like this picture of a boiling hot, sulphurous stream at Seltún on the Reykjanes peninsula, for example: some of the mist is soft rainy cloud descending, and some of it is steam rising from the ground. Isn't that amazing? You just walk along the boardwalk, following the stream back into the hills, accompanied by the gentle burbling sound of boiling water. Wow!)

Oops, that's only four. Very well, another one from Iceland: my copy of William Morris's Icelandic Journals has as a frontispiece a drawing entitled "The Arms of Iceland" showing a split salt cod. I thought this was a piece of dubious humour, but no - between some time in the fifteenth century and 1903, the codfish really was used officially as an emblem of Iceland. You can to some extent explain this away: it was the emblem used by Denmark to represent only one part of its national territory, salt cod was for a long time Iceland's one internationally traded product (see [livejournal.com profile] durham_rambler on the subject of the role of coffee in the electrification of Iceland - it's all about the salt cod, really) - but the fact remains. And we saw the flag still flying outside the Icelandic Saltfish Museum in Grindavik, as far as a flag can fly in steady rain. We didn't visit the museum - that'll be for another trip - instead we went to the restaurant opposite and ate salt cod.
shewhomust: (bibendum)
Sail away


This viking ship wasn't the first thing I saw in Iceland that I wanted to photograph: that would be the incomprehensible landscape of lava fields below us, as we flew in to Keflavik. But it was the first thing I saw after I set foot on the ground, dazed from being in movement for twelve hours, and by the return to evening daylight after nightfall. Even in that state, I thought it was beautiful, and noticed that it sails on a sea of glass boulders (I didn't know then that glass is one of the limited number of things they actually make in Iceland).

And yesterday as we headed back to the gate and the plane and England and eventually home, it was the last thing in Iceland I photographed. Not the greatest picture, but it feels like a good omen, a promise of voyages to come.

After that it was Manchester, and waking to rain, and a homeward drive over the Pennines, and picking up threads - there will be more photos, and there will be more posts, but right now I'm going to remove the half-unpacked suitcase from my bed, and get some sleep (in my own bed: there are good things about coming home, too).
shewhomust: (bibendum)
You do not know how many pictures I have taken this holiday in which those oh so characteristic Icelandic sheep are shown having just turned away, moved out of shot or otherwise failed to cooperate with the photographer. But I persevere, and behold:

At last!


I give you 'Sheep under Snæfellsnes'.
shewhomust: (puffin)
When we told people we were planning a holiday in Iceland, we'd get one of two reactions. Either they'd say "Why?" or they'd already been themselves, and told us we'd love it. Only one person had considered Iceland as a destination and decided against it, and that was T., who is a serious birder: Iceland doesn't have very interesting birds, it seems - which means, I think, that the birds you can see in Iceland can also be seen elsewhere.

No doubt that's true, for the dedicated twitcher, but amateurs like us are finding it amazingly easy to see a variety of birds from closer up than we are accustomed to. Sometimes it's a bit too close up: [livejournal.com profile] durham_rambler threatens to print up a bumper sticker reading "WE BRAKE FOR OYSTER CATCHERS", we've had to do it so often.

Plenty of other birds seem to enjoy the attention: there was the one (it might have been a redwing, but don't quote me on that) who was perched on the Speaker's Mound waiting for us at Þingvellir, which flew along ahead of us for several hundred yards, waiting for us to catch up when we lagged behind. Or any number of - well, it seems they aren't curlews at all, they're whimbrels ("woken by whimbrels" says my notebook), but they are very similar. There were the pair in Vik which sat on adjacent lamp posts shouting at each other; and the golden plover at the foot of the pass to Brundavik, which posed on a stone just above the path, and whistled to make sure the papparazzi were doing their job.

The arctic terns and the great skuas are more relaxed than I'm used to. I think of them as birds who try to drive away anyone who comes within a hundred yards of their nests, but either we've caught them at a different point in the season, or their nests are more secure, but either way we've been able to watch them going about their business without being molested. This evening for the first time we were swooped on by a rattling gang of arctic terns - we backed off hastily.


Adult gull and chick
Originally uploaded by Roger Cornwell
We even visited a viewpoint at Hafnarhólmi, in the north east, where a couple of garden chairs were positioned so that you could sit in the last of the evening sun and watch the puffins coming and going at the top of the cliff, and the gulls and their chicks down below: see [livejournal.com profile] durham_rambler's picture for evidence that, in defiance of all the laws of nature, these were cute gulls.

Further than that I can't identify them; there were helpful notice boards, but they were too full of pictures of puffins being adorable to find space for a simple tutorial in gulls 101 (though given which gulls feature in other information sources, I'd guess at kittiwakes). Do you detect a note of bitterness here? Well, picture me as someone whose favourite cult band have just had a chart success: Iceland is puffin crazy, and they appear everywhere, from tea towels to knitted bonnets. Every supermarket (well, every one that I've been in) has a basket of fluffy puffins. I remain besotted, but a little defensive too.

At least I haven't yet been offered the opportunity to eat one; though the restaurant where we could have had lunch but didn't was offering guillemot.
shewhomust: (bibendum)
As with geography, so with history: I keep misreading Iceland.

It's easy to slip into thinking of Iceland as 'an old country' - as if this expression means anything. The presentation of Ieland to tourists - and that includes internal tourists - relies heavily on the sagas, and before them, on tales of the Age of Settlement. You are constantly invited to think of Iceland's history as starting with a First Settler in the ninth century, and recounted in the sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; everything reminds you of the middle ages, which means: old.

Only, of course, not. The mere fact of being able to identify a First Settler (and for the purposes of this argument, it doesn't really matter whether Ingólfr Arnarson was really the first settler, or whether Iceland was actually settled by the Irish) indicates that the history of the country is all pretty recent.

The deserted farm


There's an abandoned settlement called Sandfell just to the east of Skaftafell: turf banks which mark the site of a farm, a white fence enclosing the old graveyard, and a tree (you can't miss it, it's the only tree for miles). A noticeboard explains the history of the place, with reference to the sagas, which I would reproduce here if I could only remember which guide book I read it in. It's a peaceful, evocative place. But the farm was not actually abandoned until the 1940s - those memories of the remote past are actually overlaying the changes of a much more recent period, the time at which Iceland was at last and rather self-consciously becoming a modern independent nation.

Far from being an old country, Iceland is a very new one. Old buildings don't survive, but are constantly rebuilt. I am writing this tonight in the oldest hotel in Iceland: it dates back to 1884. It's like being in the US, where a house built in 1900 can be historic.

Something else which keeps misleading me: the elements of the Icelandic language which I recognise are often analogous to older English terms. All the place names, the Dales and the Wicks and the Burys: the wording on the map which reads
"Þú ert hérna" - thou art here.

Even the geology of Iceland is new: most places do geology first, then history, but not here - in Iceland, geology just keeps on happening.
shewhomust: (bibendum)
I have held forth before (repeatedly and at length) about the compulsion to build cairns. Evidently there are people who cannot see a stone without feeling obliged to place another stone on top of it. And you see an awful lot of stones in Iceland. Things have gone so far that cairn-building, like lighting fires, is explicitly banned in the national parks.

Driving east along Route 1 towards Skaftafell, we were catching glimpses across the plain of shining glaciers and saw-toothed mountains. We pulled in to a picnic area hoping for a better view, and only gradually realised that the parking area was surrounded by more than the usual number of cairns. In fact, it stood in the middle of a sea of the things. What's more, the mound at the far end of the area, with the interesting crenellated skyline? Nope, those are cairns, too.

Add your stone here


There's a story, of course. THey're good on stories here, and on noticeboards to tell them. So, a large farm once stood here, called Laufskálar, so rich a building that it had 24 doors on iron hinges. But it was destroyed in 894, in the earliest recorded eruption of the volcano Katla. The lava mound is named Laufskálavarða, Laufskálar Cairn, after the farm, and everyone who passes here for the first time must add a stone to a cairn, for luck. The highways authority has moved a supply of stones to the site, to ensure that everyone can meet this obligation.

As it happened, I had a pebble in my pocket that I'd picked up on the black beach that morning, while we were watching the puffins. It was a wrench to part with it, but that surely makes it all the luckier, doesn't it?
shewhomust: (bibendum)
Selfoss was the first point in our circumnavigation of Iceland. According to the CD provided by the car hire company, it is the largest town in the interior of Iceland. It isn't very big, and it's all of 10 miles from the sea. But it has an excellent bookshop combined with café (with internet access), and I bought a botanical map of Iceland, which seems to be the nearest thing available to an actual book about the wild flowers (which are many and beautiful).

The road runs through the saga country: a rich green coastal plane, and the mountains gradually closing in on the left (north). At first we see only remote profiles gleaming with snow, the glacier a line of light at the horizon, becoming more distinct as we travel on. The cone of Hekla, with her own cloud, moves across the skyline. The heights move closer, become the vertical walls of a semicircular bay lapped by green grass (and the sea this time lining the southern horizon with light). When we pause to admire one of many waterfalls, the Westman isles come and go in the mist.

Skogar Folk Museum. Short version: we loved it. )
shewhomust: (Default)
While we were in Hveragerdi, I picked up a tourist information leaflet - outside the library, underneath whose floor runs a volcanic fault line, a long rift which has been retained on display but covered with a sheet of glass in the floor. "It's still growing," says the lady in the post office, "about 2cm a year. We're going to have to replace that glass." But I digress: according to the leaflet, Heimaey is the Pompeii of the North, because of excavations which are uncovering the houses engulfed in the 1973 eruption. The past arrives so much faster than it used to...

English: the lingua franca of Iceland. Waiting to pay for my postcards, I heard the assistant explaining in English how to reclaim tax on your purchase to a rather baffled Frenchwoman. It's the language we speak to foreigners - though this may not apply to Scandinavians.

It's not that the landscape is entirely unfamiliar; it's that we keep misinterpreting things that look familiar but have different causes. That's what 'uncanny valley' means, isn't it? The flat valley bottoms, all mossy green and scored with long parallel lines, result from volcanic rifts, not from peat cutting; and a row of regularly spaced round structures were surely volcanic outcrops, too, not grouse butts. We walked this morning on a black beach, black sand strewn with black pebbles - but they were lava, not the colliery waste of Durham's black beaches, and puffins bobbed on the waves whch were not black at all.

I'm in the lounge of the hotel at Skaftafell, and through the window in front of me I can see a glacier coming straight towards me (but slowly).
shewhomust: (bibendum)
After two days in Iceland, I'm close to information overload: we have seen so many wonderful things that I need some time to process and sort before I begin to write about them. The short version is that we spent yesterday exploring the Reykjanes peninsula, pulling off the road to explore minor tourist attractions: black cliffs dotted with birds, a bridge spanning a sandy gully which happens to be the fault line between the Eurasian and American tectonic plates, the boiling mud of Seltún - stuff like that. Today we toured the Golden Circle route - the major tourist sites: the original Geysir and his livelier little brother Strokkur, Gullfoss waterfall, Þingvellir. I'm overwhelmed, and a little exhausted, too.

After all that, we went out for a pizza, so instead of any weightier cultural analysis, here are two of the pizzas available:
The Viking
Cheese, sauce, tabasco sauce, mushroom, pepperoni, fresh chili, pineapple, black pepper, cayenne pepper, fresh jalapeno.

Janis Joplin
Cheese, sauce, ham, banana, pineapple.
I have held forth elsewhere about the wrongness of ham and pineapple pizza; it never occurred to me to add that that goes double for bananas, Of course, we are in Hveragerði, where most of Iceland's banana crop is grown...

Even so, we had the 'Salmon Harbor' (prawns, mussels, smoked salmon).

Inflight

Jul. 4th, 2009 12:31 pm
shewhomust: (Default)
An egg for Hieronymus BoschIt was a long drive to Manchester, what with roadworks and traffic and - allegedly, according to the road signs - 'Animals on the road' (over a distance of several miles) and, most of all, simply being aware that we had a deadline to meet and a plane to catch. And, because this is how these things are organised, there was a long wait at the airport, during which we ate at a restaurant called 'giraffe' (as in 'I like giraffes, but I couldn't eat a whole one') good food and charming service and eventually we were called to the gate just as the setting sun was turning the hazy sky apricot.

We waited in the plane as darkness fell, then took off into a red sunset and flew over a countryside wearing black silk embroidered with gold sequins. As we flew northwards it grew lighter, until there was daylight above the clouds, and then sea below them. Our first real sight of Iceland was of a low expanse of black - what? There was nothng to give any sense of scale, but it could have been rocks, or treacle, with a pale scum (or maybe lichen) floating on top. (Turned out to be lava, and moss so thick it looked as if it had been oured on from a jug, but I would never have guessed that).

We landed at Keflavik by daylight, with a low sun lighting fires behind all the windows of the terminal building. The shuttle from the hotel drove us through the twilight to the Northern Lights hotel, past the sculpture of an egg from Bosch's Garden of Earthy Delights, through verges which - after that first sight - were astonishingly green, and thick with drifts of blue flowers: could they possibly be lupins?
shewhomust: (Default)
Gail, who knows what I like, and also where I am going for my holidays, gave me a copy of William Morris's Icelandic Journals (on-line edition here), and I have been reading them in preparation for our trip. (Meanwhile, [livejournal.com profile] durham_rambler has been reading Arnaldur Indridason's crime novels, so between us we should manage a balanced view).

A small grumble: my book is the 1969 'Travellers' Classics' edition, with an introduction by James Morris (as then was) but with no commentary of any kind about the text itself. It's an attractive hardback, easy on the eye (comparing it to the on-line edition, I suspect it's a facsimile of the original publication, in Morris's Collected Works of 1911). It contains a full, day by day account of Morris's first trip to Iceland in 1871, and a scantier and incomplete account of his return in 1873. Throughout the first visit, Morris refers to writing his journal each day, but only at the very end of it does it emerge that although he made notes at the time, the finished version was not written up until 1873, when he had decided to return. The 1873 Journal is from the start less detailed, but at first it seems simply a reluctance to repeat, for example, the details of the outward journey. Next the entries themselves become less detailed, and place-names are abbreviated to their initials; I thought 'Ah, these are Morris's contemporaneous notes that he has not written up.' Then entries become more cryptic still, and I thought 'No, these are Morris's contemporaneous notes...' Finally, on August 19th, the entries stop, in mid-entry, with the words "Looking back we can see the last of Oxnadalr." What happened? No indication.

Then there's the question of the notes. The text is followed by notes by Eiríkr Magnússon, with whom Morris studied Icelandic, and who accompanied him on his first trip. These are mostly additional information, filling in the history of the places visited, and occasionally the names of the people they met there (most of the people they encounter are described by Morris as 'an acquaintance of Magnússon's' - he does seem to have been acquainted with half the population). But there are also footnotes throughout the text, some of them Morris's own additional details, some of them signed 'EM', and some signed 'Ed.' Who is Ed.? I wonder if this too is Magnússon, partly because the voice is similar, partly because of one particular note. On Sunday, August 27th, at Thingvellir, Morris describes himself wandering off alone, lying a long time on the hillside watching a rainbow. "So at last," he says, "I turned to go home, remembering that I had to cook the dinner..." This is footnoted: "He sat about the rocks and ate blueberries till he could find no more, and then remembered about the dinner. Ed."

This is a persona which Morris assumes comfortably: he is the nervous traveller, berating himself for 'milksoppishness' (and in the 1873 Journal surprised and delighted that he is no longer afraid of fording rivers, takes it in his stride), deciding that he has penetrated far enough in the exploration of a particularly tricky cave and will just sit where he is and smoke a pipe until the others return - he is, in short, the hobbit in a party of dwarves (I had spotted his hobbitishness for myself - it would be difficult to miss it - but the precise analogy I owe to Anne Amison). The likeness is emphasised by the glee with which he appoints himself expedition cook, and prides himself on producing edible meals from three plovers and a tin of carrots, armed only with a frying pan. On another occasion, a joint of mutton is cooked in a geysir...

Morris connives willingly at this depiction of himself as the spoiled pet of the party, the buffoon who keeps everyone entertained by constantly losing possessions (a single slipper, for example) which are then brought back to him over great distances by friendly Icelanders - for this is also a party of Victorian gentlemen, and they communicate in a schoolboyish form of banter. Yet in the notes Magnússon makes a point of recounting how one night, in the tent, Morris offered to tell the Saga of Biorn, which he did, says his tutor, "with remarkably few slips", adding "And the audience was still awake when he finished!" Morris is not some hapless bystander caught up in someone else's expedition; the purpose of the trip is to allow him to see for himself the settings of the sagas of which he had already published translations. At least once he is introduced as a 'skald'.

Reading his descriptions of the journey, it is easy to see the truth of this. The scenery, the weather, his mood; these elements combine to bring the landscape to life. Here's an almost random sample (July 29th 1871):
and there we are in the wilderness: a great plain of black and grey sand, grey rocks sticking up out of it; tufts of sea-pink, and bladder campion scattered about here and there, and a strange plant, a dwarf willow, that grows in these wastes only, a few sprays of long green leaves wreathing about as it were a tangle of bare roots, white and blanched like bones: that is the near detail of the waste, but further on, on all sides rise cliffs and mountains, whose local colour is dark grey or black (except now and then a red place burnt by old volcanic fires) and which show through the atmosphere of this cloudy and showery day various shades of inky purple.
It's like reading a fantasy novel - without the plot, admittedly, but with a sense of the journey, of strangeness and exploration, that would enrich many quest narratives. Despite the rain and the bad roads, the apprehensions about difficult or dangerous passes (worse in anticipation than reality), despite the frequent descriptions of the landscape as grim, terrible or awful, Morris's happiness shines through: he is clearly having a wonderful time, and his enjoyment is infectious.

Finally, a thought to give me courage tomorrow as I start packing in earnest: at least we don't have to take supplies for a two-month expedition, nor pack them into boxes which can withstand being carried over the mountains by packhorses (and here's what happens if you try!).
shewhomust: (Default)
We returned from the supermarket around midday one day last week to find a card from the postman, saying he had tried to deliver a package (brown paper and string, he specified) and that we should allow forty-eight hours before attempting to claim it from the sorting office. Forty-eight hours is a long time to wait when you've received an e-mail from Small Beer Press saying your copy of Cloud & Ashes is on its way...

So [livejournal.com profile] durham_rambler lurked in wait, and when the postman returned after lunch to deliver the mail (what? our daily post comes around two in the afternoon) he leapt out, and made the postman promise to deliver the mystery package the next day. But we didn't really think it was a mystery, I wasn't expecting any other package - and I was so impatient to get my hands on my lovely book...

The next day we didn't dare go out all morning, in case we should miss the parcel post. And finally at lunch time (rather later than we had come home the previous day and discovered that we'd missed the post) our package arrived: and of course it wasn't Cloud & Ashes at all. It was two separate packages, one of them wrapped in brown paper, the other a jiffy bag, and the string which tied them together had been provided by the Post Office. (This amuses me immensely, though I can't explain why).

The brown paper package was a gift from Shetland - a picture book and a CD of fiddle music and some lovely Shetland soap - all the more delightful for being almost entirely unexpected. And the jiffy bag contained the details of our holiday in Iceland - so it must be true, then, we must definitely be going to Iceland, we have a road atlas. A road atlas of Iceland, now there's a strange and wonderful thing. It was like Christmas, all this unpacking of goodies.

And Cloud & Ashes arrived yesterday, so all is well.
shewhomust: (Default)
The Icelandic Phallological Museum.

No, really.

"The Icelandic Phallological Museum is probably the only museum in the world to contain a collection of phallic specimens belonging to all the various types of mammal found in a single country.

... The Icelandic Phallological Museum contains a collection of two hundred and four penises and penile parts belonging to almost all the land and sea mammals that can be found in Iceland."

Not to mention some mammals that probably can't be found: the catalogue starts with whales, dolphins, seals, and works its way via hamsters, sheep etc, to the folkloric section: kelpie, merman, troll ("Young boy, thoroughly petrified...").

You want to know if they have a human specimen? Go and check the catalogue (sorry, no direct link. Pick a language...)
shewhomust: (puffin)
Two puffinsAnd the reason why we were driving south (past Sumburgh Airport, where the road crosses the runway with a sign saying "Ahead Only") was to see the sights of Sumburgh, the southernmost tip of Shetland's Mainland. There's a lighthouse, and a fascinating complex of archaeological remains (layer upon layer, back into the past) and best of all, there are puffins. And the puffin, as we know, is my totem animal.

For I shall consider the puffin - with much squeeing and many small photographs... )

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