Iceland

(I'm afraid I won't have pictures for a little while because I'm waiting on a power converter. I'm writing this on the school computer and there is not slot for my camera's memory card.)

You know what they say about ending up on the plane next to the screaming child. That was me. The poor kid just wouldn't stop crying and screaming. It was an overnight flight (9:30pm leave, 6:30am arrival (+4 hours) and luckily he fell asleep soon, but for the last half hour he was at it again. I only got about 2 or 3 hours of sleep. As we took of there was a lightning storm in the distance. It was cool to see from the plane. The whole cloud lights up and you can see the bolts go through it.

I got to Keflavík at 6:30 and they only had two passport control stations open so there was a long wait to get through the airport. I was hoping I could take the bus from the airport to the Blue Lagoon, but that had left at 7:00 and I had just missed it. I just took the bus to Reykjavik.

The landscape of Iceland really is something else. There are large fields of black, basalt rocks covered in thick mosses with mountains in the distance. Hardly any trees are growing anywhere except for Reykjavik, which looks like it was built in between a forest. There is construction going on everywhere is seems. The land looks so rugged and wild but people have been living there for a thousand years. In a way, Reykjavik is sort of ugly with all its weather worn sheet metal, but at the same time all of the houses are really interesting. Everyone is completely different from the one next to it and most are painted with bright colors.

At about 8:30am I got to the BSÍ station with no real plan in mind. There were some tourist flyers in the back of the bus seat and one of them was tours offered by the bus company. Most of them were leaving at nine so I decided to go on the "golden circle" tour. It was 8 hours long and brought me back in time to go to the airport. It went to Hveragerði greenhouse village, Kerið volcanic crater, Gullfoss waterfall, Geysir hot spring area, and Þingvellir National Park. Now a bus tour is probably the epitome of "tourist," but I only had the day and it was probably the best way to see some of sites. There were two buses. One with the tour in English and the other in German. The German one was less crowded so I got on that one. They both eventually filled completely up. Our guide ended up doing both German and English, but I found his German easier to understand.

The stop in Hveragerði was really more of a bathroom stop with a large Duty Free shop but we were only there 10 minutes or so. Kerið was neat to see. As the name would suggest, it was a large volcanic crater, with a lake at the bottom with very blue-green water and red and black rocks all around. You have to watch your step, it's a long way down.

Gullfoss was very cool to see. It was sort of like a smaller Niagara falls in a smaller Grand Canyon. The canyon was very long and very deep. There were only a few ropes guarding you against falling directly into the waterfall but other than that you could walk right up to the edge.

Geysir went off every 10 minutes or so. There were a few larger springs and several smaller ones, all with warning signs about the water temperature being around the boiling point. (That didn't stop a few kids though from sticking their fingers in.) There was steam blowing around everywhere and smelled like sulfur whenever you walked through it. There was also a pathway up to the top of this hill. I went about halfway up but it was very muddy. I still have some Iceland stuck in my shoes...

The Þingveller National Park is where the Icelandic 'Þing' takes place. The area is on where the North Atlantic Ridge is tearing Iceland apart. There are a few large faults with large cliffs and other small ones running along the ground creating little holes in the ground.

I got back to the bus station around 4:30. I tried talking to one of the bus drivers there if there were any buses to the domestic airport. He told me no, but said he would take me anyways. I had assumed the building across a bit from the station was the airport, seeing as it said Icelandair and had small planes in front of it, but it turns out I was wrong. I tried going in the Iceland air door but the people coming out said they were closed. Closed? Turns out the airport I was looking for was near there but too far away to walk. Luckily there was a taxi there. I cut it close with the ride fare. I only had 1255isk left and it cost me 1210. (~60krona to the dollar.)

The domestic airport is extremely tiny. There's only two check in desks, a small snack place, and 4 terminals. We had to walk out to our plane. It was a small one but still had 6 seats across. The landing was a little turbulent and there was one little drop that had a lot of people gasp. The islands were shrouded in the usual impenetrable fog and you couldn't see anything till you were on the ground. We landed at about 11:20pm

It took awhile for the bus to Tórshavn to leave. It was dark and raining out but I could still see the outlines of the mountains and everything is really just like in the pictures. At the bus station, my host Asvør was supposed to meet me there. I didn't see her but I waited for awhile and she came. She said she was there before and I wasn't there so she thought maybe I had taken a taxi but when I still wasn't there by midnight she decided to come back. I finally got to bed at around 2:00am after two full days of almost no sleep.

I pretty much have the bottom floor with a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Asvør only has a slow, expensive dial up system but I can use the internet at the school for as long as I want.