A Road Trip Around Iceland: "Fire and Ice." 2000 miles of Incomparable and Unusual Natural Beauty
Greetings,
When we came off of the road and our trip thru the western US, we took an 18 day trip to Iceland with our good friends and traveling buddies, the Clarkes. We rented a 4-wheel drive Toyota and based on some recommendations from a British travel agency set off to explore this little-visited (at least by Americans) island. We got home and left immediately for Canada, and I am writing this from Riviere du Loup is far norther Quebec. Until this stop, Internet has been spotty at best, and not capable of any significant uploads. We have good Internet here (who knows why here, eh), so this is the first blog of the Iceland trip-catching up. The pictures are just taste--Puffins and Slovakian Grebes with their brand new babies on their backs are coming in the next post.
We drove counter clockwise around Iceland, with a final 500 mile detour up into and around the West Fjords. Even Iceland's single "Ring Road" that runs around the outer edge of the island is not fully paved, and in places like the West Fjords you spend lots of kilometers on narrow dirt roads hanging on the edges of cliffs looking down into the fjords. An island the size of Kentucky with about 270,000 very hardy people--2/3 of whom live in the capital of Reykjavik--it is a place where nature and the outdoors rule. A place of "fire and ice," the island is well known for both its very active volcanos and for the geothermal geysers that dot the landscape and provide much of the power for the small villages around the country. It is also known for the hundreds of fjords that form much of the outer edges of the island.
The topography of the island changes rapidly as you move west to east and south to north. From green fields dotted with hundreds of white mounds of hay wrapped and sealed in plastic for winter storage to areas so bleak and barren that the US trained the astronauts who went to the moon here. Sheep are everywhere--including on the highways, and herds of Icelandic horses graze around each farm and village.The weather, considering the northern latitude, is relatively tame. Cold, but not too cold--think New York on steroids because of the mitigating influence of the Gulf Stream--at least in the south of the island. 23 hours of sunlight in the summer--and 23 hours of darkness in the deep winter freeze. Hundreds of glorious fjords, only one town outside of Reykjavik with over 10,000 people and many farming and fishing villages with a couple of hundred--or less--very hardy, independent folks. Red-roofed farms dot the countryside. Many of these farms are fully self-sufficient by tapping into local geothermal pools, creating their own hydro-electric with a local waterfall and raising all their own food--including small greenhouses for veggies. When nuclear winter shuts down New York, these folks will likely be fine.
