A lovely lovely day yesterday – we went for a horse ride on shaggy Icelandic horses along a river valley, a drive through mountains and lava fields with a quick excursion to a waterfall, and then a soak in a geothermal pool (sorry for the lack of place names: I will use as my excuse that my keyboard can’t cope with all the Icelandic letters (I had a quick look in Symbol font just now, and nothing: Icelandic retains several of the old letters that disappeared from English around AD 800, which gives written Icelandic a particularly medieval rugged look. I read in the guidebook today that so few foreigners learn Icelandic that most native speakers have never heard Icelandic spoken with a foreign accent, which is kind of trippy, no?). We have been unbelievably lucky with the weather – it’s cold, but it has been gorgeously sunny and completely dry all the time (apparently the week before we came it snowed most of the week, so it really is luck rather than good travel planning. Hooray!). In other good news, Iceland Air thinks they may have tracked down J’s errant suitcase, and there is a reunion planned for 4 p.m. today. I’ll believe it when I see it, but Iceland Air sound pretty confident, which is good, since two days ago, the official word was “suitcase? What suitcase?”
We arrived at Lake Myvatn last night (translation: “midge lake”, which sounds horrifically unappetizing, but so far a misnomer, as there are about three gajillion birds and no bugs (related? perhaps) and it is really lovely. We are staying at the Vogar farmhouse, which is a working farm on the shore of the lake, and when you are sitting eating your breakfast there are cows and BABY COWS so cute in the room right next to you getting milked with a big glass window so you can watch them and they can watch you (and you can drink the milk that is coming out of them). I had a spastic moment of watch-dyslexia this morning, and made Jonathan get out of bed at 7:20, thinking it was an hour later, so we spent an hour down by the lake shore watching the birds, sun on distant snowy peaks, blue lake, blue sky, etc etc until it was actually time for breakfast; so much excitement so early in the morning proved too much and we have now come back to our room for a quick snozzle before setting off for the day (there are big fluffy white duvets and lots of pillows: difficult to resist). But we don’t really need to resist because, hey, it’s going to be light until 1 a.m., so we’ll have plenty of time to do everything we want to do today.
We went last night to the geothermal baths, sort of like reykjavik’s Blue Lagoon except way way fewer people; imagine a vast expanse of lava rocks, and then a natural pool (Olympic sized, except shallow and lumpy/irregularly shaped) with water so pale blue it’s almost white, with steam coming off the surface; it’s rumoured that 70% of Icelanders believe in trolls, and it definitely has the Tolkien Middle Earth look. All the water smells faintly sulfurous (and my silver bracelet turned a lovely eggplanty purple colour in the water, which was exciting – a little chemistry lesson in action) so it’s either going to give us cancer or we’ll live until we’re 110, one of the two. I was imagining that the baths would be packed with young backpackery types of all nationalities, but a) they weren’t packed at all and b) the majority of people who were there were middle-aged and elderly locals, for whom the soak in the mineral springs is clearly the social highlight of their week; it was nice. Much better than wheeling your oxygen tank around the mall, preferred activity of California seniors, and all the Icelandic oldies looked pretty well padded, so I don’t think the water’s given any of them cancer yet. I found myself a little place in the shallows where the water was hot enough to peel your skin off and lay like a crocodile, half in,half out with my feet up in the air, drinking my orange Fanta what J. had brought me in a blatant bid to win Best Person in the Universe award, and feeling that life did not get much better.
Today the plan is a series of mini-hikes – we’re going to climb up an inactive volcanic crater, go and look at some “pseudocraters” (formed by subglacial explosions. Cool.), another big waterfall, and then head out to the east coast tonight, swinging by airport for suitcase reunion. No pictures to upload – I forgot to bring extra batteries for my camera (oops) so we’re taking all the pics on J’s camera (which is a much nicer camera anyway, but which doesn’t have a cable to talk to my computer). It’s completely weird how technology has changed travelling: the other day we needed to make a phone call, so zip! pull out computer, find nearest unsecured local network, yump on Skype, dial number and Thor or Olav is your uncle. (J. actually got chatting up a dude called Thor at the pools yesterday. I love it. I also have to note that I now (if I ever doubted them) am a true believer in J.’s superpowers. He is having ACTUAL CONVERSATIONS with people in Icelandic. I do not shit. When I call him on it, he looks sheepish, and says, “well, you know, the grammar is very similar to German, and a lot of the vocabulary shares word roots with Swedish, so…” and I’m like, yes, and…? Also he doesn’t get jetlag. Hunh.
Ooh, another fun fact: Iceland did not have currency (as in money. At all.) until 1936!!! It was all bartering cows and bags of silver until then.
OK, time to wake up sleeping beauty so we can go achieve greatness…
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