Back from Fabulous Iceland, but with an Unwelcome “Souvenir”

Hello subscribers!

Tuesday very late I returned from my ten days in Iceland. It was a fab trip all round, until the very last day, when I woke up in the morning with a hefty cough and feeling generally unwell. I immediately suspected Covid, and when I was back home I did an antigen test and it did indeed come back with a solid positive result. I tried to back it up with a PCR test, but I found that these are no longer easily available here in Austria … because allegedly Covid is “over” – except it is not! Eight hours later I did another antigen test and it was also solidly positive. My wife’s are too now. It’s the first time we’ve contracted Covid, yet thankfully our symptoms are not too bad; we don’t (yet) have any high fever, no loss of smell or taste and no breathing difficulties (other than those I always have due to my chronic sinusitis). So it’s not so debilitating, but still rather unfortunate and somewhat tarnishing the end bit of what had been such a superb trip.
  

The photo above, by the way, is not really my own … I took it off the large cinema screen at the Lava Centre in Hvolsvöllur. It shows one of the recent eruptions on the Reykjanes peninsula. I was supposed to witness that sort of spectacle myself, namely on a special helicopter flight over Litli-Hrutur. But on the originally booked date, Sunday 30 July, low clouds meant no visibility, so the flight was rescheduled for the 6th of August. However, by then the eruption had ceased, so I only saw the still smouldering crater, with just a little bit of orange still glowing inside, but no more dramatically spouting lava fountains and red-hot lava flows. Bad luck two ways. Oh well, natural phenomena have their own timing. Nothing you can do about it …

But don’t get me wrong, the helicopter flight was still cool, and the rest of the trip was just fabulous. It confirmed what I had already felt when I first visited Iceland 19 years ago. This really is my favourite place on Earth – certainly as far as scenery is concerned. For me it’s the uninhabited interior highlands that are the most fascinating aspect. I generally like barren and desolate landscapes – and this is the ultimate. We took the Kjölur Route two thirds of the way and back, and right in the centre of the island it’s like driving on the surface of the Moon, except that there is a gravel track leading through it and you can see glaciers in the distance left and right (Langjökull and Hofsjökull).

In terms of dark tourism proper, highlights included that Lava Centre in Hvolsvöllur (where I sneaked in the off-screen photo above, which wouldn’t appear in a Blog post, but here I thought I could get away with it). It’s a flashy modern hi-tech immersive exhibition featuring lots of vulcanology and Iceland’s rich history of often dramatic and destructive volcanic events.

One of these events was the 1973 eruption on Heimaey, the main island of the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago off the south coast of the mainland. This time I spent three days there. The most important DT site there is the comparatively recent Eldheimar Museum, cleverly and suitably marketed as the “Pompeii of the North”. Its centrepiece is an excavated house ruin that had been covered and destroyed by black tephra and ash in the eruption – alongside about half of the island’s town.

And then there’s the Lava Show in Vik, where they melt down such tephra to recreate real lava in a backstage furnace and release it on to a sand pit in the centre of the room. So I did get an encounter with red-hot molten lava after all, albeit not in the really natural form. It was also at this show that I probably caught Covid. My wife told me afterwards that there was an American tourist hacking away like hell – and nobody wore masks, ourselves included. Basically we had been lulled into a false sense of security and let our own guard down by also no longer wearing masks indoors in public places. (That will change again now.)

There were more DT-related aspects, and I will cover the lot in due course in a few Blog posts and obviously in updated as well as all-new chapters on my main website. But first I have to go through and develop loads and loads of photos. That will take some time.
  

Overall, this trip to Iceland was great and did me the world of good mentally – I felt happier there than I had at any point all this year (also because I prepared myself by systematically bringing my autoimmune skin condition down with copious amounts of cortisone … which I now have to phase out, so the symptoms will soon come back, but it was worth it!).

If Iceland wasn’t so painfully expensive I would love to go there more regularly and/or for longer, but for that you’d have to be either wealthy enough or on an Icelandic-level salary …

I do hope to be able to return for a third time one day, though. There aren’t that many places I’d consider for repeat visits, but Iceland surely is one of them!

With that I’ll come to a close.

Until next time,

all the best,

Peter