A Dark Anniversary and Book Work

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Again, not an awful lot to report this week. One new blog post went up, on Friday, and that was a must as it was the 19th anniversary of the “9/11” terrorist attacks in the USA, so an especially dark day in history (the photo given here was taken at the former Tribute WTC visitor centre in New York).

As that date (11 September in the British order) had also always been marked on the DT page on Facebook that I had curated for five years until it was purged earlier this year, I used this opportunity to re-post all the 9/11 posts from that DT page (only possible thanks to me having kept offline copies of the material I posted on that platform, which I have meanwhile turned into a full archive). So the post also involved a bit of nostalgic “time travel” of sorts ...

The re-posting approach was also due to me still being very busy indeed with the editing of the proofs for my book, so at the moment I don’t really have time for full-length posts with plenty of new original text and lots of photos.

The work on the book is an interesting process, actually. It’s not just about checking my own text and what the publishers have done with it (not all that much really, just some shortening here and there, and a bit of reordering), but also checking the new photo captions provided by the senior editor and the photos themselves, where they’re not my own. They did in fact draft in a lot of outside stock photography. And occasionally that can go wrong, for instance for the Iceland chapter, more specifically in the chapter about the Viti explosion crater in the uninhabited interior. Here I had provided a very old photo (it’s been 16 years since I went to Iceland), taken with a first generation digital pocket camera, so I wasn’t surprised that the publishers wouldn’t use that image in the book. 
But the one they picked instead unfortunately shows a different crater. Indeed Iceland has two craters of the same name Viti (which translates as ‘hell’, by the way), so that can naturally lead to confusion if you haven’t actually been there and know the difference between the two. The other one is just a crater lake near the Krafla volcanic field, and hence also often referred to as “Krafla Lake”. And while it also looks cool, it lacks the unique attraction of the Viti explosion crater in the interior.
This can only be reached by a long 4x4 drive in a high-clearance vehicle, and requires fording several rivers, but when you eventually get to this forlorn spot in the middle of nowhere in the moonscape of the Icelandic highlands, you are in for a real treat: you can scramble down the steep slopes of the crater and then take a bath in the bluish-greenish waters of the crater lake – as that is heated to a pleasant 25–30 degrees Celsius by natural geothermal activity. You have to go in naked, though, as the water contains lots of dissolved sulphur so any swimsuits would forever stink in a really unsavoury way (think rotten eggs) afterwards … as you do too, but once you’ve had a shower that’s gone. The towels we used to dry off after getting out of the crater lake’s water, however, did retain a sulphurous smell for days so we left them in the car boot. Every morning getting into the car we first had to adjust to the vestiges of that sulphur smell ...

But I digress. In fact I’m getting too distracted. I should leave it at this and return to my book editing. I’ve just received the second batch of the proofs, and a tight deadline, so there’s plenty of work ahead of me …

Just one more thing: I got a mention again on a different blog, together with one my favourite photos from Chernobyl (well, Pripyat, more precisely). It's also nice to see dark tourism portrayed in a positive light. Do take a look!