New Iceland Post, Covid, Copenhagen

Hello subscribers!

Yesterday I uploaded a new Iceland post on to the DT Blog. It’s primarily a photo essay and an overview of the dark-tourism-relevant things I did on my recent return trip to fabulous Iceland.

The new post features 26 photos, of noticeably better quality than my old ones from 2004 (see this earlier Blog post). So do go and take a look!

The photo above is one of those featured in the new Blog post and shows the strikingly barren moonscape in the centre of Iceland along the fabled Kjölur Route (that gravel track in the photo is part of that route). For me, driving through such desolate landscape was one of the top highlights of both my Iceland trips.

As I mentioned in the previous DT Newsletter, I unfortunately contracted Covid at the end of that Iceland trip. Three days after my return I was, on request, prescribed Paxlovid by my GP – and I’m glad I had it, because by then my symptoms had grown somewhat more severe, with loss of smell and taste, a constant cough, general fatigue and for a while a very heavy feeling of pressure on the lungs. I don’t want to know how much worse it could have become without Paxlovid. It should also be a decent safeguard against developing Long Covid. At the end of the five-day course of meds I did indeed test negative again, even though some symptoms continued and still do (mainly the cough; sense of smell has largely come back, fatigue is mostly over too, and so I’m back to more or less my usual working order – hence the new Blog post and Newsletter). The only downside of taking Paxlovid was, as I had been warned, a nasty bitter taste in the mouth lingering for hours on end after each dose. But all things considered that’s a very small price to pay compared to the benefits.

My wife, who didn’t get Paxlovid, continued testing positive until today. It meant that she was forced to cancel a planned reunion with two friends with whom she had gone on the Trans-Siberian Railway back in the mid-1990s when they were students in Russia. The vague idea of maybe redoing a Transsib trip was obviously made impossible by Putin’s war against Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions and travel restrictions. Instead they settled on a different location in the Mediterranean, but because of Covid my wife had to reschedule her flight (cancelling it was not an option) … and so we decided to use that flight to go to Copenhagen for a few days at the end of this month; I just had to book the same flights for myself.

Curiously, I’ve never been to Copenhagen before (one of only a couple of European capitals I’ve never seen yet). So I’m very much looking forward to closing that gap. Moreover, it offers another escape from the continued heatwave here in Vienna, which is really grinding me down. And naturally I’ll also aim at visiting a few DT-relevant sites within Copenhagen. I’ll report back on the Blog and in DT Newsletters afterwards.

For now, this is it.

All the best,

Peter