miðvikudagur, 18 júlí 2007

Left Skaftafell at 0905 and we arrived at Jökulsárlón after skirting around the SW and S sides of Hvannadalshnjukur. We walked over a small gravel ridge and boom! There was a beautiful aquamarine lagoon filled with icebergs of all shapes and coloration – black-topped, arched, contorted, clear - one even had a seal on it. Hvannadalshnúkur was in the background, and Vatnajökull’s icecap yielding to a glacier that was feeding this 100 m deep lake. The outlet river to the Atlantic is Jökulsá, the shortest river in Iceland at 1,500 m long. We walked along the bank of the lake and along the river to the ocean and saw smaller icebergs floating down this river, under a bridge, to be tossed around on the ocean waves’ whims – to beach or not to beach?

We were now leaving the sandur and seeing more green alongside the road and in the hills. In fact, there was at least one marsh where sheep had wandered to munch the taller grass as they stood in chest-high cold water. Passed the turn-off to Höfn and made our way towards Egilsstaður and the eastern fjörds. Once through a very long tunnel, we emerged in a different landscape;

large hills of rock and gravel, perfect cone shapes merged at different heights, descended right to the edge of the road...which was under construction. Besides the roadsigns indicating limited visibility and "Malbik Endan" denoting the end of the paved road - right now - there were some warning signs about the possibility of falling rocks. I should say so!

A fjörd or two more, and we were in Egilsstaður, land of the first (official) group visit to a Vín Búð and home of Bulla Burger's hreindýr hamborgari. I thought the reindeer burger was delicious and much milder yet tastier than venison. Many pictures drawn by children were on the walls and this one caught my eye - the writing says "Hann á að láta mig fá hamborgarar" - "He is going to turn me into hamburger". Sólla bought groceries for the next several days in the nearby grocery store where there was a cold room for vegetables and fruits and a separate one for meats. We took many boxes of supplies out to the bus. The liquor prices were indeed steep so some of us decided to either go with what was familiar or with what we couldn't get in our own countries - Bud Var, Icelandic beers (Viking, Egils Ales).

Sólla had made reservations for us to have wonderful homemade chicken noodle soup at Möðrudalur, where a local minister built a church long ago in memory of his late wife. He also included Herðubreið, a large mountain known as "The Queen of the North" that loomed in the distance southwest of us, in many of his paintings and became quite well-known for these depictions. The church was very quaint and had a Grandma Moses-style painting of the Sermon on the Mount over the altar. Across the road were some turf houses and achillea grew out of several areas of the walls - pretty!

But even though the soup and rolls were wonderful, the view of Herðubreið stunning, the church setting both personally touching and redolent with history, and our table received instruction on how to say "MacChicken" in Mandarin (McXiangJi, or, MacFragrant Chicken), this was about to become The Time That Meg Learned About the Hover Mower. I think there must have been a discussion about keeping up the yardwork at this church because then Greg brought up something called the Hover Mower. After traveling with Greg for all of 2 days, I had a feeling he was pulling my leg. I had - and still have never - heard of the Hover Mower, that moves along the contour of the lawn on a cushion of air. I mean, I'm sorry, but it sounded too fantastic to me...but of course I have pulled up almost all the grass in my lawn and planted perennials, roses, trees, so lawnmowers rarely come into my consciousness. And of course, there was the very prominent aspect that this was something out of Greg's imagination, something just to pull out of the blue and try to fool me with. Well, I queried others in the group before Greg had a chance to give them a wink-wink-nudge-nudge that he was playing a joke on me, and I FOUND OUT IT WAS TRUE! There really is a Hover Mower!

Plans were made for tomorrow - onward to Ásbyrgi campground now. We would add Dettifoss to our waterfall hike tomorrow. The washboard road gave the big yellow bus quite a workout, but just when I didn't think Sveini could downshift any lower, another gear powered us up narrow gravel roads around other cars and corners. This land looks unfinished, even if it is covered in lava flows several thousand years old. The waters of the glacial rivers change route depending on flow and recent tectonics, lava burbles up every now and then, it snows and then that melts, taking some of this Martianscape with it. Springtime brings clumps of lupines, floods bring new clumps of huge rocks. Iceland is a fascinating dreamscape of geologic changes. Simply amazing.

And then we rounded a corner to see the horseshoe-shaped Great Wall of Ásbyrgi, the setting sun bringing out the golds and coppers of the stone, green grass a perfect backdrop for that play of light. We set up camp and hit the sack while it was still very light outside - we were now the closest we would get to the Arctic Circle.