Happiness is....

Hello and goodbye

Well, after a few months of waiting.... sun and flowers and all things nice arrived!! Summer is HERE and it is very nice. I miss the snow, but the sunshine feels so great, it´s hard not to want to just get out there all the time and enjoy it! (we have had unusually warm weather here: over a month of sunshine!).

Since last I wrote I've been doing plenty of horseback riding, a bit of hitching to the West Fjords area, entertaining family, saying goodbye to people (goodbye Mari!) and trying to get my head down to work in the office when it is soooo lovely outside.

My sister (Jennifer), Jim and Tom: enjoying the biggest ever babypool - The Blue Lagoon. Just after this shot we were pulled up for Tom not wearing armbands (Tom is the baby, for those who are pondering!).

Final horse-riding capers with Norwegian friend Mari who is now back in Norway and living somewhere I´d like to visit....

.... and a visit from the folks! Dad and I hiked up to the summit of Snafellsjokull with a whole bunch of others on Midsummers Night. It was a perfect sunset - and not a breath of wind hardly. Outstanding. (Unlike the Greenland shark which tastes as it looks... I say no more).

This was my trip to the west fjords, where I managed to camp on a snowy plateau (well, er, no one picked me up and I was kinda forced to do so!), hiked across a tiny section of very memorable open landscapes, and hitched a ride 200km in an ambulance....

...me chilling out beside the seaside before I had to retreat into the office.

Hot pots and horses

Well, this blog-entry is pretty late... but it was officially the First Day Of Summer on 19 March, which is an Icelandic National Holiday. As it happens, I had actually been working in the West Fjorður, but at the end of the day I dashed back to town (a 3 hour dash!) and then my friend Marí and I spent the next 4 hours in this hot-pot, or heittur pottur as is said over here. Not a bad way to celebrate the return of the sun, we thought.

And I really should introduce my new four-legged pal: meet Embla the Icelandic horse.

She is just being borrowed by me... but what a great horse, and how nice to ride again after several horse-less years! However, it´s not quite like 'riding a bike again' as over here there is a different style of riding: Icelandic horses do a rather comfortable 4-step gait called 'tölt', in addition to the regular 2-step trot that a horse normally does. Long and short of it is that tölt is tremendously comfortable to ride, (there´s none of this 'up-down-up-down', etc of trot), and the horses are - mostly! - sensible, relaxed and calm. The Icelandic horse has a 4 month holiday between September and January, which is really great for them. At this time they are just out on the land, doing what horses love best: eating and relaxing. It makes them very happy to work for the rest of the year, and sets them up well for the cold winter as they grow big hairy coats during this non-ridden time.

So, in a country where horses are both eaten and ridden, people here have much respect for their horses. In Stykkishólmur recently there was even a church service to bless the horses (no, the horses didn´t exactly go into church, but they all went to the church and ate some grass in the fields whilst the service went ahead...).

Springtime

Iceland is an important staging area for tens (hundreds?) of thousands of migratory shorebirds and waterfowl that 'stop-off' here to feed and rest a little, before flying on to more northerly breeding grounds. For birds breeding in Greenland and North-Eastern Canada and travelling from southern Europe and even Africa, Iceland serves as an attractive temperate-ish island in the middle of an otherwise very long single-trek north. Birds that have been wintering in the balmy south have just started to come back up to Iceland over the last few weeks, along with Icelandic breeding birds that will stop here for the summer. This photo shows part of a 1000-strong flock of pink footed geese, a species which breed in Icelands highlands.

My job presently is to count them! The idea is to get some figures on relative numbers at specific sites that I re-visit on successive weeks, to see which wader bird species are around and what sort of numbers of each species are out there. I´ve been doing this work for a few weeks now. It involves driving along bumpy roads, craning out of the window to look out over mudflat areas that might contain vast numbers of shorebirds.... trying to stay on the road whilst looking out the window and simultaneously fine-tuning to the BBC World Service is turning into quite an art!

Thankfully, it seems that Spring is Here, which means that although I will definitely miss this sort of weather...

There might be a bit less of this... (this first photo was not actually taken in black and white..!)

And there should be more and more of this...

Ahhh....!

Sad times for Iceland

Most of us from the U.K. are all too painfully aware of the environmental damage that up to 60 million people can make over a few millenia (some, although not all of it unavoidable). Much of the human damage seen today in the U.K. is historic: over 6000 years of human settlement on a small, temperate island takes its toll. It seems that since the agricultural advancements of the past couple of centuries, the irreversible loss of our semi-natural habitats, the potential for devastating agricultural diseases related to intensive farming practises, and other problems of human overcrowding are only recently being acknowledged. Deserved attention is only now being given to these factors.

Over here in Iceland the habitat remains relatively pristine in comparison. All bodes well, as for the size of the place, there is a very low human population of less than 300 000, (in an area approximately half the size of the whole of the British Isles). For those living over here my impression is that there is good infra-structure and communities are very adequately developed; human quality of life and standards of living are high and comfortable. Somewhat deceptively, it seems that Nature still reigns supreme - step outside your cozy community and the environment here is pretty hostile for humans: only 1/7th of the land area is vegetated, and the rest is largely composed of gravel (sand) deserts, glaciers, volcanic lava and boulders. Iceland seems by first impression to be an area of remarkable landscapes and little-disturbance, precariously perched on the tip of Europe.

However, although gateway to the Arctic (for millions of seabirds, waders and marine life), and independent in so many ways, Iceland remains a part of Europe. And, in being part of Europe, this means a relentless political yearning for technological advancement, economic growth and... er, habitat destruction?

I am not a politician, but it takes little effort to appreciate that relatively cheap energy might be harnessed, bought, and traded using the extensive natural resource potential of Iceland´s natural thermal water sources, deep gorges and powerful rivers...

But where are the constraints to large-scale development, and what limits are set by the Icelandic Government/agencies to prevent the misuse of technology, and to set standards to keep in check the potential for over-development?

A recent dam construction project in East Iceland´s rugged interior, has been a political 'hot' issue, and one example. There was there was some oppostion to the development of this 57 square km reservoir system, built to supply hydro-power for an alumininium smelter owned by a U.S. company. But planning and development bulldozed ahead anyway, and now the country seems to have forgotten there was ever opposition.

See this recent BBC link for more info on the Karahnjkukar Dam. It also made the international news prior to construction.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/6453703.stm
and here´s a link to a friend out here who is also blogging/ranting about this topic currently, and who prompted me to write this posting (in case you´d like further info./anothers views on this)

http://www.whereiskelso.blogspot.com/

Other links on this...

http://www.savingiceland.org/

(this is a rather emotive website: unsure of it´s authorship (i.e. it is not Icelandic I don´t think), but it has some interesting stories nonetheless and worth a look if you have any interest in this topic)

I wonder what might happen next time such a project is planned? The very same, I fear.


I don´t know if many people outside Iceland realise what is going on here, and the speed at which so-called progress is taking place... I didn´t, and as I don´t speak the language and am not integrated within the culture I feel rather impotent to react. I guess writing this posting is just an attempt to raise some international awareness from my blog-reading buddies back home. It was a shock to me to discover how rapidly Iceland may be losing it´s world famous landscapes. I think these are sad times for Iceland.

Changes

I have switched to a new place in town. New address: Austurgata 9, 340-Stykkishólmur, which is literally down the road from my last location (as are most places in this small town...!). I had to move as the flat was likely to be mobbed by a bunch of Uni student transients during the summer: I was forewarned there would be a lot of comings and goings with new folk passing through for short fieldwork sejourns. It was best to up sticks and move. This is a super, old house. It is a very different place to the last: from IKEA to original furniture! (Nice).

And - although spring can´t be said to have completely sprung in town - I was also recently off up to the (more) Frozen North for an Ísfestival near Akureyi with the Icelandic Alpine Club - this was a long weekend of ice-climbing and socialising (not eating ice-cream, as one friend suggested might be happening....).

Here are links to more/better photos
http://grettisgata.eitthvad.is/isklifurfestival2007
http://www.pbase.com/agustthor/festival2007

... and here´s a few of my own (although I must credit the 2nd photo here to someone else, a guy called Gummi who takes rather good photos of ice with a massive camera he insists on lugging up routes with him).

I have also been catching up with friend Yvonne Sell (from Calgary ´03 Days) who was up visiting from London last weekend. It was really great to see a familiar face over here. We managed to do a fair few touristy things, mostly on the famous Golden Circle tour from Reykjavík, where you can experience volcanoes, spouting geysirs, waterfalls and colliding continental plates!

Brrrr. Ice cold conditions within the crater of Kerið.

This is Strokker the geysir in action, which spouts boiling water every few minutes and is located a mere few metres from Iceland´s famous - and originally named - 'Geysir' geysir (Geysir seems to be inactive these days, and Strokker now the main attraction).

Exploring Þingvellir, which is the former seat of Iceland´s parliment, positioned right on the rift between two tectonic plates: North America to the left and Europe to the right. Very fitting for a the two of us we felt, with our tourist mix of Canadian/British heritage.

Gullfoss is a very spectacular twin waterfall - the second chute is 70m deep/high. It was noisy, wet and cold there and a breathtakingly dramatic sight in an otherwise quite remarkably flat area of countryside.

Plus.... Yvonne and I snuck in a bit of an ice-climb (or two) over her visit, and made this beautiful snow-woman as the weather turned to custard (you can see we were very proud of her - but I do question myself: why am I still wearing my climbing lid?). By the way, the Chelsea hat on Yvonne was purely for practical purposes only.... (Funny what you can buy in the Stykkishólmur 'Olís' gas-station when on a mission for 'something warm that fits under a climbing helmet'...).