Northern Lights over Reykjavik

Tonight I was lucky enough to see amazing red and green Northern Lights, by far the best I've ever seen. I saw something about them being outside online and went and told my housemate Tobias. We realised they were getting strong very quickly so he drove us to the lighthouse right at the end of the peninsula Reykjavik is on, where it is much darker than the rest of the city. We got there just in time as they quickly became incredibly strong and then got much weaker again.

I finally managed to get some reasonably good photos but with my poor photographic knowledge, and only a rock to use as a tripod they've come out too blurry and grainy. It's also not possible to take a photo which shows just how much they filled the whole sky. What an amazing sight!

Is it a ghost to the left? No, it's Tobias.

A trip to the south: Day 2

After a huge breakfast in our hostel, we started to drive further east. We made a short stop in the village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur to see a natural pavement made of basalt. It was partly covered in snow and ice, but great to see anyway.

Next up, we drove to Skaftafell national park to hike to Svartifoss, a waterfall nestled amongst basalt columns (a lot of basalt in the south, as you may have gathered by now). However, there was a sign at the visitor's centre saying that the path was very icy so I asked the man at the desk if it would be OK and he quite simply told me not to go. I'll never know if the path really was that icy or if he took one look at me and decided I was too much of a liability, but I was quite glad he gave us a definite answer. I know we would have been stubborn otherwise and would have spent several hours risking breaking our necks on the ice just to prove we could do it. Instead, he suggested we take an easier route to the edge of the glacier, Skaftafellsjökull. The walk was easy but windy, and as we got close the wind was blowing sand into our eyes. The guys carried on but me and Marja decided it wasn't worth it. However, we still managed to get reasonably close and it was very beautiful.

Our final stop was Jökulsárlón, the glacier lake. It's one of the best things to see in Iceland and, although I've seen it before, it's still really beautiful to see. The ice is always moving so it looked different to the last time I saw it, and the best part was the huge number of seals swimming round!

After this, it was a very long, windy drive home. The trip was so much fun, but I'm no hurry to do that drive again. However, as we drove back past Vík we saw this sunset and it was the perfect conclusion to our trip.

A trip to the south: Day 1

Last week my housemate Marja told me she was going to go with her boyfriend, Juho, and a friend's boyfriend, Jere, on a trip to the south of Iceland and offered me space in the car. I decided not to go because I've already been to the south several times. However, after a few days without lectures and nothing to do I started to get incredibly bored and realised how boring my week would be if I was in the house doing nothing with most of my housemates away. So I decided to join their trip and I think I made a very good decision.

Both Marja and I have seen large parts of the south of Iceland but it was fun to show the guys our favourite places as well as discover lots of new places we'd never been to before. First stop was Seljalandsfoss, the waterfall which you can walk behind. I've now been here several times and the last two times it's been so icy it's not possible to walk behind. However, we discovered Gljúfurárfoss, a waterfall which is only a few minutes walk away and, despite being more impressive than the main waterfall, most people don't know it's there. We walked through a narrow icy gap to enter a cave where the waterfall almost came down on top of us.

We also visited Skógarfoss, another waterfall I've seen several times, except this time there was a huge rainbow in front of it.

It had already been a day of seeing partly-new things but our next stop was completely new to all of us. We drove to a valley between the volcanoes and mountains and went for a short walk to an abandoned swimming pool, Seljavallalaug. The pool was built in the 1920s as a place to teach people how to swim. It hasn't been in use for a long time and only gets cleaned once a year, so as you can imagine, the water was pretty filthy! Apparently some of the dirt in the pool is the result of Eyjafjallajökull's eruption which filled it with ash. It was a beautiful place to swim though, although a little bit cold!

The landscape surrounding the pool

Next, we went back to the sight of the plane wreck and it was up to me to do the nerve-wracking driving along the black sand beach again. However, I felt a lot more confident this time having done it before and because I was driving in much better weather conditions. The plane wreck site was not quite so atmospheric this time but the sun gave us a good view of the mountains behind it.

Our final stop of the day was the black sand beach of Vík. I've seen the beach and its rock formations from a distance but have never seen it up close due to a lack of time or bad weather. On Monday, the weather went from being beautifully sunny to gloomy and windy in the evening when we got to the beach. As we got out the car the wind was blowing pebbles into our faces and the waves were pretty vicious but we walked over to see the basalt columns.

We knew that around the corner from here was a cave but the waves were coming up so high it wasn't possible to walk along. So I admit we did something a bit stupid and maybe a bit dangerous (sorry Mum). As one wave went out we ran along the beach as fast as we could to get to the cave.

However, whilst in the cave, the waves were coming up higher and higher making it harder for us to run back. And then came 'the big wave'. I took this picture of Jere just before I realised how big it was and started frantically shouting for him to get back from the sea.

The wave almost completely filled the cave and as it left we had no choice but to sprint back across the wet sand to avoid the next big wave. Me and the two guys narrowly avoided getting hit by the first wave but Marja was not so lucky. I'm very glad that we were all OK and safe so we can laugh at this. As I ran round the corner, I said to Marja 'Oh my god, did you see that huge wave?' to which I got the stoney-faced reply 'I was IN the wave'. She had tried to run back whilst we had ran to the back of the cave and she'd been soaked from the neck down. Luckily she had avoided being completely covered by water by climbing onto one of the small basalt columns and clinging on. We were also lucky that we were only a twenty minute drive from our hostel so she didn't have to stay wet for long. Although it was an incident we laughed about a lot later, it did make me realise how dangerous the weather and the nature can be here. I don't want to over-dramatacise this but people have been swept away at Vík beach and I can understand why; I think if we hadn't run back whilst we had the chance, the whole cave would have been filled with water and it could have been a different story.

Finally we made it back to our hostel and spent the evening cooking, playing card games (I lost every single game, every time; the Finns are clearly good at cards...) and trying to dry Marja's shoes and jeans.

Réttir: The annual sheep round-up

This feels strange to write about something which happened in the middle of September but up until recently I haven't had the photos to post here. As I'm sure I've mentioned in one of my many rants about my broken technology (my iPod broke recently too, just to add to the list), my camera's memory card broke during my visit to see the sheep round-up but luckily I had most of my lost photos recovered over the Christmas break.

Réttir happens once a year and is a big event in which the farmers gather all the sheep from the mountains and then divide the sheep up according to which farm they come from. At the event I went to, the sheep are put into one huge central pen, the farmers check their tags and then put them through little doors into separate pens for the different farms. All of the farmers and their families help out and the event turns into a bit of a countryside party. The only sad thing is that there are now almost as many tourists as locals, but considering I added to this problem I don't think I can complain too much.

An event which revolves around sheep doesn't sound that exciting but it was really fun to see the locals working together and watching the sheep who can jump their own height as they run into their pens!

Help from all the family

Jumping as he escapes

Búri Cave and a visit from my brother

Last week I had the chance to leave Reykjavik several times which made for a nice change. My oldest brother, Thomas, had been back from China in the UK for a few weeks and took the opportunity to visit me for a few days. I've visited him in China four times now so it was great to have the chance to see him in Iceland and show him all the beautiful things I've seen.

Last monday, we took a trip to the Golden Circle. This was my fourth visit and I have to say I would be happy to never see it again (it's fantastic, but four times is enough!). However, this time was more exciting because Gullfoss, the waterfall, and Kerið, the crater lake, were frozen and looked very beautiful.  

For our second trip, we travelled to the South of Iceland. I've also been here before but we managed to do a few things I hadn't already done. We saw the waterfalls Seljalandsfoss and Skógarfoss and stopped at the exhibition about Eyjafjallajoküll, the volcano which erupted in 2010.

Eyjafjallajoküll

The most exciting thing we saw, and a new thing for me, was an old US Navy plane wreck on a black sand beach. The plane is a little difficult to find and involves driving along a rocky beach for quite a way. I'm sure we could have got there a lot quicker but it was incredibly windy and snowing and I had no idea what the tyres of our tiny hire car could handle so I crawled along the beach at almost walking pace to avoid destroying the car. Annoyingly there were a few other tourists coming and going whilst we were there but it didn't take away from the eery atmosphere too much. From what I can find on the internet, the plane had to make an emergency landing on the beach after running out of fuel and nobody was killed. The plane used to be fully intact but the weather has eroded much of it and apparently the farmer, whose land it is on, sold the tail of the plane.

Creating a car advert for Toyota?

Next we went to the town of Vík in the South but it was getting dark and the weather was so bad by this point that we couldn't walk far along the beach.

In fact, the weather was awful all day and maybe this picture (taken by Thomas) shows the conditions I had to drive in all day!

As well as travelling with Thomas, last week I also visited Búri, a lava cave on Reykjanes peninsula, with a group of other students. The cave was around an hour's drive outside of Reykjavik, then we had an easy hike for around 45 minutes. To enter the cave involved sliding down a small ice slope then lowering ourselves through a very narrow gap. The entrance to the cave was beautiful with icicles hanging from the ceiling. Unfortunately my camera does not do it justice!

The next few hours were tough work scrambling over icy and jagged rocks. It was a little difficult to take photos due to constantly watching my footing and not wanting to hold up the other forty people in the cave. By the end I had cuts on my knees and my legs were black and blue; I may have fallen over a few times but I certainly wasn't the only one! After a kilometre the cave came to a sudden end with a huge drop at the end so it was time to turn back.

I was a bit scared to get too much closer...

Last week was fantastic. It was great to see Thomas and get out of Reykjavik, and then the week was ended by the amazing Sónar Festival (more on that in my last post!). Hopefully I will be doing some more trips around Iceland soon... although I may have to wait for my next student loan to come through first!

A month of festivals: Þorrablót, Winter Lights and Sónar

I've been very lazy at updating this blog recently but I've suddenly realised I actually have a lot to write about. Life feels a little bit quieter and calmer this semester but looking back at the last six weeks, I realise there's been quite a lot going on in Reykjavik (and some trips out of Reykjavik, but I'll write a separate post about that), mostly three festivals; Þorrablót, Winter Lights and Sónar.

At the end of January, some friends and I went to the Icelandic festival of Þorrablót, an evening of eating a huge meal including all the old-fashioned disgusting Icelandic food that no normal person would ever consider eating. There were sheep's heads, sheep's testicles, whale, rotten shark, liver sausage... and shots. Lots of Icelandic shots. Of course I don't normally eat meat and avoided the most vile foods, but I would say that the shots influenced my decision to try a little bit of shark and whale (I draw the line at eating testicles). They were just as disgusting as you'd imagine: reaction shot below. 

Cube-shaped sheep balls...

A dignified moment

Of course, the night I chose to get slightly worse for wear was the night before I had to fly home. Somehow I managed to get the two coaches and plane and had mostly recovered by the time I arrived at my parents' house in the evening (they may disagree). I've written about the reasons I had to go home in my previous post and feel that I should say that everything went as well as it could; my mum arranged a lovely funeral service for my grandma and despite the circumstances, it was nice to go home and see all the family.

Another recent event in Reykjavik was the Winter Lights Festival; a festival which promised to see the whole city lit up like a Christmas tree with all kinds of beautiful colours and light installations. On the opening night we followed a trail around Reykjavik to see installations and buildings lit up. The trail finished at the church and we couldn't wait to see the church lit up; I'd seen pictures from previous years and it looked beautiful. So we walked around Reykjavik... first stop, a woman hula hooping with brightly coloured hoops. Very nice, but we could tell it was just warming up.

Then a walk through brightly-lit trees, a walk across a bright pink bridge outside the city hall and some quite nice glowing jellyfish. But we were still waiting for the main attractions.

And then time for the big finale, we walked up to the church... Ok, by this point, you can tell I'm being bitter and sarcastic. The church wasn't lit up. The final thing to see was an installation by the local design college; it essentially looked like someone had piled up some bin bags and draped fairy lights over them. It was so rubbish I didn't even bother to take a photo. So overall, I'm afraid the Winter Lights Festival was thoroughly underwhelming. 

The final festival I went to was Sónar Reykjavik, an electronic dance music festival held in Harpa, the concert hall. I was expecting it to be a lot like Iceland Airwaves, and there were some similarities and some of the same bands playing. However, Sónar ended up being a lot crazier. The best acts were Bonobo, FM Belfast, Diplo, Exos and the incredible final act: Major Lazer. I don't think I've ever been to a more crazy concert but it was so much fun, despite leaving covered in other people's sweat and beer. 

So, this semester didn't get off to the best start, but it's fair to say things have got much, much better. I love living with my new flatmates and I'm so happy to be back for another few months.