After a three and a half year hiatus, I decided to update this little journal of travel, adventure and general shenanigans.

What’s happened in the interim? The cliff notes would read something like this:

Arrived in London, found girlfriend, got job at soulless bank working in quantitative finance. Had several trips back home, spent Day of the Dead in Mexico City, saw Northern Wales with girlfriend, proposed in Scotland and spent the next year between London and Edinburgh planning the wedding. Went to Portugal as best man for best mates stag party, and held the title of longest rider of the mechanical bull. Performed best man role back in Melbourne and soon after had my own stag party in Amsterdam where I found my way on stage during a live sex show (my clothes stayed on). I then got married to my wonderful wife with a traditional African ceremony in London and white wedding a couple of days later in Edinburgh. Six months later we had our honeymoon cruise through the Caribbean and spent new year’s eve of 2011 in New York City.

That was all good fun.

So that brings us, dear reader, to my most recent excursion to the alien landscape of Iceland. Mia (that’s the wife) and I were planning on visiting during our honeymoon, however logistically this proved difficult. We deferred it to February of 2011 and spent the most recent extended weekend within its deceptively hospitable shores.

We arrived late on a Wednesday night and found a bus to Hotel Bjork where we would spend the next several nights. Luckily the hotel did not subscribe to the Icelandic musician of the same name, and we managed to find our room and bed< by about two thirty in the morning where sleep was quickly embraced.

Our first full day was spent with Iceland Horizons ‘Southern Shores’ tour. This would be the first of two full day excursions spent with a British guide, David, who had relocated to Iceland over a decade ago. He was an entertaining man with a penchant for describing things in great detail. This included a history of the island and its Viking heritage and language. The landscape is quite striking, with large volcanic mountains separating large open rock plains. Iceland is a continually growing island, both outwards due to tectonic and volcanic activity, but also rising up from out of the Atlantic ocean. This means that many of the plains that we drove through used to be ocean seabed.

There are many and various farming homesteads out in the lava plains. David explained how as new materials and building methods were brought to Iceland over the past hundred years or so, the residents would build a newer, better house not too far from the old one, and convert the previous to a storage facility for livestock or supplies. As a result, each of the different farming areas would generally have a fairly old turf building, usually built into the rock and a couple of other more modern structures.

We passed by Eyjafjallajoekull, the volcano which erupted in April of 2010 and caused untold inconvenience to most of Europe and around the world. Interestingly enough, only about 25 homesteads were affected in Iceland itself. The volcano is on the south shore of the island, and the winds blew the eight kilometre high ash cloud south and away from the island. Icelanders continued flying in and out of the Americas, whilst the majority of Europe was grounded due to the airborne ash.

The area around the south shore is amazing. We saw two large waterfalls, both of which it were very accessible. This provided some nice photo opportunities before we continued on to a glacier within the foothills of the surrounding mountains. I had never seen a glacier outside of a photograph before, and the deep blue of the massive ice formation is not given justice by my camera. Apparently this is created from oxygen, compressed under the immense weight of ice.

We continued along the coast to the southernmost village of Vik, where Mia and I both ordered a traditional lamb soup. We saw some incredible black sand beaches with a basalt cave that I felt was one of the highlights of the trip. The wind and weather in this area was quite violent, so we quickly piled back into the van and headed back to Reykjavik.

That night we attempted to see the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights), my primary motivation for coming to Iceland. The forecast for the aurora was the strongest all year, so we went out with high hopes for a stunning light show. A massive solar flare had been registered only days earlier, and it is this sort of solar activity that is the necessary prelude to the atmospheric event.

Unfortunately the Northern Lights are a natural phenomena and are never guaranteed. Apparently the solar flare was so strong that it pushed the corona much further south than Iceland, and was probably visible as far as Scotland and Ireland. Luckily our tour guide for this trip was also very entertaining and gave us a good history of the area we were shivering in and some of the details of the more recent fishing wars between Iceland and Britain.

Undeterred, we ventured out again the following evening and after standing in the biting wind for a few hours we were rewarded in a small, but still very striking display of the Northern Lights. I finally was able to fulfil a dream of playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon whilst standing under such an incredible spectacle. Mia and I both agreed it was a very cool thing to experience and was worth braving the cold.

Of course that was in the evening of the second day. Before that we had spent the sunlight hours on the Golden Circle tour with David. This consisted of another beautiful and enormous waterfall that we couldn’t get quite as close to, and seeing some of the natural hot water geysers in the surrounding area. Both of these sights were interesting and I managed to get drenched by one of the larger geysers attempting to create a killer photo.

We also managed to stop by and pet some Icelandic horses, one of which seemed to take a particular liking to the taste of my ski jacket. Iceland has had a law in place for over one thousand years that prevents any horses from being imported into the country. As a result, the seventy thousand horses that currently populate the island are all descendants of the original Norse breeds that were introduced over a millennia ago. They are a very pure species, fetching a high price among horse collectors the world over.

The last stop was in the national park that we had spent the first night waiting for the Northern Lights, and whilst it had some quite pretty scenery, by this stage Mia and I were a bit over sight-seeing.

The following day we had a wander through the main strip of Reykjavik, visited the flea market and ‘world famous hot dog stall’. Neither of these were particularly good, and so a bus was found that took us to the rather more world famous Blue Lagoon. Mia and I spent the afternoon there, alternating between the warm blue water pool, smearing silica mud on our faces (Mia more so than me), and the various steam rooms and saunas that were available. A great way to relax after two very busy days of seeing the main sights of Iceland. Once our skin was sufficiently waterlogged, we dried off and found our way back to the hotel for a much needed sleep before our rather rude four thirty morning alarm clock to get our early flight back to London.

Overall Iceland was a great trip. The scenery is incredible and unlike anything I’ve seen elsewhere. The whole island might as well be one massive volcano (rather than the forty odd that comprise it currently), and the landscape is something out of another world. Between amazing waterfalls, the lava plains, the Northern Lights and the steam vents coming straight out of the ground, Iceland is a very unique place to be, and I can see why its residents are very proud of their home despite some of its harsher living conditions.