Iceland: My Introduction.
In Iceland the land is alive. Everything is newly formed with ancient hands. The country shows its fresh mountainous scars with pride while its volcanic pulse beats violently below and a thousand years can be felt in a moment. Land is violently born in guttural heaves while wing bones nestled in eggshells begin to whisper of feathers in the shadow of ash. Walking paths are re-charted year by year as the earth sighs and shifts. Rivers caress and tear in fits of mood. Life is small and strong and learns to sway with the winds. The joy of being alive runs deep between seething volcanoes, biting...
Read MoreIceland: The Golden Circle Part 3 – Geysir and Language
Travel can be a way to see back in time. Geysir is a representative of the Old Norse language making its way from the sagas of viking sea explorers to my own familiar stories. “Guysa” in Old Norse means “to gush.” The Icelandic language is the closest modern language to Old Norse, which influenced languages in Scandinavia and across Europe. Many Icelandic words, with a bit of a twist of the tongue, are entirely recognizable in English, and more so in other languages such as Finnish, Lithuanian, and Russian. Rightly, Icelanders take utmost pride in their language and...
Read MoreIceland: The Golden Circle Part 2: Þingvellir and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge
Mid-Atlantic Ridge I first wanted to go to Iceland when I saw video footage of a rift eruption as a teen. It was watching the world give violent birth to a new portion of land that would creep across the world and see civilizations and species rise and fall before either climbing into the sky or plunging back from where it came, and my eyes were starry with the sense of my own mortality. I wanted to be there to bear witness to the beginning of something so permanent. I went through much of my life thinking that across Iceland there was a constant rift eruption, a reliable one I could go look...
Read MoreIceland: The Golden Circle part 1 – Gullfoss
The most popular route in Iceland (understandably for it’s ease of travel and abundance of cool shit to look at) is the “Golden Circle” which is a road loop of a day trip from Reykjavik. It was (and I was told almost always is) a constant crawl of tour buses, with every site covered with roaming hordes of multi-coloured, unnecessary Gore-Tex. Don’t let the crowds stop you – this is a circuit worth the short trip. After a day of settling into the hostel and getting acclimatized from our 30 degree summer in Vancouver to the 12 degree summer we landed in, we...
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