ICELAND, THE ENTRANCE TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
The late summer heat makes you nervous and incites you to adventurous decisions. The season of traveling and holidaymaking is almost over, and people start thinking of how to replenish their depleted bank accounts. But all of a sudden the prolonged, untimely heat of 30-40 degrees Celsius awakens again the mirage of temptation. You have about ten days to the end of your leave–are you going to spend them using the air-conditioning? Indeed, the cool places near the white-hot city are more than you can count on your fingers but all of them are boringly familiar. Isn’t there a crazier refuge from the raging summer? Something like the non-standard Goa and Reunion for freezing people in winter? You ask the present-day god of knowledge, Google, and come to know that of late the hottest destination for cooling-tourism is Iceland.
You click several more times and you already know that the average August temperature in the capital, Reykjavik, is 11 degrees Celsius and that this island, which has popped up in the middle of the North Atlantic, is almost as big as Bulgaria. The population, however, is only about 300 thousand descendants of the ancient Vikings who speak the language of the Old-Norwegian sagas and who, after the Japanese, have the second longest life expectancy in the world. Furthermore you learn that the Icelanders have an excessively and maybe unnecessarily high standard of living, that there is not a single wild tree on their island as the thin northern forests were cleared to the last sapling in the Middle Ages, and that the price of a decent bottle of wine doesn’t match the prices at home.
If you still hesitate and don’t know whether you should set out or not, the pictures of the Icelandic landscape on the Internet urge you irresistibly to make for the travel agency and book a flight to Iceland. The flight from Europe is a short one and in the Boeing of Iceland Air you can hear all possible languages—the northern island is obviously a favourite summer destination for many lovers of arctic coolness. You expect to land on a sleepy airport but it turns out that the Leifur Eiriksson International Airport is thronged with people and jet-liners. Since Iceland lies in the middle of the air-route from Europe to North America it is more economical for many passengers to change planes in Reykjavik. More than 20 flights a day connect the island with the North American cities of New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Montreal etc.
For the tourist, the visit to Iceland almost inevitably begins at the rent-a-car desk. The public transport is poor and repulsively expensive. Not to speak of the other advantages of having a personal car in a country where the phenomenal, mandatory sites for a visit are few, but in return there is an abundance of hidden treasures waiting to be discovered. That’s why it is a good idea to choose camping as a way of traveling in these places. Iceland is dotted with modern camps providing all possible utilities and you really don’t lack anything in respect of everyday necessities. And whether you decide to pitch a tent on a deserted beach or on a meadow in the mountain depends only on your sense of adventure and romance.
However, before you hit the wild roads of the sparsely inhabited island, you of course pass through the capital Reykjavik, or the Smoke Cove as it is called in the local language. The road from the airport goes through bleak lava fields, flecked with lush moss and fresh green grass. Apparently it is not only cool here but also quite rainy. Regardless of the fact that Iceland is situated beyond the 60th parallel north, the climate is typically British because of the proximity of a warm ocean current, the Gulfstream.
Reykjavik is a small place where about two thirds of the population of the island lives. Above the grey strict angular buildings (typical of northern architecture) the concrete protestant cathedral rises with a somehow frightening appearance. The predominant religion in Iceland is Lutheranism, which after the Reformation replaced the Catholicism. This inevitably left its marks on the mentality of the local people, who are embarrassingly restrained and concrete. At least during the weekdays. On Friday evening, however, the city changes its face. Bars and restaurants are crowded with people, the discos burst with visitors, and beer and vodka never run out. Here too, as everywhere in Scandinavia, the relationship “people and alcohol” is complicated and stressful. Nothing helps, neither the absurdly high prices, nor the total prohibition in force until 1989, which was later replaced by the present-day draconian state liquor monopoly.
There is nothing to keep you long in the Icelandic capital, not even the building of Gorbachov and Reagan, where the historic meeting between the two men took place in 1986. To drive in Iceland is pleasant and not challenging. After you get out of the urbanized area in the western part of the city you are more likely to encounter domestic animals crossing the road than other vehicles. The landscape changes all the time: from sparkling fields with alfalfa through moss covered basalt rocks or naked slopes of rusty black volcanic ash and cinder to stony beaches, cut through by the silver mouths of glacial rivers and coastal lagoons blocked up by icebergs. The sights are something new for the eyes but what is more important is whether you look at them with new eyes.
The masters of Iceland are the volcanoes. In the course of the centuries they used to determine not only the landscape’s character but also people’s destiny. Driving on literally black roads you reach the foot of the Hekla–the most baneful herald of the underground elements, a volcano that doesn’t want to fall asleep and reminds of itself with chronometric precision every ten years. Today the damages caused by the volcanoes are reduced to a minimum, but in the past the eruptions had the effect of a plague epidemic. However, you can’t but wonder what made the miniature people choose the lid of the hellish boiling cauldron in the center of the Earth for its homeland. Geologically Iceland sits exactly on the fault connecting the European and the North American tectonic plates, which causes the never-ceasing seismic, volcanic and geothermal activity in the region.
Nature tends to balance its manifestations and luckily for the Icelanders this is also the case with their country, covered with ashes. The abundance of geothermal fields provides the possibility of free heating, which, being so difficult to ensure in other parts of the world is a major cause for social disturbances elsewhere. Not only is hot mineral water running everywhere on the island where people live, but there is also the steam of the numerous geysers and fumaroles which function as a natural dynamo in the Icelandic power stations. All this explains what turns Iceland into one of the most environmentally friendly places on earth as well as why its GDP is $ 37,000 per capita despite the decline in the fishing industry, the mainstay of the local economy. Yet you can’t live only on fish…
After you pass the Gateway to Hell, as they call Hekla in the Old Icelandic sagas, you proceed to one of the island’s main historic landmarks, Thingvellir. This is the place where the first Icelandic parliament was convened more than a thousand years ago. Although Iceland was formed as a nation quite early, the island was colonised soon after that–first by Norway and then by Denmark, which incorporated it in its possessions at the end of the 14th century. This political situation lasted until the end of World War II, when the independent Republic of Iceland was proclaimed.
You drive on westwards past waterfalls, steaming geysers and silent craters, led by an adolescent excitement for a special book. You want to understand what made Jules Verne choose the Iceland’s volcano Snæfell as a starting point for his Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The weather is getting worse. Liver-coloured clouds block the horizon and soon the Atlantic rain starts pouring down. You spend a night in Ólafsvík the novel’s characters, Professor Hardwigg and his nephew before they set off looking for the entrance to the underground world.
On the next day the sky is saturated with opal polar light. The glaciers of the mystical volcano peep out of the swishing fog like the torso of a stranded whale. You park on the cold magma and start walking uphill on a fat layer of moss and tundra vegetation, which is so springy that you have the feeling of walking on a live body. Soon you reach the snow line and the wind intensifies, closing the horizon with a shroud of low clouds. The glacier lurks somewhere ahead of you with its insidious hidden crevasses. Frightened, you look around and slow down. As always, the sense of setting of the French science fiction author is superb – the entrance to the centre of the earth couldn’t be anywhere else than on the Icelandic volcano Snæfell.
Two hours later you take a rest in a roadside restaurant at the foot of the Jules Verne mountain and wonder which of the many seafood delicacies on the menu to choose. While you are finishing the portion of roasted Greenland halibut (a northern fish resembling our turbot) a horde of bikers thunders by. The futuristic, belligerent motorcycles flash like Viking’s armour in the twilight of the dying day pulsating with the roar of the two-cycle engines amidst Iceland’s volcanic ashes. In the distance the green eye of Arnarstapi lighthouse turns every thirty seconds in its orbit, measuring the infinity.
January 16th, 2017 at 11:23 PM
Винаги съм имала любопитство към тази далечна и усамотена страна.По-скоро във въображението ми са били интересните горещи гейзери.Така поднесен този материал създава чудесна образна представа за страната.Написан е с много познание и в художествен стил,за което сме благодарни.Но….след прочетеното малко бих се замислила дали ще ми помогне за релакс или ще ме натовари с мрачни и хладни впечатления…И все пак запазвам дълбоко в сърцето си едно вечно любопитство къмм Исландия!