now for some actual Iceland, after Daniel Brim and I landed… here’s Iceland day 1.

this turns out to be the least exciting day, as far as pictures go, but hey you get to hear about how we got the door nearly blown off the rental car.

Wait, you did what!!??

Yeap, the wind in the Iceland, it’s something to behold. Must have been a constant 100 mph… I needed to do the biological function that should not be done into the wind so I opened the car door, and wham!, it gets ripped out of my hand and blown completely backwards against the fender… there is entertainment value to be found in driving another three thousand kilometers on a door that didn’t close all the way!

Less containing of entertainment value is how much the dang rental ended up costing us. Let’s not think about that. Let’s just look at some pictures.


Hooray for geothermal activity. Iceland is basically a giant pile of volcanoes.


The waterfall Gullfoss. In infrared – for both the strange colors, and more importantly the long-exposure waves.


An ancient farmhouse. I do mean ancient – it may very well date back to the 17th century. Note the ominous, fog-shrouded, sharp cliffs.


Behold the murk. Yep, that was it for the morning of the first day! Low-hanging clouds and lots of rain, as we left the airport and headed east.


Why look at that, I took a picture of a sign. This is on highway 35 – the dashed borders for F35 and 31 imply that this road leads to those two. F stands for … well, the expletive would be far more accurate a translation than whatever Icelandic description is abbreviated there. All F roads are execrable in condition and to attempt to traverse them is chancing one’s mortal death. We will not take the F road. We are heading to Geysir, and then past it.


What’s this, it’s clearing up? Quick, head for the blue patch! The white blobs are bales of hay – for some reason, Iceland shrink-wraps them!


Geothermal activity at Geysir. We’ll see in a minute why it’s called that… this is just a little bubbling vent.


There we go. Geysir, everybody.


This is where the road gets F’ed. Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that – I can’t figure out how Iceland deems a road to be F status: F35 is actually quite civilized, and is better than many, many roads that are not F (including a few sections of Route 1, the main ring road that connects the entire island together!). Other F roads, like F206, are navigable in the same sense that the way to the moon is navigable… and don’t even ask me about the Puffin Road, which is too execrable to even receive a number.


Another one of Gullfoss in long-exposure. I really need a visible-light 10-stop filter, so I can keep the colors as nature intended, while blurring the waves all elegantly.


It would look something like this … I combined one visible-light and one infrared photo in Photoshop to get this one.


Hey look at that, an old sign. Actually it’s not that old. It features the post-1965 font, despite being cast out of aluminum – a technique that most places abandoned by the 1950s. This probably goes back to the 70s and has been repainted at least once.

For those wondering – that third-to-last character is a hard “th” (like the middle sound in the word “other”). The Icelandic alphabet contains a few letters that were used in old Norse, but have dropped out of circulation in the other languages descended from it – Norwegian, German, and even English. Icelandic is the closest we get to the language of the Vikings: if one is fluent in Icelandic, he can read 11th century sagas with no difficulty. Contrast that with English: 17th century Shakespeare is quaint, and 13th century Chaucer is a nightmare inflicted upon the student body.


A sheep. There will be many more sheep. In Iceland, there are half a million sheep, to go with only 300 thousand people. Count out the Reykjavík area, in which nearly all of the people live – and you get 50000 people … and half a million sheep. We know who really runs the place.


Who’s the clown with the highway sign? Yep, that’s me, standing in 100 mile per hour winds there! Dan took the photo while I stood by and felt my jacket and even my undershirt getting swept away.


The sign says illfaer vager: “Ill-faring road”. That’s all the warning you need.


And this is our good road. Ominous, but survivable. With four-wheel drive and a good suspension, it’s smooth sailing ahead.


Look at that, some color in the skies!


And a whole slew of colors.


How ever shall we cross the river without getting ourselves killed mercilessly? This is a side road to F35 (F743 or something equally obscure) that we decided to venture down for no discernible reason. And yes, sometimes Iceland just does not bother to build a bridge. Why cater to four insane cars a week? Especially if they are piloted by foreigners who have no idea at all.

Fords, ladies and gentlemen – they are a challenge upon themselves; because water that 9 inches deep looks exactly the same as water that’s 90 inches deep. (Oh, the prominent posters at the rental car facility warning that insurance does not cover water loss or damage did not help!)

Well, this one involved a freakish swing of the steering wheel to the right at the deepest part of the river, but other than that was uneventful. After the fact, of course.


This is a different ford – only about five inches deep across the road. Uneventful.

About four minutes after this ford is when we got the doors deranged by the wind. Damn the elements!


Back to civilization. Here’s me holding the door open with the left hand, and … taking a photo with the right? Who’s steering? Who’s operating the stick shift? Yep, four hands – quite an interesting drive.


A horse. Iceland has three main farm species: sheep, horse, and cow. All are very distinct breeds courtesy of hundreds of years of Viking rule.


Hey look at that; the door doesn’t close all the way. Oops.


Iceland has the occasional suspension bridge.


Oh dear, it’s raining again. Hard.


A waterfall at dusk. I took this with the fisheye lens, thus the funny ground angles.


Red clouds at dusk.


Skógafoss. No infrared or photoshop trickery here – it’s an authentic long exposure because I took it a half-hour after nightfall!


Walking up to Skógafoss. I took this photo from almost underneath the waterfall. Gotta love the fisheye lens!


Highway One after dark. Note – no traffic. This is the main road of Iceland, and it is pretty severely abandoned when one gets out into the sticks!


Where’s that one car of the evening? Ah, there he goes!


Iceland lights up its waterfalls at night!


No northern lights to be found on the first night … but here’s a perfectly good photo of the Milky Way.

next up… Iceland Day Two, featuring more fun in the inlands, more terrible dirt roads, more old signs … and, of course, no sleep, just counting sheep.