So after the pop divas and dodgy bankers, now we know it as the place that shut down half the world's planes. In recent days we've had a powerful reminder of the geological phenomenon that is Iceland. In fact, up till last Wednesday, tour operators were still flying people in for special 'Volcano Holidays' to witness 'the raw power of nature'. This Easter, between eruptions, I got to visit this amazing sub-arctic country and here's the opening of my journey's weblog:Day One: Easter Sunday Kevlavik
They should have called it Brown-land. A disappointed Viking, stumbling across a giant frozen fjord, named this place Iceland. But coming in from the air, all we could see was a flattened landscape in rusty browns, dusty yellows; so many craters and volcanic cones and even the still-smoking eruption off in the distance. No trees, hardly any houses, and in the centre a brown nothingness to lose yourself in.
Soon we're driving through this volcanic landscape. Some frost-giant has fly-tipped a truck-load of debris – ash and lava and rubble – and it's fallen any old way. Toppling cairns and strange sculptures of black tufa rise up, clumpy rocks smothered in grey lichens and mosses. And at the rim of this flattened wasteland are peaks bare of vegetation, dusty as lunar ridges in colours of iron that got wet.
At the nearby Blue Lagoon, spa, we negotiate communal changing rooms to tumble into the blue-milky waters of this man-made lagoon. Chattering with the season's tourists, it is astoundingly warm and pleasant to sit in the open-air which we know must be icy, surrounded by those rusted-iron hills. Weird and wonderful, exactly as promised. We come out crusted with minerals like the rocks arranged around those milky pools. Not great for the hair but Icelanders reckon it's a tonic for the skin.And if that was not enough, on our first evening in Iceland, the beautiful Northern Lights Inn lived up to its name. As darkness fell around 10 o'clock, we climbed into the observatory tower and it was like someone had thrown a switch. The aurora borealis snapped into view – ghostly green whirlpools coiling and slithering across the heavens. Up in the Sky-land, a reindeer herder was lassoing the stars, throwing out ropes of colour that brightened and vanished. I thought of all those mythic forms as it morphed from a 'bridge of fire' to a swan snagged in ice to the Merrie Dancers and warriors kicking a spectral football.
For a time then, there seemed to be a lull in the show. But when we donned layers and braved the balcony, we could see a haze of sun-dust smothering the stars in drifts. When it thickened the aurora was not as vivid in colour but far more dynamic in its movement. Suddenly we were seeing great swathes of this dusky light undulating in quick pulses ever-higher. I felt then we really were watching the magnetosphere 'twang and buckle' and the freezing arctic wind seemed to give an echo to the solar winds roaring silently behind this display. Like pebbles caught a great cosmic stream, we watched it funneling light in from space, the veil of the earth's ionosphere folding and rippling before our eyes.At midnight when we retreated shuddering with cold, the aurora was still playing itself out. We'd only been in Iceland for half-a-day. Could the next three days possibly live up to what we'd already experienced in this other-worldly place?
