Blogs from South, Iceland, Europe - page 17

Day 11: 10th October 2009 9:10 AM I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of nothing. No howling winds that had battered us for the previous 30 hours or so, just a quiet calm. I’m not sure if it was the silence that woke me up, but it was the first thing I noticed. I didn’t write a song in the end last night, but John did beat me at chess and we whiled the night away playing games, reading books and eating. It was quiet, but pleasant. This morning it is as still as when I woke up at whatever silly hour it was, and the stillness was also the first thing John and Lyndsey commented on when they got up. Losing a day shouldn’t be a major problem for us, ... read more

Day 10: 9th October 2009 6:40 PM It’s difficult to describe just how strong the winds have been today, but I’ll give it a go. The ducks on the pond outside were blown sideways this morning and disappeared not long after. The pond itself resembles a particularly stormy ocean, the wind whipping up waves that crash against the sides. Even the sheep, those most hardened of weather-beaten animals, have taken refuge outside the front door of the hostel where they are sheltered from the worst of the wind. Perhaps the best way to describe its power, though, is by describing the waterfall in the distance, which appears to actually be travelling upwards, or at least it has stopped and the water is doing nothing more than spraying about at the top. After our cup of tea ... read more

10:00 PM A strange thing happened last night. We were just cooking our tea, having finally got into the kitchen around 9.30, when a bearded bloke came up to me and said “Excuse me, are you from Wolverhampton?” I was slightly confused as to how he might know this, so I gave him a look that said “Yes. Explain” and started chatting to him. It turns out that he is a friend of a friend of mine called Dan who I have met a few times. The last time I saw him I don’t think he had the beard, or at least he was in the early stages of bushy growth, which I count as a reasonable excuse for not recognising him until he actually told me who he was. It’s strange how we can come ... read more

8:20 PM Whenever we have been off on trips to foreign parts in the past, we have always made the best use of the public transport available, mainly, across Europe, the formerly bargainous Inter Rail tickets which enable us to jump on a train anywhere in Europe and jump off anywhere we want (I say formerly bargainous because the price shoots up once you hit the age of 26, and the collapse of Sterling against the Euro in the last 12 months has now made it doubly expensive). The problem with Iceland is that there aren’t any trains; the landscape doesn’t make building them particularly easy or cheap, and given the population of the island outside of Reykjavik, it almost doesn’t seem worth the effort. The lack of trains meant that if we wanted to go ... read more

7:05 PM Last night ended up with a relatively early finish, although by the time we had settled back at the hostel and made ourselves a glass of hot chocolate (bought from the supermarket with the intention of warming us up, and looking like being a regular source of sustenance from now on) it was sometime after midnight. We arranged to have a bit of a lie in this morning, mainly because we had arranged to see the Heimaey volcano film in the local cinema at 11.00, which didn’t give us much time to do anything else beforehand. From what I can gather, we were reasonably lucky to see the film, which is apparently not available outside of Heimaey and only gets played once a week in the summer season, but there had been a special ... read more