Our last day in Iceland. We returned the beast and went down to the old harbour in search of the saga exhibition. Saga is the story telling, the history of Iceland. Seems the original settlers were Vikings from Norway but they brought many Irish women with them; a result of raids in the British Isles. So there is quite a close link to the Celts. The exhibition was well done with very life like figures. I had thought that as this is such a harsh land that they'd all be busy surviving… but no, it was the usual story of in fighting and civil wars.
Some little snippets:
Some little snippets:
- The water is beautiful here, soft on your skin & hair and lovely to drink.
- The skin on my fingertips are split and/or peeling with the cold.
- Our insulated rubber boots have been worth their weight in gold as have the crampons for walking on snow/ice.
- I love the crunching sound winter car tyres make. They are studded to help grip in snow and ice.
- You have to take tripods out of the car at night or any residual dampness in the joints will freeze them solid.
- Camera bags should not be opened for several hours after coming indoors to allow the gear to warm up slowly.
- Your water bottle in the car is as cold as if its been in the fridge.
- On 21 Dec there is only a few minutes of daylight… on 21 July there is no darkness.
- We saw paw prints of an artic fox a couple of times at the ice beach at Jökulsárlón
- The outside of the Pórbergur cultural heritage museum at Hali has a row of 2 metre high book spines.
- While we were taking photos near Höfn Pete found a lovely green &white coloured stone (the size of a Ferro Rocher chocolate). When we visited the information centre we discovered it was an opal!
- There is a Phallological museum in Reykjavik… yup a willie museum! Who knew?