First Impressions
Two weeks lay ahead of us, a blank canvas waiting to be filled with new discoveries alongside returns to the places we’d visited all too briefly three years earlier. Excited? You bet we were - so much so that more than twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation wasn’t going to stop us heading out into the adventure almost immediately after checking in at our first base near Grundarfjordur. That initial burst of adrenalin would see us through these opening hours of the trip we’d been waiting all year for - in my case that retirement present to self, boosted by the fact that the lump sum had been a bit more generous than the figure my own calculations had arrived at. I didn’t question it.
We were keen to explore Kirkjufell and the spaces around it rather more extensively than we’d been able to when we’d come here in the summer of 2019. Then, we’d arrived at the waterfall scene somewhere around midnight, taken the classic shot, walked back to the van where we’d left it and flopped for the night before heading north the following morning. Now, we had two full days in Snaefellsnes, to which we could add the four or five hours of daylight that remained. And as we pulled up on the side road to the west of the famous mountain to tramp about in the marshes, something had already caught the eye. Somebody with a bit of cash to invest had chosen the location of their new holiday cabin rather well, looking out north over the fjord towards Kirkjufell, backed by the most dramatic scenery, and guaranteed to command visitors whose pockets were rather more comfortably furnished than our own - despite the lump sum booster I let slip about earlier. Don't tell anyone will you! Still, we didn’t come here to wallow around in luxury, but rather more to wallow around in muddy spaces in our wellies - they’d have never let us stay even if we were filthy rich, rather than just filthy.
Sadly I’ll have to leave you to imagine the cosy inside, the quadruple glazing and the underfloor heating for yourself, because I’m having to do the same. Actually just about everywhere in Iceland has underfloor heating, thanks to the geothermal soup that lies beneath the earth here. But despite the obvious newness of this well appointed pit stop, it fulfilled the “appealing lone building in the middle of nowhere” category admirably. Set against cloud filled slopes, it stood out immediately as a subject in this sparsely populated area. A couple of miles east lay the small fishing port of Grundarfjordur, home to less than a thousand souls, while the occupants would have to drive more than ten miles to the west of here before arriving at Olafsvik, hardly any bigger in size. If you like life away from the concrete jungle, you could do a lot worse than come here. And because all the togs and day drippers will be standing at the waterfalls, or by the lake, there will only be a couple of strange looking men training telephoto lenses on your lodgings from across the marsh. For the pair of strange men, it had been a pleasing way to begin the journey in this magnificent country.
All of this makes me think of another theme for Iceland. This bearing in mind that the third, fourth and fifth trips to the country are already pretty much sketched out in between my ears. How about a trip with a self imposed ban on photographing anything instantly recognisable? Fat chance of sticking to that rule of course, yet everywhere you look there are lone buildings, some of them derelict, some of them luxury holiday homes. Many are simple cabins, dotted here and there against the most astonishing backdrops. In fact when I think about it, I’ve a few more of these to share. Hang around and wait for that sense of splendid isolation to creep in. Even here, where thousands throng the hotspots, new compositions and stories lie in wait in the quiet spaces.
First Impressions
Two weeks lay ahead of us, a blank canvas waiting to be filled with new discoveries alongside returns to the places we’d visited all too briefly three years earlier. Excited? You bet we were - so much so that more than twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation wasn’t going to stop us heading out into the adventure almost immediately after checking in at our first base near Grundarfjordur. That initial burst of adrenalin would see us through these opening hours of the trip we’d been waiting all year for - in my case that retirement present to self, boosted by the fact that the lump sum had been a bit more generous than the figure my own calculations had arrived at. I didn’t question it.
We were keen to explore Kirkjufell and the spaces around it rather more extensively than we’d been able to when we’d come here in the summer of 2019. Then, we’d arrived at the waterfall scene somewhere around midnight, taken the classic shot, walked back to the van where we’d left it and flopped for the night before heading north the following morning. Now, we had two full days in Snaefellsnes, to which we could add the four or five hours of daylight that remained. And as we pulled up on the side road to the west of the famous mountain to tramp about in the marshes, something had already caught the eye. Somebody with a bit of cash to invest had chosen the location of their new holiday cabin rather well, looking out north over the fjord towards Kirkjufell, backed by the most dramatic scenery, and guaranteed to command visitors whose pockets were rather more comfortably furnished than our own - despite the lump sum booster I let slip about earlier. Don't tell anyone will you! Still, we didn’t come here to wallow around in luxury, but rather more to wallow around in muddy spaces in our wellies - they’d have never let us stay even if we were filthy rich, rather than just filthy.
Sadly I’ll have to leave you to imagine the cosy inside, the quadruple glazing and the underfloor heating for yourself, because I’m having to do the same. Actually just about everywhere in Iceland has underfloor heating, thanks to the geothermal soup that lies beneath the earth here. But despite the obvious newness of this well appointed pit stop, it fulfilled the “appealing lone building in the middle of nowhere” category admirably. Set against cloud filled slopes, it stood out immediately as a subject in this sparsely populated area. A couple of miles east lay the small fishing port of Grundarfjordur, home to less than a thousand souls, while the occupants would have to drive more than ten miles to the west of here before arriving at Olafsvik, hardly any bigger in size. If you like life away from the concrete jungle, you could do a lot worse than come here. And because all the togs and day drippers will be standing at the waterfalls, or by the lake, there will only be a couple of strange looking men training telephoto lenses on your lodgings from across the marsh. For the pair of strange men, it had been a pleasing way to begin the journey in this magnificent country.
All of this makes me think of another theme for Iceland. This bearing in mind that the third, fourth and fifth trips to the country are already pretty much sketched out in between my ears. How about a trip with a self imposed ban on photographing anything instantly recognisable? Fat chance of sticking to that rule of course, yet everywhere you look there are lone buildings, some of them derelict, some of them luxury holiday homes. Many are simple cabins, dotted here and there against the most astonishing backdrops. In fact when I think about it, I’ve a few more of these to share. Hang around and wait for that sense of splendid isolation to creep in. Even here, where thousands throng the hotspots, new compositions and stories lie in wait in the quiet spaces.