Iceland, Day 5 & 6

            On Thursday we took a bus tour along the south coast to the village of Vik. (A “vik” is where a small river flows into the sea. In old Scandinavia, people who lived along the viks were called Vikings.)   Vik has a beach of jet black sand, up against a cliff where a rapidly cooling basalt flow has produced spectacular pentagonal shaped vertical columns.  Just before we got to Vik, we drove right past Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano, which was quiet the week we were there.  But the peak was shrouded in mist that day, so we could not actually see it. (Eyjafjallajokull is pronounced:  Aya-fyaht-la-yoe-kut-la, usually shortened to Aya-fyaht-la-yok’t.  Remember, in Icelandic, “J” is pronounced like “Y” and a double “L” is sometimes  “L-T” or “T-L,” depending on context.  Here, it is pronounced as “T-L,”   but in Gullfoss, it is pronounced   “L-T,” which is why Gullfoss comes out “Goolt-foss.”)  

            On the way back from Vik, we drove through some of Iceland’s best grazing land, with sheep, cattle, and horses (hross), grazing on both sides of the road.  A narrow coastal plain, nearly at sea level, starts out flat and then, as it nears the mountain, has its incline steepen in a hyperbolic curve till it’s nearly vertical at 6 or 7 hundred feet.  The sheep graze as far up the slope as they are comfortable, which is nearly vertical.  I’ve always thought that these little beasts must have shorter legs on one side.  We stopped along the road to get pictures of some horses.  As soon as we stopped, the horses came right up to the fence and waited to have their picture taken.  And then the horses on the other side of the road got jealous and crowded up to the fence too.

            The Icelandic horse is extremely friendly.  They don’t bite you or kick you, they are strong, and are comfortable to ride on rough terrain, since they have an extra gate not found in any other horse.  Iceland has been exporting live horses for many years now, and this trade is an important part of the economy.  There are now more Icelandic horses outside of Iceland than inside, and there are over 90,000 inside.  For a country of 300,000 people, that’s a lot of horses.  Some horses are owned by townsfolk who board them in the countryside and drive up on weekends to ride them. Some are rented to tourists. And some are raised for export. But as the world economy has collapsed and fewer people can afford to spend money on imported horses, more will have to be culled out for slaughter.  Remember, Iceland is an island and it isn’t getting any bigger. Almost none of the land is tillable, and of the small portion that can be grazed, all of it is in use—and has been in use for a thousand years.   There is only so much pasture, and there will never be any more.

            This fixed constraint affects not only livestock production, but all aspects of life, and all Icelanders understand this.  At no time since the original settlement have they encouraged immigration.  While they encourage tourism, as this has become a significant part of the economy, even marrying an Icelander does not automatically guarantee you a permit to live there.  

            On Friday morning we walked up to Hallgrimskirkja, a beautiful fairly new church on a hilltop in Reykjavik, and an object of great civic pride. Like all other buildings, it is made of reinforced concrete. This town has almost continuous small earthquakes, and occasionally fairly large ones, so no other kind of construction is practical. Yet the church is tall, thin, and has a light, airy feel to it. Typical structures here are made of poured concrete, and then either stucco covered, or sheeted in corrugated steel, which is often painted bright colors.  All buildings are well built, well maintained, and the whole town is immaculately clean. There are no slums or blighted areas.

            The Icelanders, besides being tall, healthy, and friendly, are the most educated on earth. Education from age 6 to 16 is provided by the local community.   Upon graduation, every Islander who cannot find a job is given a stipend.  And all are entitled to attend Iceland University, or study abroad---all at government expense.  Thirty percent of all Icelanders have college degrees.  In the age group from 25 to 45, nearly 100 % have at least a BA.  Most Icelanders in this age group speak fluent English as well as Icelandic, and many also speak an additional language, such as German, Danish, or French.  And Icelanders write, publish, purchase, and read more books per capita than any people anywhere.  And these friendly, independent, egalitarian, and freedom-loving people also have the oldest democracy on Earth.

            This is the last regular post that attempts to detail my day to day adventures in Iceland, but I will soon begin to post a few comments about this country’s geology, economics, history, and current political culture.  Being an economic determinist, I believe that economics determines history, and history determines politics.  But I also believe that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the ecology, which is constrained by the geology. So I will begin, in a day or two, discussing Iceland’s unique geology, and discuss how this has constrained its economy and thereby determined its history and the political and social system which comes out of the history.  I don’t actually know that much about geology, but the island’s most striking geological features are not especially subtle.  A retarded gerbil could see that there’s no damn place like Iceland.

Iceland Diary, Day 4

            On Wednesday, what I would like to have done is get a better picture of the Russian  sailing vessel that was moored in the harbor when we arrived.  But alas, it had already gone back to Russia. In fact, it was already gone Monday morning. Darn! I really wanted a closer look at that ship.  So we just stayed in Reykjavik to visit museums and soak up local culture, including the food culture.   Food is expensive—about twice the price paid in Iowa.  And that is true of both prepared food and food sold in supermarkets.  (I saw a package of lunch meat, probably bologna, in a supermarket priced at about $8.00 per pound.)  But in Iceland, much of the food must be imported, so food has always been expensive.  And before the exchange rate of the Krona crashed last year, the prices, in U.S. dollars, would have been much higher.  This is actually a very good time to visit Iceland.

            The favorite national food of Icelanders is lamb soup.  It’s a thick soup made of lamb, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots, and it’s very tasty.  It is served everywhere from elite restaurants to truck stop lunch counters.  It varies in quality, but the worst it ever gets is wonderful.  The most popular restaurant in Reykjavik is a hot dog stand. When I first heard this I was quite puzzled. But it turns out that what they call a hot dog is different from anything served in the U.S.  It’s a spicy, coarse ground sausage, probably mutton, and it’s cheap and delicious. The only hot dogs I ever ate in the U.S. that resemble an Iceland dog are those I ate at Coney Island in the 1960s.   So basically, an Iceland hot dog is an original Coney Island hot dog.

            While all food in Iceland is pricey, some is delicious—and some isn’t!  And it’s all equally pricey.  How do you find the good food?  By accident!  Some of the places recommended by the tourest guides were excellent, and some were lousy.  Going to a place frequented by the natives was not a reliable guide either.  A place might be popular with the locals because they have the best rock band.  But if you stay there a few days, you find the good places.  And when Reykjavik food is good, it’s very, very good.  There is a huge dairy industry in Iceland, and all dairy goods are excellent and cheap.  They have the best butter on earth, and use it lavishly.

            Many restaurants offer minke whale steak, and even puffin.  But typical restaurant fare is lamb, codfish, and horsemeat.  (They do not raise horses specifically for slaughter.  But in a country that imports a lot of its food, nothing is wasted.  I’ll say more about this later.)  You’d think codfish would be dogmeat cheap, since Iceland still exports codfish. But it’s quite expensive in Rejkavik.  What little codfish the Icelanders still take from the sea, they sell mostly to rich Europeans to pay for the many foodstuffs which they must  import.  They also export a lot of mutton, and very small amounts of horsemeat, mostly to France and Japan, where it is considered a delicacy.

            We visited a museum where they have preserved a recently discovered a 9^th century Viking longhouse, right in downtown Reykjavik.  We also visited the National Museum.  They have exhibits showing reproductions of the ancient documents, and also archaeological artifacts dating back to the earliest settlements.  One thing about the Icelanders’ history is that they have so much of it.  The earliest settlers were not literate, and records for the first two hundred years were passed down orally before they were written down.  But soon after they accepted Christianity in 1000 AD, they became nearly 100% literate, and have remained so ever since.   In the middle ages, when in most of Europe only a privileged few could read, Iceland was almost 100% literate.  So when the sagas were written, all Icelanders could read them—and they all did--and every generation since has read them.  This is possible because the language has hardly changed over the last thousand years.  And the connection to the sagas is one factor that has helped prevent it from changing.  It is said that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. Icelanders fully understand this; they have studied their mistakes carefully, and have no intention of repeating them.  More on this later.

            

Iceland Diary, day 2 & 3

            When we arrived Sunday morning, as our bus came into Reykjavik harbor, there was a huge sailing ship moored there.  I got a few pictures from the bus.  Monday morning I walked down to the harbor to get a better shot, but the ship was already gone.  It was a Russian ship, the second largest sailing ship in the world—and it looked to be 400’ long.  It had been at the Sail Amsterdam fest, and was stopping at Reykjavik on the way home.

            Sunday evening, my wife became ill with a sinus infection.  She had been treated for a sinus infection the week before and had completed a course of antibiotics and thought she was cured. But it was starting to come back.  So Monday she went to a special clinic set up to handle sick tourists and saw a doctor immediately, who wrote a prescription---all for $40.00.  The next day she felt fine.  While my wife was at the clinic, my daughter and I did a walking tour of Reykjavik harbor and went to an art museum.  Featured that month were works by Erro, the Icelandic painter who does accurate portraiture with a political motive.  (Think Coit Tower paintings.)  One huge canvas showed the traditional monkey see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil pose.   But all of the monkeys had Richard Nixon’s face, and the third monkey was shouting.  The caption said, “Well, two out of three ain’t bad.”   Since Erro dislikes the same people I dislike, I’m sure we’d get along fine.  We also walked over to the parliament building, the Allthing.  A modest stone building, it’s smaller than any rural Iowa county court house.

             On Tuesday, we took a bus tour called the Golden Circle Tour.   This takes you into the interior, to Gullfoss, pronounced goolt-fose,  (shown above) which means gold falls.  (In Icelandic, a double “L” can sound like “LT” or “TL,” depending on context.)  It’s the most beautiful falls in Iceland, and perhaps the world.   A rather large river plunges over a cliff and falls a hundred feet, and then turns a 45 degree corner and does it again.  From there we went to Geysir and saw the original geyser and several hot springs--so hot the water was actually boiling.   And from there we went to Thingveller  (pronounced thing-vet-la.)  This is a beautiful rift valley where the North American plate and the Eurasian Plates are pulling apart.   People like to get their picture taken with “one foot in America and one foot in Europe,” but this is self deception. There is not one fissure, but several parallel fissures.  If you were standing on a ridge that was the furthest east point of what was unambiguously American, and your friend was on the ridge on the furthest west point that was unambiguously Eurasian, there would be a 17 kilometer rift valley between you.  Slightly above the valley is a place called the Law Rock.  This place, a small natural amphitheater, is the site where in the year 930 AD, Viking settlers convened the first Allthing, the first island-wide attempt at popular self-government.  The Allthing today is the world’s oldest democratic forum.  Both the history and the geology are fascinating.  But the photo-opps never stop.

            We also stopped at a geothermal powerhouse about 27 miles from Reykjavik, which supplies hot water heat to all Reykjavik and hundreds of hydroponic greenhouses, and also produces 200 Mw of electricity.   This is 10% of Iceland’s electricity.  Most of the rest comes from hydro-electric dams in the interior.  All inhabited parts of the island are now served by the grid, and power is cheap.  At the geothermal sites, 10,000 ft bore holes tap steam under pressure and superheated water. The steam and the water are separated and the steam drives turbines; the superheated water is allowed to boil and this steam drives more turbines.  Fresh water cools the condenser, which preheats this water, to be heated more by additional waste heat, and then pumped by gravity to Reykjavik.

Iceland, Day One

Innocents Abroad--Whale Watching in Reykjavik.
              We had left Minneapolis Intl at 7:30 PM and arrived at Keflavik Airport 6 hours later.   I can never sleep on airplanes, so I was just starting to get sleepy when we arrived.  By then it was 6:30 AM Reykjavik time, so it was to be many more hours before I would get to bed.  And at noon, we had tickets to go on a whale watching cruise.  The hotel let us into our rooms so we could deposit our luggage there, eat our free breakfast, freshen up, and catch a short nap.

            Our whale watching boat was about 100 ft long, 25’ across the beam and 2 decks high, and had a humongous diesel engine.  It was fairly calm, and we did not ride the waves—we blasted through them at 40 mph--so it was smooth as glass.   After 40 minutes of this, after we had nearly lost all sight of land, the pilot cut the engine to a low idle, and we gently bobbed on top of the waves, quietly looking for signs of whales.  Of course, the boat now pitched and rolled with the waves, and I expect a few became seasick. 

            They look for whales by looking for concentrations of sea birds above the water.  The whales involved are baleen whales—filter feeders. Though they eat zooplankton, they can also feed on very small fish, which the sea birds also eat.  So any crowd of birds usually means a crowd of whales. There are 11 kinds of whales in Icelandic waters, but we were looking for minke whales, a 30’ long baleen whale about a yard in diameter, which weighs several tons.  Minke whales are solitary animals, but often gather around a rich food source.  These whales are taken for food, and many restaurants in Reykjavik serve minke whale steak.  After about a half hour of bobbing around like a cork, we still had seen no whale. I was beginning to get discouraged, thinking my bonus whale watching cruise would amount to a “carnival ride.” But then the whale spotter, on a platform above the top deck, shouted, “Whale at two o’clock, at 200 meters---whale at nine o’clock at 75 meters…..etc”  I had hoped to get pictures of them, but soon realized this would not happen.  You have no idea where they are going to surface, and when they do, they are only visible for about two seconds. By the time you get the camera aimed and focused, they’re gone.  

            What does a minke whale look like, at least, what does the part you are likely to see look like?   Imagine that you have a huge black rubber inner-tube.  And imagine that you glue some fins, like the dorsal fin of a shark, around the edge so that if you rotate it, it would look like a big saw blade.  Now take all but 3 of the fins off, and make sure they are evenly spaced.  Then take this thing and hold it under water, with it slowly rotating-- and every now and then lift it to where about a third of it is out of the water.  Leave it there till the people watching see a fin rise gently out of the sea, and in a graceful arc, plunge back down.  Then jerk the whole thing back under. That’s what a minke whale surfacing looks like. You see this black, arched back of the whale rise out of the water, and you see a fin rise over the top of the arch and plunge back into the sea.

            As interesting as the whales were the sea birds.  There were gannets, the largest sea bird in the North Atlantic. They look almost like gulls, but have a wing spread up to two meters.

When they hunt, they do not skim along the surface snatching up fish.  They hover about 70 ft above the water, and when they see a fish, they fold in their wings and do a power dive straight into the sea, breaking the surface at 30 or 40 mph.   It’s a pretty majestic show!

            We continued watching whales till about 4:00 o’clock, and then the captain returned us to port in time for supper.  (It was an adventure—but it did not make us late for supper.)