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.
No comments:
Post a Comment