Posts tagged Iceland

There aren’t many places in the world where you can experience complete silence, but on a still day, the center of Iceland is one of them.  There are very few animals, no rustling of leaves, and certainly no human disturbances.  Someone said that the nearest petrol station was 234km away.

When the sun goes down across the tundra, the darkness can be seen rising along the horizon.  It looks as if visibility is decreasing into a fog, or that your eyes are getting really blurry, but it’s really just darkness coming up.

It’s also incredibly difficult to know what time it is in Iceland.  At the summer solstice, the sun never goes down, and in the winter, it can be dark all day. The sun sets 7 minutes later every single day, so you can get really thrown off.  We found ourselves up until 4 or 5 am when we guessed it was only 11 pm or so.

The massive amounts of snowy terrain also make it difficult to tell where you are, so when you are out riding a snowmobile it’s important to have a safety plan and know what to do if you get lost…

The center of Iceland is a massive playground for the Vikings… we did some snowmobiling and pulled each other across the lakes on our skis until we found some good runs to shuttle each other back and forth down…

Siggi our Viking mountain guide from South Iceland Adventure…

The mountain hut doesn’t have running water in the winter, but does have a pretty cool solar panel so we didn’t have to use candles all the time…

Today was the best day in Iceland yet.  We were really hoping to get clear skies to film, and when we did it was simply spectacular. 

Driving down the road, the skies broke and we immediately jumped out of the superjeep to start flilming as the clouds lifted above these cliffs.

The great thing about Iceland is that there is amazing scenery everywhere—the farms in the countryside are full of structures like this an even some Viking ruins, which made for some pretty good shots on film.

Today we also had our first real superjeep experience on the black beaches of Iceland.  It literally looked like the surface of the moon; kilometers and kilometers of black sand and windblown dunes. We could only imagine what the crew of this old US Military plane crash could have been thinking when they saw where they were. 

After the scenes at the black beach, we headed up the Katla Volcano on Myrdalsjokull and the cloud ceiling lifted perfectly for us.  We did some amazing time lapse shots at the summit looking over the Eyjafjallajokull volcano and celebrated an awesome expedition so far.

A huge thank you to South Iceland Adventure and Wardour and Oxford Global Consultancy for sending us out here in the name of Climate Unchange.