Flashback: Iceland

Another picture from Iceland: a road near Thingvellir.

Maybe you have to have grown up out in the Fog Belt of San Francisco to find this an appealing hike, but I do -- I'd love to lace up my hiking shoes and see where this road goes.

Or maybe it would look good to anyone who's been mostly stuck inside for the past two months.

One more

Still more views from Thingvellir

These pictures are a little dark but still worth sharing.

More scenes from Thingvellir

Random things about Iceland

There's a ring road that encircles the country. It takes 24 hours to drive the complete circuit.

The only native tree is the birch, which grows very slowly and doesn't become very tall. They have a joke that if you're lost in an Icelandic forest and need to figure out where you are, stand up.

The name of the country in Icelandic is Island.

I got back to New York Thursday night, but I'm camped out in hotels for another week while my bathroom is being renovated. It's an odd limbo -- home but not home -- but at least I might actually get through my unsorted pictures by the time I can move back into my apartment.

See what I mean about Alaska?

This is the view of the valley at Thingvellir.

Because the landscape is such a chameleon, a lot of movies and tv shows are filmed here, pretending to be anywhere from Nepal to Iwo Jima to imaginary planets. In Game of Thrones everything north of the Wall is actually Iceland, and the landscape Arya wanders through with the Hound was filmed here in Thingvellir.

Thingvellir

Or, as it's written in Icelandic, Þingvellir. Most of the other Germanic languages gave up on the letters thorn (Þ) and eth (ð) long ago and now use th, but Icelandic still uses them. So for example, you see the name Thor written as Þor. All of which gives me scary flashbacks to Professor Renoir's Old English class and the unpleasant sensation that I'm about to be called on to read and translate a passage from The Wanderer, so I'm going to stick with English spellings from here on.

The Althing, the national assembly of Iceland, was established at Thingvellir in 930, only sixty or so years after the first settlers from Scandinavia arrived here. (“Thing” in Icelandic means meeting or assembly; “vellir” means fields.) The meetings continued to be held here until 1798, but now it's just a national park and World Heritage Site.

It's tearing us apart

Geology, that is.

Anyone who remembers when the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010 and brought all air travel in Europe to a halt knows that Iceland is a temperamental teenager geologically speaking. But I hadn't realized that they have a volcanic eruption, on average, every five years, accompanied by months of earthquakes.

The landscape we saw yesterday reminded me a little of the Scottish Highlands -- lots of rocky crags -- and a little of Alaska -- lots of tundra-like moss, not so many trees. But there weren't a lot of mountains, which I had always assumed were a prerequisite for volcanoes.

Iceland is situated on the Mid-Atlantic ridge, where the North American and Eurasion plates meet. But unlike the Ring of Fire in the Pacific, where the plates are pushing into each other and creating huge mountains along with the volcanoes and earthquakes, these two plates are actually pulling apart. There's a rift valley splitting the country on the diagonal, and in the valley itself (here at Thingvellir) there are huge faults and fissures in the earth.