I
grew up in a city, I live in a city and when I vacation, I usually head for a
city. I don't camp out in tents, unless they're the air-conditioned, carpeted
Bedouin variety, and I don't believe in testing my physical limits through bungy-jumps
and dives off of high cliffs. I am fully convinced that I get all the exercise
I need dancing past sunrise at a club in Ibiza. Oh, and I don't like cold weather.
Imagine my uncertainty
when I found myself going to Iceland for two months in the middle of winter. Sure,
there are cities on Iceland, and there are more than enough nightclubs to keep
a visitor entertained for a couple of months, but Iceland is not about cities
and clubs. It is all about nature.
Most
visitors to Iceland will agree: the most lasting memory of Iceland is not the
mob scene at Nelly's on a Friday night, or even the superb fish at Einar Ben restaurant.
The most lasting impression of Iceland is the nature.
Never
have I seen a landscape like that. The barren land, ravaged by volcanic explosions
and massive glaciers, looks like a moon landscape. It comes as no surprise that
before they took off for the moon, NASA's Apollo 11 team practiced on the Icelandic
tundra. It looks like the moon, and when you get lost on one of those wide-open
plains, it feels just as remote.
Miles
and miles of…nothing
There
is a joke in Iceland: if you get lost in the woods in Iceland - stand up. Not
a particularly funny joke until you get out on the wide-open lava fields and realize
there is no vegetation higher than your kneecaps in sight. Then you start laughing,
but not a hearty laugh, more an insecure, I-am-a-very-little-person-in-a-very-big-world
kind of laugh.
There
used to be trees on Iceland. When the first settlers arrived from Norway in the
ninth century, the island was covered with birch trees. Trying to keep warm, the
settlers used the trees to heat their wooden houses. Excessive cropping, combined
with overgrazing, has caused the land to erode and has left it virtually barren.
| Every
country has its sore spot, a topic you're better off not bringing up at a cocktail
party. Don't talk to Germans about past treatment of religious minorities or to
the French about the invasion of American pop culture. In Iceland, it's the weather. |
Nowadays, heating
is no problem. The capital city of Reykjavik, and much of Iceland, is heated using
geothermal energy from the country's many hot springs. The hot water in Reykjavik
is natural hot water from a nearby spring. Clean and cheap, geothermal energy
lacks all the environmental downsides of traditional energy sources. Now if they
could only do something about that sulfurous smell. (CONTINUE...)
