I worked on the Iceland photos this weekend pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. I have about 90 ready for posting (of an estimated 400-500). I have pretty much decided to put them in a web album. I'll send out a link after I have all of the photos in the album. Quite a few people have been asking about the Iceland photos who would just want to view them all at once, without being bothered by text or scrolling through a blog. Also... 500 photos represents about a year's worth of blog-fodder. Much as I loved Iceland, I'm sure I'll want to post photos of something else this year! What I will be doing is posting the best photos to the blog, as well as those that have interesting stories behind them.

Here's the first.

This is a photo of Snaefellsjokull glacier (jokull means glacier in Icelandic). It was taken on the fourth day of our vacation. At this point in the trip, I was very stressed out about our slow progress. I had been reading about Iceland on the internet and in our travel handbook. I had seen a few 2-week itineraries created by other people which basically involved touring the Golden Circle (Thingvillir, Geysir and Gulfoss) on the first afternoon, then taking in the Snaefellsjokull glacier/peninsula on the second day. Well... We received our rental jeep very late on the second day, then got cranky, hungry and lost wandering around Thingvillir... never mind Geysir and Gulfoss! On the second day, we got sidetracked hiking up a mountain barely 30 minutes outside of Reykjavik... we never even saw the Snaefellsjokull glacier, let alone the whole peninsula! I had identified things that I wanted to see throughout the island, and already we were so far behind in our itinerary. It was at this point we decided we were going to have to skip the Westfjords!

Iceland is pretty much taken over by tourists during the high season. If you're researching a trip there, you'll read about all of these things that you must see (Blue Lagoon, Golden Circle, etc). To be honest, my favorite parts of the trip (as a photographer and as a curious traveller) were those that fell off the beaten path a bit... those that we stumbled on accidentally. Yes... the highly publicized and well-toured waterfalls are amazing... but some of the waterfalls we found beside remote gravel roads were equally spectacular... and I could play around with my camera as much as I wanted to without worrying about other tourists. Yes... the geysir is worth seeing... but photographing the geysir surrounded by 50 tourists and a rope fence reminded me of photographing a lion in a zoo cage - not very exciting and frankly kind of sad.

Iceland has some beautiful paved highways. They have secondary highways which are well-maintained gravel roads, as well as rougher roads into the interior, designated "F-roads". The F-roads only open in mid-summer, once all of the melting is finished. In order to travel on F-roads, a 4X4 is required. We tried to rent one and were given a Toyota RAV 4 - as one of my coworkers put it, the soccer mom's 4X4. We took a little dirt and gravel road to Snaefellsjokull. At the road's origin from the highway, there was a sign saying, "Impassable". Being used to wimpy Canadian road signage, we scoffed at this and proceeded to take the impassable road. We hadn't yet learned that Icelanders don't mess around with road signs. If they say a bend in the road should be taken at 30km/h, that is probably a good suggestion. If they say a road is impassable, you might, for example, find yourself driving right up to a glacier - sheer snow and ice with no traversable path. This is what happened to us.

Looking through my photos, I must have been having some sort of brain malfunction when I chose my camera settings to photograph the glacier. Nonetheless, the light was good enough that day to make up for my ineptness. The Snaefellsjokull photos are among the best I've taken so far. Look forward to seeing more when I get the web album up.