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I have seen so much it feels like I have packed a whole month into just six days. Iceland is an extraordinary place, where the pubs start getting busy at 2am, the sun sets at half midnight and rises half an hour later, and the smells stick in your mind just as much as the sights. With unlimited supplies of hot natural spring water, your morning shower smells of egg mayonnaise, being drawn straight out of the ground and pumped through your taps.

It is a country dominated by high peaks and wide flat stretches of lava field, powerful waterfalls and creaking glaciers. Perhaps the most impressive sight, though, is the eruption of a geysir, which starts out as a beautiful aquamarine bubble, almost as though it is taking a deep breath, and then moments later shoots scalding water fifty, sixty, seventy feet in the air.

The first picture below shows the hot bubble, while the second shows the actual eruption not quite at its peak. In the second picture you can clearly see people standing to the left of the eruption, giving an indication of how high the water climbs.

Paul got rather too close to one of these eruptions and spent the next hour sitting in wet clothes.

One of the most surprising things is how close you can get to nature in Iceland. Not just in terms of a wander across a lava field or black ash beach, but right behind waterfalls that drop a full 50 feet, or out onto wet and slippery peninsulas. This is particularly the case at Gulfoss, a Niagra-like series of falls that you find on every postcard stand across the country. In the picture below a rocky outcrop extends into the flow from the left. The small dots on top of it are people. Ten minutes later we, too, were one of those people. The noise was extraordinary and you had to shout to make yourself heard.

Your first day driving around Iceland you spend most of your time pointing out to whoever you are with every cloud of steam rising from the side of the road. As soon as you realise that you are pretty much guaranteed to see one every ten minutes you tend to stop, but that doesn’t detract from the extraordinary volcanic landscape where bubbling pools of boiling mud and streams that give off great puffs of steam as they cut their way across cold ground are humdrum, everyday phenomena.

As I always do when I travel, I kept a record of what we saw and did, but putting Iceland into words is not easy. No adjective is wide enough to explain the scope of the lava fields, deep enough to describe the fast-flowing rivers or grand enough to picture the waterfalls.

I’ll certainly be going back. Of that, I have no doubt.

Meanwhile, a bin on a street in Reykjavik:

We didn’t get back until very late last night so although I set the alarm for half nine this morning I wasn’t up until after ten, for a day of washing and drying clothes, reading and replying to email, and planning for this evening’s show. Did a little cropping and colour balancing on eight of the 227 photos I took last week and uploaded them to Photobox to be printed. I’m eager to see how they come out.

The weather is fantastic, which has kind of thrown my body thermostat off kilter. I went out this evening dressed as though I was half way up an Icelandic mountain even though the sun was shining and the air inside my car was stifling. That should have been enough of a hint but I stupidly kept my thick winter coat on all the way to ITN and arrived hot and bothered.

It was all worth the effort, though, as it was a fun show. Our opening chats always flow better after one or other of us has been away. Andrew came in to do the news for the first time in an age, and Steve’s challenge was chatty and laid back.

We had the telly on in the corner of the studio watching the mens diving at the Commonwealth Games. I’m not a sports fan, but I did get an invite to go up and see some of the events and I’d have liked to have gone - it probably won’t happen in the UK again for a very long time.

Oh, well. The alternative - a holiday - is far more fun.

My cable connection seems to have gone AWOL in my absence, plunging me back into the hell that is dial-up Internet connection. Things are crawling along and it makes me realise how fast my cable is, even though I seem to spend half my time complaining about how lousy it is.

Checking my server logs this evening, though, I see that 1.1% of all traffic to my site comes from servers owned by Essex Police…

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 25th, 2002 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.