Iceland: Emstrur & Thorsmork

I didn't quite understand the Emstrur landscape. Some of it looked like the surface of the moon, just lava rubble and craggy cliffs; some of it was gouged-out canyons and mossy mountains; a great deal of it was just plain desert, straight-up black sand dunes complete with what looked like beach grass. We were lucky we didn't encounter a sandstorm, which are common there. Don took all of the photos on this page.

Leaving the desert and entering a hilly valley 

 Our first bug! (besides gnats)

We found a good spot for bouldering 

This is the moon

The next day took us through Thorsmork -- or, more appropriately, Þórsmörk, named after the Norse god, Thor. It was the end of the journey: a grassy, birchwood forest, an alluvial plain, the Ejafjallajokull glacier (EYE-ya-fee-YA-la-YO-kudd'l -- the one whose snow-submerged volcano exploded last April). Don and I relaxed and took showers and found striped river rocks and made breakfast burritos with all of our leftover food. The bus ride back was dreamlike and all too familiar, making the trip seem as if it had never happened.

 A view of the Mýrdalsjökull glacier

It was actually very refreshing to see trees and shrubs -- they softened the landscape dramatically! 

The campsite at sunset 

The springtime snowmelt sometimes floods this valley, making it a giant riverbed

Seljalandsfoss 

Behind the waterfall

As if all this weren't enough, our last night in Iceland was marked by the presence of none other than the Aurora Borealis. I can only describe it using drug words and techie-terms: neon, flowing, amorphous, ethereal, ephemeral. I can't explain how a part of a visual image can move and disappear without you noticing, but somehow the Northern Lights achieved this. You would concentrate on one spot, and then suddenly -- but not suddenly, because it was all moving and shifting slowly -- it was gone. Like someone creeping slowly out of a room, inch by inch. After a few minutes of staring, I ran outside to take some pictures, but by the time I got there, it was gone.

The below video gives a pretty good impression of what we saw, except ours was a brighter green and more concentrated.

I'm definitely going back.