Common Sense and Whiskey

Volcanism. All Over.

Nearly eight minutes of video of volcanic activity on Mt Merapi, Java:

And a note that a new volcano is rumbling in Iceland. Meet Grimsvotn.

Eyjafjallajokull's on Summer Vacation, Too.

This is not the famous disruptor of air traffic, Eyjafjallajokull. But it is a volcano in Iceland. (It's a photo taken from a small plane on a flight from Reykjavik to Heimaey Island in 1991.)

It's almost time to leave for our cabin in Finland. We leave this weekend, which got me wondering, after our last trip was completely rearranged by volcanism, how Eyjafjallajokull's doing lately.

Timely of James Burton to write Whatever happened to ... Iceland's volcanic ash in the Independent yesterday. And the news is good.

Writes Burton, "...not only has Eyjafjallajokull calmed down, but also Ketla's 'imminent' eruption may not take place for another 100 years."

Let's just maintain the status quo for one more week.

And may I just note in passing that flying off to the east is the wrong way to get this experience. But I sure have made a note of it.

More photos from Iceland here at EarthPhotos.com.

Iceland Volcanism

All this Icelandic volcanism has prompted me to go find a photo I took on a trip to Iceland in 1991.

First, a digression: I'm positive it was 1991 because, as sometimes seems to happen, our plans were changed a little bit by world events. We spent a good deal of our time in Iceland watching the U.S. ("This will not stand") invasion of Iraq in Gulf War I, which began with an aerial bombardment on 17 January 1991.

O.J. Simpson interrupted an afternoon of our Vancouver, B.C. vacation with his slow speed chase on 17 June, 1994. Hafez Assad grabbed a little of our time in Hanoi on 10 June, 2000, as we watched reports of his death. And on 9/11 we found ourselves about to board a long train from Buryatia, Russia, for Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Sure enough, first thing on our first (and maybe only) of three days in Mongolia, we canceled everything, ordered up food and watched CNN all day.

Meanwhile, back in 1991 in Iceland, I'm not sure why, but rather than staying in downtown Reykjavik, we chose the Hotel Loftleidir, smack on the runway for Reykjavik's small domestic airport. This photo from the room shows what I mean by smack on the runway. You can see a small plane right in the center of the photo:

So, why not - we chartered a very small Cessna for a flight over to Heimaey, the only populated island in the Westman (Vestmannaeyjar) archipelago off southern Iceland, and en route we were thrilled to witness this actual, honest-to-goodness awesome (in the real sense of the word) volcanic activity:

(Photos from the Iceland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. There are more showing geothermal activity, and a few aerial shots from over Reykjavik there, too.)

Eyjafjallajokull

Definitive photo coverage.

Arctic Travel Resources

Looking into possibilities for some Arctic travel this summer. Here's the early stages of an expanding reading list:

- Who Owns the Arctic?: Understanding Sovereignty Disputes in the North by Michael Byers

- After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic by Alun Anderson

- Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica by Sarah Wheeler

Some web resources:

- Svalbard Tourism - Cruise Handbook for Svalbard - Longyearbyen (capital of Svalbard) airport information - Tromso, Norway flight information - Wideroe Norwegian airline - Faroe Islands photography - Faroe Islands transportation - The Smyril ferry line - Arctic Small Ship Cruises

And related:

- Alaska bear viewing - The Northwest Passage (1, 2, 3) - Canadian polar bear tours - more here, including the aurora forecaster.

Prior to our August 2010 visit, our trips to the region have included Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The links are to their galleries at EarthPhotos.com.

McDonald's Leaves Iceland, No One's Day Ruined.

To know a people, know their food. In a foreign land, we always try to make it to a local grocery or market, just to see what's different there. When you're on holiday, one of the great pleasures is to sample the local cuisine.

The little deep-fried scorpions on our first trip to Beijing were cute and crunchy. Finnish moose is hearty, warming and delicious. The crocodile tail in Cape Town was leathery and tough and caused intestinal revolt later on, but hey, when in South Africa....

We went for the betel nut high on the banks of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea:

They offered a chew of betel nut. An amused audience watched us split ‘em open and pop the nuts into our mouths. You chew; that generates saliva, and you spit the juice through your teeth while keeping the meat. It was a technique I didn’t master.

The juice is white. You dip a couple-inch piece of mustard stalk into “lime,” pounded from mussel shell, and chomp it. It turns the juice bright red. Chew, spit, chew. It’s a little bitter and it gets your heart moving a bit, a little blood rushes to your head, everything’s a notch more intense, and then it fades.

The larvae-in-a-branch in Kyuak Tan village, Burma, was a bug too far, though:

You could buy branches too, inside of which some God-forsaken larvae nestled. Yep, you bought the branch, plucked the thing out and popped it in your mouth. Tasted like butter, Kyaw said, except crunchy. This was more of a Chinese practice than a Burmese one, he assured us, and he'd only tried it once. My God, these people were eating worms out of trees!!!

With this for comparison, let us not lament the closing of the three McDonald's in Iceland. You can manage until you get back home. For those who must, I was going to suggest the Hard Rock Cafe Reykjavik, but whoops, looks like that's gone, too. In the spirit of the region, enjoy some fine imported smoked Scandinavian reindeer instead.

(Photo: Making sago paste in Papua New Guinea. Visit the Food Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Finding Trolls in the Surf

"Icelandic elves, for example, can have long, spindly legs, big ears, or crazy hair but they don’t wear pointed hats or shoes. Such garb is found on an Icelandic dwarf, perhaps, but he could just as well be wearing a long cloak or a beard." - from GoNomad.com

Because the summer is so short, and the days so long, people all across Scandinavia are emerging from hibernation about now, and will live hard and furious for the next several months.

But it's mighty cold in winter. If the weather's brutal outside, you have plenty of time indoors to dwell inside your head. Which may account for the persistent Icelandic belief in fairies, elves and dwarfs. On the other hand, This may be another explanation.

(Photo from the Iceland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Iceland: Americans Can Say 'At Least We Didn't Do THAT!'

Glitnir. Kaupthing. Landsbanki: The unholy trinity of failed banking in Iceland.

In an article called Wall Street on the Tundra in the current Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis is both disrespectful toward individual Icelanders and critical of Iceland's entire financial structure. He brings some remarkable statistics.

On the way up: From 2003 to 2007 "the Icelandic stock market multiplied by nine times. Reykjavík real-estate prices tripled. By 2006 the average Icelandic family was three times as wealthy as it had been in 2003...."

And on the way down: When the three banks collapsed last October, "Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child.... In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P."

See The Iceland Weather Report for an ongoing chronicle of the aftermath.

You can buy about 114 Icelandic krona for a dollar today, up from 84 in September. Icelandair will fly you between Boston and Keflavik over the July 4th weekend this summer for about $566 R/T.

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com. See more photos in the Iceland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)