In the early hours of the morning when it already felt like it had been light forever but was only like 530 I heard Colleen get up and I should have gotten up too but I was too cozy in my bag. She went on a run into town and around the harbor front then stopped at a store and bought some fresh caught salmon for dinner. She returned while I was outside the common area, charging my phone and assembling my breakfast. Ambiana and Jakobi are still asleep or at least still in the tent. Colleen walks up the hill to a bench and sits in the sun and reads her book while I hang next to the outlet and read the April edition of HARPERS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am appreciating these slow lazy mornings in Iceland. The campervan people were mostly all gone by the time I emerged from the tent at 800. To complete the Ten Day Ring Road Circuit and actually get out of the campervan and see stuff takes almost every hour of those 10 days. Those doing the circuit are up and out by 600 which is the majority but a couple of campervans are still parked in the campground and their occupants are making breakfast, brewing coffee, showering and smoking cigarettes in and around the common area.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Today is Drive-Back-Towards-Reykjavik Day! We haven’t yet decided where we will spend the night. VIK is a possibility or maybe stay at the campground in SKOGAR but that idea is not popular with Ambiana and Jakobi who have finally woken up and are in the bathroom and making their breakfasts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The last of the campervans have long gone by the time we pack up our tents and stuff all our stuff into the car. While awaiting the girls to wake up I took my binoculars and surveyed the mountains along the coast ranging my gaze up the grassy hillsides, following dirt roads and honing in on dwellings. The Ring Road was at the base of the mountains along the coast and I followed it East and saw it disappear into a tunnel beneath the mountain. I wanted to go East, through that tunnel but added it to the Next Time List.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Finally we were all packed and ready to go and we headed up the peninsula out of town retracing our way back past the wide glacial valleys, the escarpments and the fosses. Outside the car the day was bright and beautiful with blue skies and sun and a scattering of white clouds. Our first stop was another glacier lagoon, this one smaller than the other and the icebergs were larger and closer to the shore. Above the lagoon a massive glacier descended between black rocky ridges from the ice cap above accordioned with crevasses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another Glacier Lagoon<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
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We parked in the lot with a fair amount of other cars and a tour bus or two. There was a building hosting Tours of the Lagoon by Rubber Zodiac. Groups of what looked like 30 people in matching yellow life vests made their way down to the shore and out on the lagoon I watched another Zodiac full of yellow life jacketed groups zipping among the icebergs. I imagined that would be cool, to be out there in a boat, preferably a kayak. I wonder if I brought a kayak I would be allowed paddle out there?<\/p>\n\n\n
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The wind of the glacier whipping across the lagoon was chilly. All four of us made our way to the shore gazing out over the scene, checking out the chunks of ice large and small washed ashore. Out in the lagoon large pieces of ice filled the water while the glacier, spread out wide where it met the lagoon, thinned as my gaze rose up the ice-face marveling at the crevasses, reading in them movement; the glacial tale of its approach to the sea.<\/p>\n\n\n
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To the Black Sand Beach at VIK<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Then it was back in the car and the long drive to VIK. By now we knew we wanted to be West of VIK for the night and Colleen used this time to locate us a room for the night. We drove through VIK and this time took the turn off that took as to the black sand beach. This was the surprise of the day. I wasn’t expecting much and was blown away by the towering geometric basalt cliffs and caves that at the Eastern end of the beach.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Jakobi once again did not want to get out of the car but Colleen went back and dragged her down to the beach. Somethings can not go unseen. Ambiana and I walked into the caves, laid our hands on the wall, felt the pounding of the waves within them. The beach was carpeted with small smooth black stones and we filled our pockets with them. The caves reminded me of the one on the Kalalau Beach in Ka’uai filled with ancestral and elemental powers. People wandered the beach alongside us checking out the caves and the cliffs towering overhead, picking up stones, approaching the waves with the sea stacks just offshore and walking off down the long beach.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Being a tourist is a funny thing. Visiting a place probably only once, paying for food and accommodation, shopping and taking tours. When I am at a place as achingly beautiful as this beach I want to stay here, to experience this beach in all seasons and all weathers, to get to know the land and seascapes and begin to feel a part of them like the rock and the seal and the ice and the grass. That would be hard to do here with the number of people coming through but I am sure there are places that are more beautiful then this, places that are remote, that do not see the daily flow of visitors.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Making money from tourism is unethical to the land and the impacts upon it and all that live upon it; animal, mineral, vegetative and human. Most of our current economic system is unethical placing the profit of the few at the expense of everything else. A paradigm shift is needed in which we place the sustainability and optimization of your biosphere above EVERYTHING ELSE. A paradigm shift is driven by crisis and we are seeing an exponential increase in crisis since the pandemic and that does not even factor in Mass Shootings, which we seem to just accept as the cost of living and doing business. Think about that: our school children are regularly massacered in their schools so we can live in a consumer world that values money over peoples lives.<\/p>\n\n\n
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How to keep the tourists in their lane. This is hard to do on an island. In Hawai’i the locals are getting squeezed off their beaches. Camping and beach parking fees for tourist have risen and rightly so. Imagine a world without tourism. People still travel but without all the attractions and tours. Travel would be more like the migration of Canadian Geese that visit our ponds back in Worcester every spring. We don’t flock out to feed, house and entertain them. We admire them and they do their own thing. Campgrounds and grocery stores are the only thing a migratory tourist needs. <\/p>\n\n\n
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What do we really need? Air to breathe, food to eat, a place to shelter, meaningful purpose and work. Its that last one that is missing and that void is so big it can’t be filled by the capitalistic social-mass-media news sports celebrity political industrial military corporate entertainment complex which has been built to endlessly feed that bottomless hole and generate massive wealth for the 1%. <\/p>\n\n\n
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The pandemic showed we could stop that complex. That scared the elite so the murder of George Floyd was used to divide us yet again. Crisis unite us and we need to be ready to not be so easily divided when the next one comes. Take the money out of the system and the system disappears. We need to re-brand all humans as Gaians or Earthians or Terrans experiencing the diversity of our planet and working to optimize all her systems, functions and biomes as well as all of ours.<\/p>\n\n\n
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I am keenly aware in this cave that I am a tourist like all the rest on this beach and am thus part of the problem, swept along on the human tide of movement around the globe. Grocery stores and campgrounds for the most part but still a part of the tourist swarm visiting the stunning land and seascapes of Iceland and this black sand beach is surely one of them; the cliffs and caves a cathedral to the power of lava and the sea. As humans we must surely bow in the face of such divinity as exhibited on this beach. <\/p>\n\n\n
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The elemental powers that have sculpted these cliffs and caves and all the landmasses and oceans, the sky above and the whole planet are unfathomable compared with the powers we posses save one; our capacity for conscious thought. The elemental powers that created all this, have brought us forth to be self aware. In us the primordial elements has grown into the self awareness of all that they are. Separation as a Self Separate from Nature was a necessary step in that growth, thus the present and past history of our species as Man vs. Nature. But we are realizing one does not fight Nature, one lives with it and adapts because Nature does not adapt. Until Now!<\/p>\n\n\n
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As the new paradigm of Humans=Nature comes into consciousness so does the realization that we embody the capacity of Nature-To-Adapt. We recognize that we can shape Nature, that we can create the conditions that optimize the systems ad processes of Nature and create a mutually beneficial sustainable biosphere, ecosystem and culture for all that inhabit the Earth. I want to stand in this sacred cave and shout this to those on the beach but they would just think me mad if they thought anything at all and Jakobi would just think I was stoned. After all they are only words and it is action that is needed.<\/p>\n\n\n
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As I walk out of the cave and back up the beach toward the car park I sort through the stones in my pocket, keeping two. Ambiana has climbed the basalt columns making up the rock face and is standing atop one about 20 feet up looking out over the sea thinking perhaps of the beginning of her long planned trip around the world not so many months away. I call to her and hold up the camera and she does a graceful dance for the dancevideo. Colleen and Jakobi are visible off the beach at the top of the path heading toward the car. Ambiana scampers down and we walk together up and off the beach joining Colleen & Jakobi at the car.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Back in the car Colleen read off the description of a place she has found halfway between here and SELFOSS. It was the right distance ahead, we would arrive around 5pm and was only a few hours from GRANDAVIK where we wanted to spend the night before flying home on Friday. But we still had one stop to make before calling it a day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
SELJALANDSFOSS<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
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Past SKOGAR was the foss we passed on our way East. The one that had a path you could walk behind it. We zipped up the coast passing SKOGARFOSS, still flowing magnificently over the cliff, past the valley containing the hot spring pool and along the edge of the escarpment that down the coast at the place it turned inland to the North the walk-behind-foss awaited. <\/p>\n\n\n
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We had left the sun behind at the glacial lagoon, the landscape was snow covered till VIK where it was cloudy at the beach and now as we headed East it began to rain a slight drizzle that had turned to a sprinkling as we pulled into SELJALANDSFOSS and paid the parking fee joining the parade of people walking the path to and from the Foss. We paused a couple times on the path and made a couple dancevideos with the Foss in the background.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Behind the waterfall the path was closed where it continued out from behind the falls so here we paused looking and listening to the torrent of falling water before us, the cliff wall to our back amplifying and echoing the rush of falling H20. It was majestic to be so wet among such a fine display of the power and might of water, especially knowing the place we were staying up ahead had a sauna and a hot tub awaiting us.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Spending the Night in HVOLSOLLUR<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
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We arrived in HVOLSOLLUR around 1630 and found the Midgard Basecamp as our accommodation is called. It was in a industrial looking area which is basically the Icelandic design scheme. Low rectangular buildings made of metal with flat roofs. Colleen checked us in while we waited in the car and she soon returned and told us we had to come in and take the tour so we joined one other family also with two kids in the lobby where a young lady in all black; top skirt socks shoes with smart looking glasses and a blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail awaited us. <\/p>\n\n\n
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She welcomed us and gave us the lowdown on the check out time, the common area restaurant open til 2000, she pointed to where the common kitchen was down the hall along with restrooms. She then led us upstairs to where the rooms were and showed us the sauna and hot tub outdoors on a 2nd<\/sup> story deck. If you want something to drink in the hot tub go to the bar. No glass on the deck. She pointed out the two sets of restrooms which are just toilets. There are 3 sinks in a common area plus hair dryers and a niche for our towels which are in our rooms. The place looked new and freshly modern. Out on the deck the Icelandic Flag hung on the wall facing the hot tub.<\/p>\n\n\n
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The room was a double and a set of bunk beds. A perfect fit for a family of four of which we were. Ambiana & Jakobi claimed theri bunks Jakobi taking the top and we dropped our bags happy to be out of the car. <\/p>\n\n\n
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Colleen had bought salmon in HOFN this morning so she headed to the common kitchen downstairs to cook it while Ambiana and Jakobi set off to explore the place. I had a sit and checked my phone before checking in with Colleen and lending a hand if need be but as usual she has it all in hand and I took a gander about the place myself. <\/p>\n\n\n
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The downstairs for the most part is a large open space containing the front doors, check in, the bar and a common area. An edgy hostel hotel vibe lots of dark wood, stainless steel. Created by travelers for travelers offering travelers and families alike Adventure Tours and Accommodation.<\/p>\n\n\n
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The salmon was good and afterwards, before getting into the hot tub I sat in the barrel shaped sauna and relaxed my traveling body enjoying the heat blanketing my body. <\/p>\n\n\n
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I did not stay long wanting to join Colleen, Ambiana and Jakobi in the hot tub where we sat in the gray and snowy air; a spring snow, large snowflakes gently falling as we looked out over snow covered fields which melted away into misty clouds at the first hint of the rising hills. After two cold nights in the tents it was the height of luxury to be inside in a warm bed reading by lamplight before falling off to sleep, our last full day in Iceland upon the morrow. <\/p>\n\n\n
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