Spain - diving holiday

In September 2009 I went with the diving club from Ghent (Ocean Divers) to Estartit, Spain. This is the region of the Costa Brava. Just of the coast of Estartit, you have the Medes Isles, that are protected (marine national park). They are rather popular with belgian divers, some diving clubs make it their annual trip.

The deal was pretty sweet, combination of hotel and 5 days diving for some 400 euro. Not bad. And we had a nice group, lot's of fun.

But I didn't really start this holiday with a lot of energy. I was tired, most of all emotionally. Later I have realized that at least part of that fatigue was due to what I was eating. Not the fact that I am on a vegetarian diet, because that can actually be healthier than a 'standard' diet with meat and fish in it, but because I didn't pay a lot of attention to how much variation i put in my food. But apart from that I was emotionally burnt up. In 2008 I had been running like crazy, if you look at my overview of that year it was amazing: traveling a lot, both for work and private, buying a house, a re-breather (and trying to learn how to dive with it). And constantly teaching (which means you are very focused on your job). But the second half of 2009 was rather slow concerning teaching assignments and suddenly I was confronted with the fact that I had to find a new structure in my life. Ever since I lived alone I hadn't taken the time to built up my life for my own and kept busy with a lot of things. Just before we left to Spain I had a 2-day workshop called 'Self-Awareness' and that really opened my eyes that I had to start living my own life and not purely in function of external things or people.

So I was a bit edgy the first few days, but luckily that went better as time progressed.

The first day I used my re-breather (see picture above, which isn't my own picture, but taken by Serge Ego, thanks!), but the facilities at the diving centre weren't very great. A rebreather takes a lot of work, preparing, cleaning, checking, ... And you need some place to do this (and time to do it). So I decided to dive open circuit (i.e. just like everybody else with my tanks :-) ) the rest of the stay. And that was probably a good idea, since I was a lot more relax.

But at least I logged two more re-breather dives and under the supervision of very experienced divers I set a new personal depth record with my re-breather.

The weather was superb and we enjoyed our stay.

The underwater life at Estartit isn't the best I've ever seen, but still worth the visit (and you go there by car, so no flights and also you can take all your own equipment with you, which is worth a lot to experienced divers). Saw a lot of cod, those were huge and I personally enjoyed the little caves we explored as well as the wreck. For that dive i would have loved to have my re-breather.

Somewhere during the week, on Wednesday, we (Jan, Bruno and myself) skipped the dive in the afternoon, to go to Figueres, to visit the Dali museum. I had been there once before, years ago and then the crowd that was waiting to enter was too big to consider a visit. The museum itself is considered the largest surrealistic object in the world and it is something to behold and something you must visit.Later in the afternoon we went to Cadaqués, at the coast. This is a quiet, almost quaint little fishers village and a delight to visit. The road towards it is rather tricky, full concentration is required. But the village is worth it.

I also sampled the night life of Estartit a bit, which wasn't so magnificent but in the end, if you had a good time, that is all that counts :-)

The drive towards and back by car was actually rather nice. We crossed the whole of France and especially the southern half is really nice to behold.
On our way back we were pulled over by the police (actually customs) who probably found 3 men in a white van a bit suspicious. Especially since the third actually emerged from the back (where an self made bed was being used by us in turn to rest a bit).
The best bit was that they ask what all the equipment was and when they heard it was diving equipment asked whether there was any air in the tanks. I immediately started giving a complete overview of all my own tanks and their exact content: both in pressure and air mixture. Only when they left (with a friendly goodbye) did Bruno tell me that it's apparently forbidden by law in France to drive around with dive tanks that are pressurized.
My guess is that since I was so direct and honest in my response about the tanks that they concluded is really unaware that I just violated a whole bunch of French laws ;-)

Riederalp - the Glacier

Finally the day had come. Packed and ready, with a incredible amount of warm clothing we set off in the heat of august towards the elevator taking us to a high point from which we were to decend towards the glacier. The first part was okay and i was rather beginning to wonder why we had all these clothes with us. But as we stepped onto the glacier the temperature dropped spectacular. And by the time we came to a stop somewhere in the middle of the glacier, on one of the moraines, it was really cold. The Aletsch glacier has two moraines which consist of lots of rocks that are pushed forward by the individual glaciers that form the Aletsch (see further down as wel) and when they merge, the ice doesnt really mingle (since its not liquid), so the edges of the individual glaciers are still visible.
The guy trying to keep himself warm is actually one of our guides, and he's use to it!


It was an adventure to be walking over the ice with our ice shoes on. But it was not without risk. A few people fell down on the ice, which is rather sharp and scafed their hands and knees. Walking for hours over a gigantic white ice sheet starts to hypnotise you. It's almost as if you are no longer in this world. As if time doesn't really have any meaning.
We were rudly awakened from our dreams by the last steep climb towards the mountain hut were we spent the night.
The hut looks over the Aletsch glacier, which is very spectacular. Basically consists of three glaciers, joining together and continuing their journey as if three very slow rivers of ice join together.
As you can see above, the hut is supplied during the summer by helicopter.
In the picture below you can see the part of the glacier we had already walked the first day. Here you can see very clearly the moraines.
The next day, we started very early in the morning. After a nice descend via a ladder (which was rather steep), we started immediately.

What goes up, must come down. After the initial joy of reaching the highest point of the day, we realised we had a very long way down yet. In total we were to descend some 1400 meter.


And although the way down seemed smooth at first, it proved to be a real challenge, giving us the roughest terrain of the whole trip.
After hours of descending we entered the valley of Lötschental.


Everyone was happy to be there (the whole group was rather tired as well), although it took us the better part of the next hour to get to the rendez-vous point where the bus was going to pick us up to get back to Riederalp. Looking back it was rather impressive what we had accomplished that day!

But the cows couldn't care less:

Riederalp - Switzerland

The first week of August i went to Switzerland. For me it had been many years since i was in that beautiful country. Via a colleague, Lieve, i heard about this plan to do a 2-day glacier trekking at Riederalp (which is in the south of the country) and spend in total around a week in "Berghaus Toni". The glacier is no other than the Aletsch Glacier, the longest in Europe.
The story is that a friend of Lieve, Sven, had recently bought the hotel Toni and is planning to run it from now on. He has been going to the region of Riederalp ever since he was a child, he even speaks the swiss german dialect.

So i hooked up with two other people who were going to Riederalp and we started of together in a car. The plan was to join a family that was also on their way towards Switserland and we were to meet up somewhere in the Elzas. We ended up together on a campground in Kandersteg, only a few dozen kilometers from Riederalp.
The next day we took advantage of our position to do a very lovely walk around the Oeschinensee (with 'see' being the german word for lake, not sea).

It was so nice to see the impressive mountains again. It had been from when i was 17 that i last saw them (then i went skying, the last time i actually walked in the mountains of Switzerland was when i was 14 years old).


I was also thrilled to see the typical cows, with their enormous bells around their necks. I always feel a bit sad for them, it must be maddening to run around the whole day with that noisy thing around you.

It was a lovely day, sunny and the swiss national holiday. The forest around the lake provided us with some shelter from the sun and made for a lovely hike.

Once we arrived in Riederalp and settled in the hotel the fun began. It was a very lively group with very creative people among them (actors, musicians, ...), which means there is always someone around to entertain the group. The evenings were filled with songs and music, since we had a couple of very skilled guitar players in our midst (one of them only 11 years old!).

And a plan was unfolding to create a movie about our adventures in Riederalp. Did i mention already we had creative people in the group? Still haven't seen the end result though, looking forward to it.

In the picture below you can see on the left side the little town of Riederalp. As you can see Riederalp is situated on the mountain and can normally only be reached via one of the two elevators. There are no cars in Riederalp (with the exception of two electrical cars that are used for all kinds of things, amongst other a kind of taxi service for people who don't get around easily). Just imagine, if any construction works need to be done, they need to haul all the equipment up by elevator.


We scouted the surroundings with a little hike to the nerby Riederhorn (horn being the name for the mountain peaks).
There was one day of rain, but to be honest i didn't even mind too much. I spend it in good company playing some games and learned an entirely new one, called 'jungle speed'.
On sunday we went and watched the 'yodel mass', i kid you not :-)

The next day, we went on a beautifull walk through the mountains.
The path took us to a breathtaking bridge, that we needed to cross.
And it gave us our first clear sight of the glacier we were to climb within two days.I was really excited for the coming 2-day hike.

Iceland - the final chapter

Still dazed by the experience of the whale whatching, we set of towards Akureyri, the biggest city in the north and forth biggest city in the whole of Iceland (but only around 20.000 inhabitants). We basically only stopped there to get some late lunch which only found after touring half of the city. There were some festivities because of the national holiday of Iceland (17th of June).

Apparently the city is known for its botanical gardens but we didn't really care about it and drove further towards Sauðárkrókur where we stayed for the night. It was one of the finest guesthouses we had along our journey with a very nice living room and kitchen which we had more or less to ourselves. We took advantage of the nice setting to have a relaxing evening with a game of chess.

The next day (day 5 already) we set off, driving further east. In the mean time some red light had started to blink indicating that we needed to check the oil level. Well, we did, and we couldn't see anything wrong with it so we simply continued. Need I to remind you that neither of us has any idea about car mechanics, but we felt relatively okay.

We drove through the surprisingly green and fertile lands of the Húnavatnssýsla county.
We continued towards the Borgarfjörður district. This district is largely dominated by a big valley and again nice and luch to behold. The roads are pleasently winding through the countryside. We stopped at Deildartunguhver hot spring. It doesn't look very special but the hote water is tunneled over towards Borgarnes and even Akranes (34 and 64 kilometers away) where it provides all the hot water and a lot of the heating.

Still following the valley we arrived at a historical site called Reykholt. There there is since recent years a big museum and site dedicated to Snorri Sturluson. Apart from having a very funny name it is one of Iceland most famous writers and especially there best known historian.
There was a interesting museum there and although the girl that greated us was very cute, we didn't really feel like running around a museum for a few hours.Instead we continued following the valley and river until we came to the Barnafossar and Hraunfossar waterfalls. These are very beautifull and although we had seen many warfall (fos) before in Iceland, these really appealed, but difficult to describe and as they say: 'a picture says more than a thousand words' (yeah i know, a strange thing to hear me say)
Instead of turning around here, i had one more thing to visit here, something i had been looking forward to for a while. Starting to leave the least signs of civilisation and the last parts of paved road (although the policy of our car rental said clearly we had to stay on paved road with our 2x4 car), we found the lava fields. We had seen these rugged landscapes before, but this time there were lava tubes in these fields that you could actually visit.
Again you could see the naturally formed basalt stones that look like they are created by humans, this time in such a vast amount that the church floor (see before) looks pathetic.Luckely we had a flash light, because the cave was very dark, which made it a bit of a challenge to take pictures. Above you see the entrance to the lava tube i took, as you might be able to see it goes downwards rather steeply. I didn't just wanted to take pictures from the rock of the cave but especially of the beautiful stalagmites made entirly of ice. The temperature in the cave was rather chilly which is why the stalagmites survived even in June.
This last one is really dark, taken from inside the cave where i could still see some daylight (i went just beyond the point where i had some idea of where the exit was and then i turned around since i was by myself and with only one flashlight, i had no redundancy :-) ).
We stayed overnight at the town of Borgarnes, which is located nicely next to a great lake. The hostel was outside of the town, and after a nice swim in the Borgarnes swimming pool we enjoyed our dinner at the guesthouse (payed for since we had to be in the city center but they were booked out due to a visiting motorcycle group).

The next day we had a very lovely drive towards Reykjavik (going through an impressive tunnel they created as a shortcut). We stopped by the rental company to let them have a look at the flashing light and the mechanic put 2 liter of oil in our car (it was apparently a good idea to make the pit stop).
After that there was one more thing to do: The Blue Lagoon. By far the most visited attraction in Iceland. It is a big geothermal pool, that was blue one day, but due to the huge amounts of white clay that are being used by visitors (because i has a kind of natural peeling effect and is suppose to be good for your skin), the water in the actual pool has turned white. This picture was taken outside the actual pool area and here you can still see the blue color.

The pool itself is big, put very shallow, so don't be mistaken by this picture, people generally are sitting down.

The Blue Lagoon is a very fancy infrastructure, trying to lure a more high end public (than what the hell was i doing there, i can hear you think). Including groups who basically are touring Europe and take in Iceland in one day (which means they quickly tour Reykjavik and swim in the Blue Lagoon), like the group of Japaneese girls we met. In the picture below you also so how the edges of the pool are painted white because of the clay.

By then it was time to head back for the capital where we turned in the car. Then we went for the centre again and had a lovely diner and went to sleep early, the next day we had a plain to catch very early in the morning. The trip back was rather eventless, except that because of poor planning i had to be back in time because i still had my diving tanks to fill because i was scheduled to go on the North Sea the next day. But all ended well ;-)

All in all it was a very filled trip. Although i only spent one week in Iceland (to visit, the other week was purely for work), i really saw a lot, got a good impression and the trip was filled with first timers (whales, lava tubes, geysers, ...)