Iceland - whale watching

There we go again, we continue circling the island.

Day 4: Whale Watching day!!

An extra day especially to go out with a rebuilt fishersboat to go 'hunting' for whales, not to kill them as they did a lot in the past, but to observer them. We set of in the morning going to the end of the bay in the direction of the open sea. The area is very rich in krillwhich is the reason that there are so many whales around, question of course was, are we going to see any?

We immediately took position at the highest point on the boat, and i found myself next to a girl (who's name was something like Fyrerune, which apparently meant something like 'the sign of God' or something along those lines) who works for the whale museum of Husavik. There is some kind of deal between the museum and the people operating the whale spotting boats, and on almost each trip there is someone from the museum to take notes and photographe the whales.

In case you are wondering, yes it was cold up there!

They try to identify as many of them as possible, among others to see whether they are coming back to this bay. This is important since it shows that krill population is still thriving.

It also gave us a direct access to a lot of information on the whales.

But which ones? We didn't see any. We spent at least an hour on the calm water (the few puffins we saw where cute but that was already a long time ago).

Seems a bit wierd behavior for a bird? Yeah, the little guys really are great flyers, they skim over the water but they are good divers and that makes them okay in my book!

And just when we thought we were going to be in that 1,75% of the times that there is nothing to see on the trip (and therefore we were going to get another free trip), it started. First there were rumors, entusiastic people from the company that told us there was a blow to be seen at the horizon: yeah sure, they are probably saying that so we can't ask for another free trip. But then, behold: we saw it, far away still but we could see (especially through the lens of my camera) the back of a Blue Whale, the biggest animal on the planet. The idea that i was looking at this magnificent creature, that can reach a length of 30 meters and can weigh upto 200 tonnes, gave me a very excited feeling.

From that moment on it started, we got reports from everywhere: first the people on watch were shouting instruction to the ever more enthustiastic tourists, they gave us the directions by using the clock reference system (i.e. if the whale was straight ahead it's at twelve o'clock, behind us at six o'clock, etc...)

Afther a while they couldn't keep up anymore and at a certain time they actually called out: they are everywhere :-)

We saw a lot of blue whales, mostly at a respectful distance and then a whole bunch of humpback whales.

Above you can see a humpback, through the water you clearly see his right front fin, which is absolutely huge.And in this one you can see also the two blowholes on its back.

The humpbacks came a lot closer and gave us a nice show, with many fluke fins, the absolute view i wanted to see in my life.
This was already nice but this was wat i had always dreamed of seeing:
'V' for Victory:
This one isn't bad either: And to close it all of: a mother with calf just next to the boat, everyone went wild ;-)

I was taking pictures like crazy, luckely i emptied my compact flash card (2GB) the day before. Suddenly i noticed that Fyrerune (or something like that) hadn't taken any pictures for a while and was basically looking at here camera in stead. When i asked she said her camera appeared not to be working anymore and there was this strange message. It read 'CF Full', which i explained to her meant her memory was full so no more pictures.

I suggested that, also since i had a zoom lens with a better focal length, i would let her copy my pictures. See it as my contribution to science :-)

She was delighted and we went with her to the museum, where they all started looking at my pictures. One guy started looking and when he saw one of the first of the blue whales (and you could just see the back) he simply stated 'oh yeah, saw that one last week'. Apparently they all have a unique pattern of blue and grey on their back, but still, amazing that he could identify them on the spot.

We were allowed free entrance to the museum and it was worth a visit. Have a look at their website: http://www.whalemuseum.is/museum/

Afterwards i started chatting with two trainees who almost finished their intern (one girl from Italy and one girl from the States). Although they were cute girls, Tony reminded me that we needed to move on if we where to arrive at our destination of the day in time. ;-)

One more grand finale (if you wonder whether it's the same: just check the patern of white on the tail to compare the humpbacks):

Iceland - Part 2

A rather short entry this time, only one day out of the trip in Iceland, but you will agree that it was a full day, what plenty of diversity.

Day 3: The next morning we started of from Höfn, and took the Almannaskard tunnel to Lónsöræfi, which is a mountainous area ringed by extinct volcanoes and traversed by glacial rivers.
We did a lot of driving that day, but it took us through rough and beautifull landscapes. Some of the mountains seem to plunge directly into the sea. The area of the East Fjords, is very sparsely inhabited, some of the fjords are now deserted and each time you round a corner it's as if you enter a different world. In the picture above you can see wildflowers clinging on to the steep cliffs.
We stopped at a small town called Djúpivogur for a light meal.

We took a short cut: instead of proceeding along the coast we drove across Öxi pass (road 939), a steep and spectacular route. The scenery was absolutely stunning. You had the feeling you were alone on the planet, so desolate.
Once out of the mountain pass we followed a green valley up until the town of Egilsstaðir. While driving through the valley we saw a small herd of moose!
From Egilsstaðir we travelled across the highland desert plateau towards Lake Mývatn. That desert landscape is very daunting but there were few places to really stop and take a picture. Several times Tony was luckely engrossed in his literature (travel guide) so that he didn't see how narrow the road was and how deep the drop on both sides ;-)
The next pictures only gives you an idea:


We made a stop at the Námaskarð pass where boiling mud pools and flashing colours of the pass merge with lava and ash from the Krafla volcanic system. The colours are out of this world, the sulfuric smell of the mud pools also :-)

The Lake Mývatn area is known world wide for the abundance of birdlife and its exceptionally many breeding duck species, but to be honest we lacked the time to actually go and explore the surroundings of the lake area. We did visit the Nature Baths at Mývatn our first geothermal pool in Iceland. There are a few spots in the pool where new, warm water comes into the pool and to be honest, i could stay close to those spots for a long time, i was too hot.

We continued on our way towards the lovely town of Húsavík town.


From here we were to take a whale watching trip the next day!

Iceland

Wow! It has been a while since i took the time to post something. Why is that? I don't know for sure.

Didn't I go anywhere all that time, no of course i did : that would have been strange! :-)

Really worth mentioning was my New Years Eve in the Netherlands (hardly abroad, i agree, but still), which is spent with some good friends in a little house at the coast. At midnight we went to the beach and celebrated the coming of 2009 (see picture below). Personally i was curious what the year would bring.

I was hoping a little bit less travelling. Not that i started to dislike it, but i felt i was really hard to built up some kind of a life if you are never at home. In the mean time i had settled into my new house (i moved end of november), a small house that i bought by myself. And one of my plans for 2009 is to make it from a house into a home.

Up until now i went twice to Greece for my job. Both were nice trips and i enjoyed seeing my friend Mary again, who showed me parts of Athens.

The second time was an internal training, which was a very nice group.On the 7th of June, the day we had elections in Belgium (both regional and european), i was flying of to Iceland. A country that i was longing to see for a long time. I did vote and then rushed back to my house where a taxi brought me to the train station of Ghent where i boarded the train towards Schiphol Airport, near Amsterdam. In Antwerp i changed trains and then i was ona direct connection or so i guessed. Between Antwerp and Roosendaal, it was announced the train would go any further. I alerted a few japanese travellers who didn't understand the announcements and went on a search for the correct train. This one went to Den Bosh and i met there a very nice guy, originally from Morroco and living and working in the States, called Adil. We had some very nice conversations on varied topics and before we knew (and after ch anging trains yet another time) i was in the airport where i was on time for my plane.

The first week i was teaching for Siminn, the local incumbent telecom operator, in Reykjavic. The group was nice, they were the more social icelandic people i was going to meet. I don't complain, but icelandic people are not the warmest i have ever met. They are polite that is true, but that's about it. Reykjavic is a very nice town. It is rather small for a capital (around 100.000 inhabitants out of 300.000 in total in Iceland). And i enjoyed strolling around in the evening (it didn't get dark the whole time i was there, so i did have to worry about getting back to my hotel on time).

The picture above shows the darkest it got, seen from my hotel room.

When walking from my hotel to the city center i came across this lovely lake, with some wildlife. :-)

After my course, i spent the saturday in cristal clear water of 4 degrees celcius. Why, because of the amazing visibility but also because it is in Thingvellir, where you have the tectonic plates of Europe and North-America joining (Iceland pretty much evolved from the magma coming from underneath the plates while the continents are being pushed further apart each year (by a few centimeters). And to be honest, I just had to do it:
More pictures of the dive on my facebook account.

A colleague of mine, Tony, came along for the next part of the trip (he had even more trouble getting there and arrived somewhere around midnight).
The idea was to circle the country in 6 days, following the N1 (National 1), a round that goes around the whole of the island.

Day 1: Starting of the day by picking up the car (we were lucky to get a free upgrade) and drive towards Thingvellir, which i had seen the day before, this time to really visit the place itself. Apart from a geological important place, it is also the setting of the first 'parliament' of Iceland, called the Althingi, from around 930 where the law speakers receited the law to all the representatives and issues of justice were discussed. Important historical decisions where taken here, like the adaptation of chirstianity in the year 1000.
And it is also a very beautiful place to see:
With some bad tempered geese:
As I already knew from my dives there, the water is cristal clear, people also have the tendency to throw money into it:
Iceland had in those time a clan like structure (reminded me a bit of Schotlands history). And i bought a book on the Iceland sagas to learn more about it (to be honest i still have to read it).

After that we drove to the Great Geysir area. These are the first geysers that i ever saw. They have their own 'Old Faithfull', called Strokkur, which blows every few minutes.
Even in this hotpot (with boiling water) people where throwing money:
From there we went to Gullfoss, one of Icelands most beautiful and certainly the most impressive waterfall (the word 'foss' by the way is icelandic for 'waterfall'). Through the beautiful landscape it was a nice drive back to the N1 which we continued up until Hella, where we stayed the night. It was a very small place with absolutely nothing to do even finding something to eat passed 9pm was impossible.

Day 2: We continued to the east heading for the Eyjafjöll district and stopped at the waterfalls Seljalandsfoss and Skogafoss.

At Seljalandsfoss we walked behind the waterfall, which was a nice experience.
At Skogafoss i want to see how close i could get. The waterfall is pretty big and an enormous amount of water sprays from it.
I was nicely tucked into my raincoat but still got soaked to the bone (and the water was pretty cold). Then i wanted to see the waterfall from above. There is a little trail going all the way up, but if you continue just a bit further you go back down towards the actual ridge of the waterfall. The view there was stunning, impressive and a little bit frighting, since i was standing on a patch of dirt and grass of which I wasn't sure i was going to hold me, luckely it did: you have to spice up your life from time to time ;-) And that gives you a picture of the waterfall from a perspective that few people take:
And since i was in an adventurous mood, i went a bit offroad with the car towards the Solheimajökull ('jökull' stands for 'glacier'), my very first glacier ever (but not my last, see some of my next entries ;-) ). I went up the glacier for only a few hunderd meters, since it is too dangerous without a guide to do so, there can be cracks in the ice that aren't always easy to spot.

The driving was nice and we went all the way to Dyrholaey, which is a natural reserve famous for the great number of seabirds nesting there. Unfortunately the road to the actual colonies was closed due to the breeding season so we enjoy a short walk around the curious formation just next to it.
Closeby there is the little village of Vik, where we had a little rest (ate some soup) and get some gass (and bumped to back of the car into a little wall; honestly i didn't see it!).

The next part was magnificient, driving across a the Myrdalssandur floodplains and the seamingly endless lavafield or Eldhraun, apparently the biggist lavafield to have flown on Earth in historical time.


We stopped at Klaustur to see the Church Floor, which consists of small basalt colums that together form a kind of naturally created floor, very curious.
But to be completely honest i was more taken in by the cute sheep that where running aruond there :-)
Again the road was spectacular: vast tracks of black sandy desert washed down by numerous glacial rivers.
We stopped shortly at the Skaftafell National Park but unfortunately there was no time for a descent walk so we had coffee and some cake instead.

And there was more to be seen: Jökulsarlon, the glacial lagoon where icebergs, sculpted by the elements are broken of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier.


After that we drove all the way to Höfn, where we had a lovely diner and enjoyed a good night sleep after a very long day.