Not only is my mother-in-law an avid bird-watcher, but she is also a serious stamp collector. She brought stamps along to trade, and at the farm house at which we were staying, she was given a whole amazing pile.
Groovy canyon.
We stopped at this one place, one of the rare instances of where someone was killed due to volcanic activity. Lava covered a farm here, and out of respect for the fellow who died, anyone who comes is asked to build a cairn on the site. The transportation authority actually hauls in rocks so visitors will have building supplies, but when we arrived, all of the rocks were already piled up. Ariel and Ivo (nice young Dutch man from a nice family traveling in our group) built a lovely pile.
Next we stopped in the town of Vik. Vik lies in a small valley while the church sits on a high hill above the town. If the nearby volcano erupts, Vik will be flooded, so all of the townsfolk are regularly drilled to get to the church.
All over Iceland we would see patches of a red looking grass. It isn't a grass at all, but a low little plant with these tiny red buds all over.
So, next we stopped at this pebble beach with a cliff of vast basalt columns. Near the cliffs, everyone was taking about a million pictures, and when I looked up, I could see lots of puffins flying in to their little burrows high up. I took probably 100 photos, all of them miserable. We all did.
Then, we got back on the bus, went to the other side of the bay (seen 5 photos up), and Gyða mentions that we might want to head up the left trail to see some more puffins. She wasn't kidding. We stood about 8 feet from the puffins and the entrance to their little underground dens. Tracey about peed on herself, and we all fell over ourselves to take their pictures (100s of them) and delete all of the crappy ones we had struggled to take.
Atlantic Puffin: Fratercula arctica
The long-tailed skua: Stercorarius longicaudus
Black-legged Kittiwake: Rissa tridactyla 
Random brown ducks
My dad has been asking me to get him a quern stone for ages. I have been looking for ages. Unfortunately, they are nearly impossible to find in England as back when hand-mills were common in feudal times, the miller had the authority to smash any hand-mills he found (they were bad for business). So they are scarce in the UK. But in Iceland, I saw them everywhere. In the Skoga Folk museum, we came up some stairs and saw this pile of them. Sorry, Dad, I didn't steal any.
Three-eyed lamb. I love Livia's expression.
That night we stayed in Hella, our last night in our tour of Iceland.
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
Puffin Along -- Part 8
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Puffins are pretty birds, in an odd sort of way. When they are flying, they kind of look drunk. I was surprised that we were able to get as close as we did to the little buggers. They were unafraid of people and they let us take pictures to our hearts' content. It was one of the highlights of the trip for me to be so close to them and watch them interact and fly.
The waterfalls on this trip were really impressive. The large one in this set had pathways all the way up to the base. I couldn't get closer than 10m due to the force of the water and air pressure pushing you back. It was pretty neat to look up and see the thousands of tons of water cascade over continuously. Our guide mentioned that any place with a lot of waterfalls is a "new" land, as they will wear away the ground over time. Iceland is constantly evolving. That's one of the things that makes it so amazing.
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