Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

What a week it's been, what with preparing for our holiday and speaking to financial advisors, all keen for a slice of a pie not yet quite fully baked.

Sarah and I leave for Iceland on Wednesday at noon. We'll enjoy a few days lounging around in the cafés and swimming pools of Reykjavík before flying on to the Faroe Islands, a trip we've been looking forward to for quite some time.

Given events that are likely to be happening back on the home front, we'll be making some effort to check e-mail every few days. We may even post to the blog; it all depends on how pushed for time we are.

At 04:00, it began. "What?" you ask. "The day", I say.

I couldn't sleep. I normally have no problem with jet-lag, but when I awoke at 04:00 this morning, I just could not get back to sleep. After much tossing and turning, I eventually read a little of one of our guide books and then eventually gave in and got up.

I went downstairs to the hotel's computer room at 07:00 and proceeded to read my work-related and personal e-mail. I quickly discovered there were events in process at work that required my immediate attention, before things here take a turn for the desolate and it becomes really hard to access handy things like telecommunications.

After a shower and some troubles with the hotel's computer (which wouldn't allow temporary files to be created, thus rendering Adobe Acrobat Reader inoperable), I eventually managed to print out (on the hotel reception's own computer, no less) the forms I needed and then Sarah and I went out for some breakfast. That was followed by a brisk walk over to a wool shop and along some of the city streets we've previously hardly touched, after which we went back to the hotel room to fill in the forms. By this time, it was pouring with rain. Later in the afternoon, the hotel graciously faxed our forms to Google free of charge for us, after which I put the originals in the international post at the central post-office, handily located just around the corner from our hotel. Hopefully, that'll be the worst of our remote bureaucracy taken care of.

Later in the afternoon, we soaked off the stress of the last week or so by taking a bus out to Reykjavík's main swimming pool, called Laugardalur. The boiling hot water soothed our troubled brow and fulfilled the dream of returning to that spot that I've been nurturing for the last year. It was remarkably refreshing to bathe waist-deep in a hot pool, while cold rain pounded down on our head, back and shoulders.

After dinner, I made an unexpected return to the swimming pool, as Sarah noticed during dinner that my wedding ring was missing. Damn! I had left it in my locker at the pool! A hasty phone call to the swimming pool from the restaurant revealed that they had found it and were keeping it for me, so I was treated to a second round trip on one of Reykjavík's expensive bus routes.

Tomorrow, we head into Iceland's wild interior on a 4x4 safari to Iceland's most active volcano, Hekla, and the variegated hills around Landmannalaugar. There, we'll take some time out to lounge in a piping hot geothermal pool, surrounded by rhyolite hills and lush greenery. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate, as this trip will involve some serious off-road activity, such as river crossings.

That'll be a full Saturday for us. Then, on Sunday, it's off to the Faroe Islands for an altogether much more remote experience than Iceland's capital has to offer.

And to finish with the beginning, what about Thursday? Our bus from the airport into Reykjavík broke down and another one had to be sent for to pick us up: an inauspicious start.

Poor weather looked like it might rain out the day, but it cleared up remarkably fast when we made it into the city. To improve things yet further, we were able to check into our hotel at 09:15 and get into our room, where we grabbed a couple of hours sleep, before rising again at noon.

The afternoon was spent hitting a few of Reyjavík's fine coffee shops. It's great to be back in a country with such great coffee! We did a few other things, too, but Thursday is already becoming somewhat of a blur.

Austurvöllur Square is once again home to a wonderful open-air photographic exhibition, exposing the many different people, lifestyles and locations that make up this fascinating country's character. Hopefully, we'll get to look at all of the poster boards before we leave.

Sarah and I awoke to our alarm going off at 07:00 today, which means I actually managed to sleep through the night. It's nice to finally be on the local time zone. Usually, it takes me only a single night.

After breakfast, we were met by our guide from Mountain Taxi, Beggi, in his monster off-road jeep. This vehicle had 3 radio systems, a GPS computer, a GSM phone and a mounting for a laptop computer, which Heggi told us he uses only in winter. Apparently, the computer tracks his every movement when out on the snow. When he gets lost, he can retrace his journey, step by step.

Beggi and his wife are heavily involved with Iceland's 4x4 Club. He told us that any jeep with fewer than 5 antennas is probably never driven outside of Reykjavík by its owner. It was pretty easy to tell that Beggi views these people with contempt. His souped up vehicle with 40" tyres, enhanced suspension and all mod cons left many of these vehicles standing.

We began to drive to Iceland's most active volcano, Hekla, driving along roads (Hah! Did I say roads?) that I would not have attempted, even if I'd had Beggi's 12 gear monster at my disposal.

In the afternoon, we arrived at Landmannalaugar, where we experienced the highlight of the trip. At the end of some very rough roads and in the middle of nowhere, a natural hot spring billows steam into the icy air. We stripped into our swimming costume and dived in. Bliss! It was absolutely heavenly.

But, nothing is without its price, of course, and oh, what a bitch when we had to get out of the pool and the icy Icelandic air blasted our soaking wet bodies with Arctic wind. It's hard to accurately describe how unpleasantly cold that felt.

It was a long trip. Beggi was with us for 11 hours, all told. I even managed to lose my phone in Beggi's car, but he kindly brought it back to the hotel later in the evening. (Am I really going to lose an item every day during this holiday?)

We're now at the end of a very long day. We had dinner at Hornið around the corner, then went for coffee and cake at a very pleasant café a couple of streets away.

Tomorrow afternoon, we'll fly from Reykjavík city airport to Vágar in the Faroe Islands. I'm not sure how we'll spend the morning yet. Once we arrive in Vágar, we'll get on a bus to the capital, Tórshavn and then probably try to find some dinner.

By the way, you can send us an SMS message on our new phone while we're here. The number is +1-650-861-9501.

Our 16:00 flight to the Faroes turned into our 15:30 flight to the Faroes some weeks ago.

This morning, checking out of our hotel in Reykjavík, it suddenly and inexplicably turned into our 21:00 flight. It looks like we get an extra full day in Iceland.

Let's hope we do actually arrive in the Faroes tonight.

Well, we finally made it to the Faroes and have spent today exploring Tórshavn. The temperature has been an amazing 25°C today, so I've been wearing shorts and sweating away as we walk around town. The locals tell us that this weather is truly extraordinary and that we should make the most of it.

Anyway, if I use this computer for any longer, I'll have to pay for it, so that's all for now.

We've been having a fabulous time here in the Faroe Islands. The weather has been beautiful for an astounding five straight days. We met some Faroese tourists (visiting other parts of their own country) yesterday and they said that this kind of weather is a once every 10 years kind of thing. It's been about 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit (since I'm writing this, Ian will just have to deal with the Fahrenheit instead of Celsius measurements -- this is my form of rebellion against his tyrany) every day. Yesterday had some clouds, but all the other days have been clear blue skies. Children have been swimming in the ocean and in the streams that run down the steep hillsides through the towns. A picture of kids swimming was on the cover of the newspaper, so you know that it's unusual.

We spent Monday in Tórshavn (the capital) which Ian wrote about briefly in the previous entry. It's a much bigger town than we were expecting, with lots going on. It's full of babies; they're everywhere in this country.

On Tuesday, we picked up our car and drove up to Vestmanna, where there are giant cliffs that are very popular with seabirds. We had a 3-hour boat ride around the cliffs and into small caves at the base of them. Although a lot of the birds have departed now that summer is coming to a close, there were still lots of birds. We saw a few puffins, which was a lot of fun, but we hope to see many more in the coming days.

We then proceeded to drive up to two towns at the north of Streymoy, the island with both Tórshavn and Westmanna. Both were just beautiful, with grass roofed houses and steep sloped mountains rising out of the sea. Needless to say, we've been making good use of our new cameras.

On Tuesday night, we stayed in a hotel in Runavík on the island Eysturoy. The room faced west over the water and had the hot sun (that day was particularly hot, in the 80s) beating in from noon until 11:00. Since they're not accustomed to hot weather, the room just had one small opening window in a bank of fixed windows. It was absolutely roasting in there. Probably 100 degrees. We opened the windows and went out to find some dinner. When we got back, it was still really really hot. It didn't cool off until about 6am. Not our best night's sleep ever.

On wednesday, we took the car ferry from Eysturoy to Borðoy, where the Faroes' second biggest town, Klaksvík, is. We stayed north of Klaksvík in Viðareyði, which is actually on the island of Viðoy. Eighteen islands make up the Faroes, and you go from one to another quite regularly since many have bits that almost touch, so they can make little causeways that you can drive over. The really amazing thing is the tunnels. Since the islands are so steep, it would be impossible to make a road over the top. Instead, they burrow one-lane tunnels through the mass of the mountains, taking you from one side to the other that way. The tunnels are very small and have irregular sides. As the car in front of you goes through with his high beams on, it looks like a a science fiction movie would depict a creature from outer space with his own protective plasma bubble around him sliding through a tube. I (clearly) can't do it justice with words, but the effect is eerie.

On Thursday, we had hoped to climb Enniberg, the highest sea cliff in the world (or so they claim), but the very top was in a cloud, so we decided to wait another day. Instead we drove out to the town of Kunoy on the island of Kunoy, which was only recently connected to the road system by a tunnel. There, we met a really nice farmer and chatted with him and played with his dog for a while. Then we went back to Klaksvík, where we proceeded to take a ferry to the island of Kalsoy, take a bus to the very tip of it (through four of the aforementioned tunnels), and climb up to the lighthouse. The bus dropped us and the four Faroese tourists, mentioned before, at the tiny village of Trøllanes at the northern tip of Kalsoy. It looked like 20 or fewer people lived there. The climb was very very steep, but grassy, so it wasn't difficult to find your footing. We just had to be careful for holes. The grass grows so thickly on these hills that it covers holes and makes a sort of booby trap. Once we got up to the lighthouse, the view was fantastic, and a real surprise, as the books hadn't prepared us. We could see Enniberg, the cliff that we had hoped to climb (still in the clouds), to the east, and lots of the other islands to the west. Hopefully our pictures will get close to capturing it.

We found out from the Faroese tourists yesterday that they were told that the Enniberg cliff walk required a guide to help you down if the fog rolls in while you're up there. That information, combined with a look at the route with the binoculars and some wimpiness on our part, made us decide to skip the 6 hour hike up the cliff today. I think it would have been too hard for me.

Instead, we rode on the mail boat to the remote easternmost islands of Svínoy and Fugloy. We didn't get off the boat to spend the day there, since the only option for the return trip was late this afternoon and we weren't sure how much there was to do there. The ride was beautiful and we were the only tourists on the boat. When we got close to Fugloy, the swells got really big and the boat was bobbing around like a cork. At the dock, the boat can't actually tie up due to the rough water (there's no harbor) so the boat guys just sling one long rope over a winch and then hand the cargo up to the men waiting on the dock. The whole town comes down with their dogs (9 of them today) to watch the spectacle. A woman with two small children and a baby was getting off the boat. We looked on with quite a bit of anxiety as the boat guy held the baby out over the side of the bobbing boat and a guy on the dock tried to get a grip on him. It took several bobs of the boat before they had a good enough connection to pass the baby. The baby didn't seem to mind at all.

We got back on dry land and decided to try a hike that wasn't mentioned in either of our travel guides, but was in a small brochure put out by the tourist board. We weren't expecting much at all, which made the phenomenal views at the top of the mountain above Klaksvík all the more of a treat. The weather was absolutely perfect (no clouds, no wind) and we had a great view of Klaksvík far below and a handfull of other islands. We took a ton of pictures, so maybe a few will come out well.

Okay, that brings you up to date. If anyone made it through all of this, I'll be impressed.

We're now back in Tórshavn, after three lovely days on the island of Mykines. Puffins abounded there and we got some great photos of these delightful and colourful little clowns. There were also a lot of arctic terns and gannets, plus some oyster-catchers. Our leg muscles are getting strong, too, after some pretty serious hiking.

Google fever continues in my absence. I've just read an article on CNN's teletext about the repricing of the shares. Even here, you can't escape the talk about Google.

We'll be hanging out in the Faroese capital tomorrow, then flying back to Reykjavík on Friday, where we'll quickly change to a flight to Vestmannaeyjar, a group of islands off the south coast of Iceland. We'll be staying in the town of Heimaey for three days.

Folks back home continue to keep us in touch via SMS messages. Keep them coming, guys; the more, the merrier.

Comment posting now works again after a period of two weeks of having been broken. If you've tried to post a comment in the last two weeks and it's still relevant, please post it again now.

We're flying back to Iceland this afternoon, after 12 wonderful days in the Faroes. If you don't know where the Faroe Islands are, look them up on a map and do some reading about the place. You really should consider a holiday here.

The next update will come from Vestmannaeyjar, assuming we can find Internet access in the town of Heimaey.

Today is our last day in Vestmannaeyjar, the small group of islands off the south-west coast of Iceland. We've had a great time here and the fabulous weather has unbelievably continued.

This place hosts the largest puffin colony in the world, and in August, the baby puffins (endearingly called pufflings) are abandoned by their parents once they are ready to be on their own, and finally leave the nest once they get hungry enough to motivate them to move. They often leave in the nighttime and look for the sea, which they apparently find by looking for the reflections of the stars in the water. The city lights confuse them, though, and many of them end up on the streets of the small town here, Heimaey. The children of the town look for them each night, chase them down, pop them in a box and bring them home for the evening. In the morning, they take them to the beach and hurl them into the air. Needless to say, we wanted to get in on this, and our visit was largely motivated by a desire to see the pufflings.

We arrived on Friday in a tiny little plane (about 18 seats). That night, we went out with no flashlight and no box and figured we were doomed to failure. However, after a short while, we ran into an English man and his son who were staying in our guesthouse and had a flashlight. We hooked up with them for the rest of the evening. It turns out that they actually live in Reykjavík and he's a rather famous person here; he illustrated some books about Icelandic folklore that are in every tourist shop here. Anyway, we wandered around for quite a while and were on our way home when I saw something drop out of the sky in my peripheral vision. I ran over to where it fell and saw that it was a little puffling! They seem to only be able to fly if they're jumping off a cliff and get a head start, so the best they can do to get away is just waddle around and flap their little wings, so he was pretty easy to catch. The English guy found a ratty old box in a fishy-smelling dupster and we put him in there, quite pleased with ourselves, and headed home. A few minutes later, we came across a baby seagull in the middle of the main drag. All the kids are only interested in getting puffins, so no one was rescuing him. We had acquired another box along the way, so I picked up the seagull, too, and now we had two birds to look after for the evening.

We put them on the table in our room and they were pretty quiet at first. It was a bit hard to get to sleep, though, because we kept thinking "we have a puffin in our room!" At 5:45, they decided that they'd had enough and started pecking and scratching at their boxes. We eventually gave in to them and brought them down to the beach. The idea is to grab the bird and swing him a few times between your legs using the pose that children (and I) use for bowling. We were going to start with the seagull for practice, but he wasn't having any of it. Finally I wimped out and just turned his box sideways so he could walk out himself. He swam off quite happily. The puffin had a really low crappy box with no flaps. We were just using another piece of cardboard as the lid. I think he heard the waves crashing and had just the motivation he needed, so once I lifted the lid, he was out of there before I could grab him. He ran down to the water and swam off, and literally within 10 seconds of getting in the water, he was diving for fish and coming back up far away from where he went down. It's amazing what good divers they are.

On Saturday, we climbed the "new" volcano here. It erupted in 1973 and covered 1/3 of the town in lava and all of the town in deep ash. It also came very close to closing off the mouth of the harbor here, which would have been devastating to the economy here, as they catch 15% of Iceland's fish here. The firemen stopped the flow of lava by spraying cold seawater on it 24 hours per day. Apparently the harbor was actually improved by the added shelter that the lava flow provided. It's still hot in the volcano. You can walk around in the crater, where it's 470°C just one meter below the surface.

On Saturday night, we looked and looked but didn't find any pufflings :(

On Sunday, we walked and walked and walked. Our feet are really ready for transplant after all the walking that we've been doing. At night, I convinced Ian that he really did want to go out at midnight for pufflings. We saw two of them about half a second after someone else saw them, so we were feeling pretty cheated and were heading back home when suddenly we got two in the space of a minute. There's a shipyard right by the harbor and it seems like a good place to go. We were very pleased with ourselves and vowed to get the release right this time.

After being smart enough to leave the birds in the hallway for the night, we went out this morning to release them. Walking down to the harbor they were scrambling about all over the box. I felt quite guilty for the trauma that we were imposing upon them, but if they weren't rescued, they'd die of exposure or starvation. You see plenty of evidence of puffin infant mortality around this town. On the way down to the beach, a guy pulled up next to us in a truck and asked us to take his puffin, too. We think he must have found him on his boat or something. So now we had three.

This time, we did the release correctly and got a few decent pictures of us throwing the puffins out to the water. When you let go of them, they are high enough that they can fly a bit, and get about 50 feet out into the water before they land. Ian managed to put a bit of spin on the one he threw, so we have a picture of the poor thing belly up in the air. He landed with a bit of a splash, but was fine. All in all, a fun morning.

This afternoon, we decided to go horseback riding. Ian has never been on a horse and I haven't been on one for a long time. Icelandic horses are really beautiful and gentle, so it was an especially nice way to ride. We went with two other people and the guy who owns the horses on a 2.5 hour ride, or so. It was a lot of fun. Now we are really dusty and smell of horses, but we had a great time. We must have looked very silly with bicycle helmets on while riding down the road on horses.

Once again, I've rambled on and on. Tomorrow morning we'll head back to Reykjavík on the tiny airplane. Then we just have one more night there before we head back home. It's been a great vacation.

Vestmannaeyjar was great. Searching for wayward pufflings in the dead of night, whilst wisps of the Northern Lights incandescently meandered overhead was quite an experience and not one I'll forget in a hurry.

The plane from Heimaey got us back into Reykjavík this morning in time for breakfast. After that, we checked into our hotel and then ambled around the shops for a couple of hours.

In the afternoon, we went whale-watching, managing to see quite a few Minke whales. There were a few porpoises about, too, along with Fulmars and Arctic Terns.

Apart from that, we've spent the afternoon and evening relaxing in coffee shops and generally taking it easy; a fitting end to what has been a fantastic break from the chaos back home.

Tomorrow morning, we head for the Blue Lagoon (or Bláa Lónið, as it's known here), where we'll soothe ourselves in piping hot water for a couple of hours before heading on to Keflavík airport. There, the gruelling return home begins.

We'll get back to Mountain View around midnight tomorrow, Pacific Time. Hopefully the jet-lag won't preclude some small amount of sleep that night, because it's in at the deep end and back to work on Thursday. Ugh.

Back to reality... Sigh. Still, at least there's the sale of 5% of my Google stock to look forward to, the first week of September. That should hopefully restore the holiday glow to our cheeks.

The world's slowest immigration queues...

Puddles of piss in front of every urinal, presumably due to a fear of contracting something nasty from the porcelain...

Unintelligible airport staff...

Ants in the house...

That's right... we're back.