Monthly Archives: March 2021

Snæfellsjökull Tourism as the Mountain Sees It

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Iceland’s great mountain is not on the Ring Road, which is an arrangement of highways across the width and breadth of the main chunks of Iceland that allow tourists to flow through the country on “road trips” and, with luck, meet only professional tourism operators. This allows the country to get along with things and to pay for its roads. When you’re off the Ring Road, though, you have to be clever. The people of Snæfellsnes have hit on a couple of solid ideas. They won’t tell people that the name of the town that hosts their tourism marketing staff, Hellissandur, means The Sandbar from Hell, and they promote the daylights out of the idea of day trips from Reykjavik to view the sites. No overnight stays necessary. Clever.

Welcome to the Centre of the Earth

It makes a lot of sense. If people come for longer, they won’t leave, and if they don’t leave, they won’t need a tour bus, and if they don’t need a tour bus, what then? These are the big questions. The mountain and its snow spirits (I mean, look at them up there!) do not need to answer. It is an inspiring purity of presence.

Dynjandishæði

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It is good to remember that a waterfall, such as the great Dynjandi, is just a fall. That’s to say, it’s a space where the lifting and holding energy of solid ground becomes its opposite, the energy called a fjall. A fall here is not a verb. It is a space, which creates the verb. To get a handle on this energy, its good to stand at the top of a waterfall, and feel oneself falling with it. The earth falls from beneath one’s feet with vertigo.

Now you are in Iceland. It does for you what it doesn’t do for water: it catches you and holds you. It is that moment when the keel of a boat rises and stops swaying in the sea, the landing when it is held. Don’t fight it. It only becomes your story when you don’t fight it.