Arnarstapi is marketed as a quaint fishing village. What that means is tour busses from Reykjavik dropping off crowds, who line up at the fish and chips shop, not that fish and chips is anything other than a British dish, but what the heck.
Here’s the fishing fleet in the harbour. In the depleted seas, it survives by catching fish for the fish and chips shop.
Yesterday I showed an image of a couple of puffin philosophers in Borgarfjörður Eystri. Now a glimpse of some of their concerns. Because puffins erode their hillsides (and have to move on), the community has laid down netting to prevent them from digging just a wee bit too much. The result is a near perfect mathematical placement, likely related to the reach of a human’s arms.
A puffin could complain, but the alternative is to be gobbled up by invasive minks, also brought by humans. The project is financed by people donating to this benevolent intervention. Not that that will stop the puffins from deliberating over it for years, of course.
Borgarfjörður Eystri
Like any other Icelandic fishing people, really.
Water or vatn, these are just words.
A trip out to Njardvik and Ytri-Hvannagil is the thing to put those behind you.
This stuff is alive.
The secret of writing books in Iceland is to stop writing them.
Here, one is written.
Note, as Gunnar did, the chain-linked rhymes of Icelandic epic verse rising from the stone itself. Atlantis, he called it.
Fair enough. Iceland, too, is only a name.
This is more.
Not a traveller goes past the south, on land or water, that she does not record in her memory of stone.
Only if you sneak by in the fog, do you have a chance of making it to Reykjavik unseen.
Sure, those big fancy city trolls are all fine and good.
Akureyri
But wild trolls, such as the one in the middle upper right below are best.
Innri-Hvannagil
You never know when you’ll meet one.
Don’t let the novelists fool you. When the land goes to sea, it is a whale.
Reyðarfjörður
It’s just the way of things in a poetic landscape.
Rauðarhóll
Note the little elf in its spume!
If you’ve lost your head over the beauty of Iceland, don’t worry.
You can always get another one.
Neskaupstaðir
They’re lying all over the place.
Sure, a ptarmigan on the Selá, Christmas dinner, easy to identify.
And an elf bird in its nest in the hraun, not Christmas dinner, easy enough.
But a cairn in the Villingadalur, that looks like an elvish bird, tricky.
Yet, it’s by it that you find your way through elf country to Christmas dinner.
They come from eggs laid in crystal nests, of course.
Easter Cave, Neskaupstaðir
A Farm in Iceland 