We are contentedly back on the continent again, having survived Iceland's freezing winds and naked landscapes, enjoying the good German hospitality that. we have come to love. We are staying near Frankfurt with Heiko, our flatmate in Ireland. Our other flatmate, Torsten, drove across from Nürnberg to tour us around the local castles and bring us to their own little irish pub!
Iceland proved to be yet another country simple to hitchhike around, despite everyone' s dubiousness, and our lifts were representative of Iceland itself: the population is comprised of 299 404 Icelanders, and 369 431 tourists visited in 2005. We got 5 lifts from Icelanders and 6 from tourists, and several of our lifts took us 600kms at a time! Thrudur, and Tomek and Ola, our HC hosts in the east of Iceland, sent us marching up and down dozens of waterfalls that appear to be emptying all of the planet's seas in a rush into the centre of the Earth, up and down volcanoes, over cracks where the earth has opened up in a quake (Thrudur's house was split open in a recent earthquake), past glaciers calving into icebergs floating in a lagoon with the sea lions, to hot rivers to bathe in, and to the Geysir from where all the rest get their name, which was a terrifying experience to stand next to alone in the dark as it materialized 15 meters of gushing water every 10 suspenseful minutes or so. Though we were repeatedly told otherwise, we did manage to hitchhike through Iceland's interior, which is crossed only by two gravel roads only recommended for 4x4 vehicles with those enormous wheels and satellite phones. Thrudur warned us about these strange rock formations that were trolls who had been caught out in the sunlight while viewing their land (apparently Tolkein based his trilogy on Icelandic mythology) so we didn't camp the night out there! We still think it is a lovely but bizarre little country: the tiny villages smelt of their main industry: fishing, and after showering our silver wedding rings turned black temporarily from the minerals in the naturally hot water that is piped into houses. Thankfully we managed to avoid Iceland's speciality dishes: burnt sheep's head, rotten shark, foal, puffin, soured ram's testicles (as if ram's testicles wasn't strange enough). I guess in this barren land you had to eat everything you can get your hands on! Here's three new photos of our time in Iceland (last three on the page).
We have a lift to Paris arranged for tomorrow with the great German ride-sharing agency (an institution which the rest of the world is sorely lacking), and HC hosts for the next few weeks so Bon Soir and Tchussiii!
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