This is Jungle Life

(Note: As I tried to reflect over the past three weeks living with a shaman to write this post, this song, although quite irrelevant, flooded my thoughts. Figured I´d share the wealth...)

As my first placement with the volunteer organisation I´m working for in Ecuador, I headed deep into the Amazon to live and work with a shaman and his family.  I decided to forego any preconceptions about this one, because anything I could think of would probably inevitably be wrong; this situation was a new one for the books.  That said, I was still a little surprised when I met Marco the first day and he was dressed in normal clothes, not a feather or talisman in sight.  We made our way by bus to Paraiso, his "eco-lodge" (which was really just his house with a tourist slant), and met his family.  That evening we went for a walk, ate chicken and rice, and headed to bed early.  All very normal, non-shamanistic type things to do, really.  During the three weeks, the odd shaman-esque thing would pop up: the baby armadillo in a jar I found on the shelf next to the cooking oil (when asked what something was, Marco´s typical response was, "Medicine."  When I pressed him further I found out baby armadillo juice is apparently good for respiratory problems: asthmatics take note), the gigantic boa skin on the wall (it had been hit by a truck), the jaguar head hanging on the stairs (this was killed out of necessity, Marco said, as the jaguar was skulking around with its eye on the younger children).  With regard to the volunteer work, we helped out with the small organic farm Marco keeps: pulling weeds in the corn fields, planting yuca plants (a tuber very similar in taste and texture to a potato, but a bit drier), hunting around for the eggs the duck left around the yard.  All things considered, the days were fairly ordinary in a a lot of ways. 

Except, of course, we´re in the middle of the jungle.  One thing this means is more insects than I´m accustomed to.  It took me a while to get used to the cockroaches, giant moths, mosquitos, and unidentified buzzing orbs scurrying around my room at night, as well as the mosquito net I was provided to protect against this insect army.  Now, I´d always had a fairly romantic view of mosquito nets, something between fairy princess canopy and crisp white cotton Emperial England in India á la the opening scenes of "The Secret Garden", but this was all before I actually tried sleeping under one.  My first night I most certainly did not have the hang of it, and whiled away the hours afraid to move under the pink gauzy pall that was mere centimeters from my face, imagining all sorts of terrors clinging to the other side of it.  The second night I discovered the mattress tuck method, and by my second week I was old hat at the whole business.  Unfortunately this didn´t ensure a peaceful night´s sleep; night-time meant roaming and quacking time for the nosy duck which had the run of the place, and this combined with the growls and yips of the puppies under the house and the rooster which began his crowing duties at 4 in the morning and continued every hour on the hour until 7 (at which time he increased to every twenty minutes or so) made for quite the moonlight sonata.  A million thanks to the inventors of earplugs.

Marco himself is a very interesting character (I mean, he is a shaman, after all...).  He comes from the Quichua tribe, which is the largest indigenous group in Ecuador.  Although Quichua is his first language, his wife is from a different indigenous group and doesn´t know how to speak it, so they speak Spanish at home.  Marco expressed his worries that his children don´t want to learn his language, how he´s afraid that they will know nothing of his culture because they have no interest in being a part of it.  He does his best to teach them when they listen, but it´s a struggle faced by people all over the world: how do you keep a culture alive for a new generation that´s drawn in by the allure of a modern, globalised mono-culture?  It reminded me a bit of the debate in Ireland regarding whether or not to keep Irish a mandatory subject in schools; are language, tradition, and culture things that should be forced, or should they be optional, kept alive only by those who really feel passionate about them?  Can they survive if the latter is the chosen route? 

Most of the time, however, Marco took his culture and shamanism in stride, mixing a bit of them in here and there.  One night he treated us to some traditional dancing lessons, and another rainy day as we helped make beaded necklaces out of seeds for his grandson´s school play he showed off his tigerwear.  He came down from his room decked out in a tiger vest, beaming as he stated, "This is my tiger clothes.  Do you like it?"  I was a bit unsure whether to laugh or act impressed; was he playing dress-up or showing me his shaman gear?  There were other moments like this, when it was difficult to know how to react.  Another rainy day (it rained a lot in the past three weeks) we were all playing a card game called Cuarenta Cartas around the kitchen table, and Marco constantly matched my cards.  He grinned and said, "Careful, I am reading your mind!"  I´ll be honest, this is an unsettling thing to hear from a shaman.  Are my thoughts that easy to read?  Do shamanic powers include mind-reading?  Does the shamanic code allow them to use their powers to beat gringos at card games?  I´ll have to work more on my Jedi mind tricks...

Havin´ a bit of a dance

He´s also in the process of learning English, and the titular phrase of this post was one of his favourites.  Throughout the day if one of us was startled by a blood-thirsty insect of some sort or was showing off our mosquito bites, he would laugh and say, "This is jungle life!"  Another day we had been discussing the bats he had seen the night before when he broke into English, "Why is he Bad-man if he is good?" 

******

The past few weekends have been no strangers to adventure either.  The first weekend a few of the volunteers went off on a horseriding trek around Chimborazo, the majestic snow-capped peak which resides over the city of Riobamba.  I´m not exactly a Butch Cassidy on a horse so five hours of riding for two days didn´t bode well for the aul derriére, but it turns out that wouldn´t be my biggest concern for the weekend.  I was assigned an aging white-haired little horse, and for the first half hour of riding he puffed, snorted, and wheezed so much that I thought he was going to give up the ghost right there with me on top of him.  But he found his stride, and turned out to be a noble steed in his own way; by the time the first hour was over he had already gained the affectionate title of Old Jim.  However, by the time the first hour was over another development of a more climatic nature had manifested itself: we rode right into the middle of a hail, thunder, and lightning storm.  At one point at the top of a mountain I scanned our surroundings, watching the lightning striking nearer, and noted warily that we were the tallest objects for miles in any direction.  Crouch down there a bit, Old Jim...

After a few hours of riding in the hail we were all soaked through and, we admitted to each other later, were all silently considering our survival options.  The most popular idea seemed to be to find some shelter and get the horses to lie down around us for heat until help arrived.  But we soldiered on, and four wet and shivery hours later we rode out of the storm.  The last hour was dry and beautiful; we made our way down to a verdant valley and followed a river all the way to the tiny village of Salinas, land of chocolate and cheese.

  

The next weekend another group of us headed to Baños, an adventure sport mecca two hours from Paraiso.  The first day I decided to fly my tourist flag high and jumped on a chiva, which is an open-sided truck that drives around blasting cheesy dance music and flashing disco lights.  After circling the main plaza 7 times (when we asked the driver he said this was the "city tour" part of the trip) we made our way to some of the local waterfalls that speckle the area.  

The next day was a wash-out (what did I expect in a place called Baños...), and so that night we did the only thing to be done and headed to the pubs.  Late enough into the night, some of the other volunteers got talking about their plan to go puenting the next morning.  Puenting is in the same family as bungee jumping: they tie a rope to a bridge, tie the other end to you, and off you go.  I had not planned on going puenting, nor did I have any desire to really.  However, a few merry pints in, and surrounded by young enthusiastic folk, it started to sound like a thing that maybe I would want to do.  The conversation inevitably came to the shake, the sealing of my fate; tomorrow, I was going to jump off a bridge, hurrah!  Sunday morning I felt a bit differently about the situation.  As the excitement became visible with the other volunteers, my breakfast got a little less comfortable in my stomach.  But everyone else was doing it, I couldn´t be the only one...When we got out of the car at the bridge and I saw how high it was, I very nearly got sick.  It was a good 150 meters, and the river I had affectionately thought of as frothy chocolate milk the previous day was now a raging, foaming deluge coursing its way through a ragged canyon.  The other volunteers dropped off the side one by one, and then it was my turn.  I was belted and buckled up, and climbed over the side of the bridge to the 1 foot by 2 feet dinner tray hanging on the other side.  The man behind me counted to three, grabbed my ankles, and off I went.  In the first two seconds or so I couldn´t feel the harness and I actually thought I was going to die.  If there was anything going through my mind at all, it was something along the lines of my logic throwing its hands up in the air with exhasperation and screaming, "Jumping off a bridge, seriously?!  Twenty four years of careful tutelage and you decide to jump off a bridge.  Great.  Well done."  and storming away.  But in the next second the rope started to tighten and once I realised today was not my day to go, I let out a hearty, terrified scream.  After that was a few minutes of the best swing ever, and then I was pulled onto the cliff and sent on my way.  And that, my friends, is the tale of how I jumped off a bridge just because everyone else was doing it.  And lived to tell the tale.

Tune in three weeks from now for stories from my time in an indigenous community in the Andes. There´ll be dancing, there´ll be farming. There may be llamas.

More photos of shamans, Baños, and horses here.

Basilicas, Seals, and Dramamine: A Girl´s New Best Friend(s)

My South American adventure started on a high note; very high in fact: 2,800 meters/9,200 feet above sea level high. Following advice from guide books and medical professionals, I decided to take it handy my first day to allow myself to acclimate to the lack of oxygen in the air.  An easy day travelling around the museums and perhaps visiting La Basílica, which is one of the dominating features of the impressive Quito skyline, sounded like a safe bet.  However, most of the museums were closed for no reason that I could find, and the one I did manage to get into was a confusing mix of Precolumbian huts and dolls dressed as monks (I later realised that there was some kind of order to it, but my route led to an anachronistic and slightly perplexing impression of Ecuadorian history).  Mildly defeated, I puffed my way up Calle Venezuela to La Basílica.  Its imposing Gothic architecture belies its fairly recent construction (by Basilica standards anyway), as it was only built in the late 19th century.  That said, what La Basílica lacks in age, it makes up for in accessibility.  For $2, I was able to ramble throughout the majority of the sanctified innards of the building, which included gang-planking my way across the spine of the roof to a lookout point, and climbing all 115 meters to the top of the belfry hand over hand up increasingly smaller ladders.  So much for taking it handy.  The view, however, was well worth it.

The next day I took a tour arranged by the hostel where I was staying to Otavalo, which has been deemed one of the biggest artisan markets in South America.  "But...", you may say, "Why would you go to an artisan market on the second day of your four-month trip during which time you have to carry all of your possessions around on your back, á la Monsieur Snail?"  Why indeed, my estute friend, why indeed... Anyway, to the market I went, and artisanial objects I bought.  The market itself was interesting enough, tourist stands rubbing elbows with sizzling vats of fried pig and gold chains, but I was surprised to hear it´s in Lonely Planet´s Top 10 for South America.  If you´re planning to bypass a trip to Machu Picchu or Iguazu to get your shop on in Otavalo, don´t.  Unless fuzzy llama toys and gringo pants are your thing.

Left with a week before beginning my 9-week volunteering placement, I decided to team up with a German girl I met in the hostel to do some exploring.  We were thinking of heading up to Colombia for the week, but given that we would have spent about half of our time on a bus and would have voided our Ecuadorian visitors visa (a point I only discovered later - future travellers take note of this point: you can´t leave Ecuador during the 90 days of your visa if you expect to get back in) we decided against it.  Something that had been niggling me since I´d arrived was the fact that everyone I met seemed to have gone to the Galapagos, and would practically plead with you when you stated that you´d already decided it was out of your budget and that you were going to bypass it.  The Galapagos aren´t cheap, and until fairly recently its shores were reserved for scientists and very rich tourists.  However, in the last few years it has grown as a travel destination for a younger crowd as well, and it´s not unlikely to see a scruffy backpacker wandering about the beaches these days.  So I weighed up the points that I will probably never be this close again, this is one of the best times of year to go because High Season isn´t in full swing yet so prices are cheaper while Low Season is pretty much over so the weather conditions are more favourable, and living off beans and tuna for a while wouldn´t be so bad really, and decided to go for it.  Booked flights, high fived, no turning back.

The enchantment started as soon as the airplane touched down in the tiny lean-to airport on the isle of Baltra.  As the airplane taxied down the runway, it was escorted by dozens of giant dragonflies, officious and determined in their duties.  Due to a lucky seat placement, my new German friend had made the acquaintance of a man who was visiting his family in Puerto Ayura, the main port of the Galapagos, and his nephew was happy to help us find a place to stay and offer adice.  The place in question ended up being the hotel where he worked and was a bit more than we´d hoped to pay, but it was called El Castillo and it actually was a castle.  Our room had a balcony, there was a guitar and a couple of hammocks ready for use, and the fresh juice for the morning breakfast came from the fruit trees in the garden.  Never one to turn down a jammy turn of events, we settled in for the night.

But when one talks of Galapagos, one doesn´t talk about lodgings, so enough of the Castle and on to the the real attraction of the islands: the animals.  Immortalised by Darwin´s 1835 scientific visit, the islands are most famous for the amazing fauna which exhibits little to no natural fear of man.  On our first day we strolled to the fish boat dock where a sea lion was basking in the sun and pelicans rested in the trees a mere meter or so from where we were standing.  When the fish came in they skulked around the corner, waiting for a chance to snatch an unattended fish.

We managed to get a last-minute package deal which had us on a tour ship for two nights, then over to Isabella, the biggest island, for volcano climbing and reef snorkelling.  The Naturalist guide on the tour was an interesting fellow: during the day he would lead tours around the islands spinning off descriptions of the animals and facts about the islands as he clutched a rubber hammerhead shark, obsessively rubbed antibacterial lotion on his hands, and then rubbed his hands on his face.  By night-time when he gave the itinerary for the next day he would be glossy-eyed and slurring slightly.  The last night that we were on the boat (it was an 8-day tour for the rest of the passengers but we were only there for the first 3) after he detailled the activities for the next day he unexpectedly launched into a speech about how tourism was what was keeping the islands going, but it was also killing them.  The money from tourists coming to gawk at the wildlife is vital for the protection programmes to continue running, but the money inevitably lines the wrong pockets and the ever-increasing traffic of visitors is damaging the delicate eco-system they´ve come to see.  At the end of a few minutes there was an uncomfortable silence and then one of the other passengers raised his hand.  "So, what time are you meeting us for lunch tomorrow again?"  His approach was strange, and his audience was perhaps ill-chosen, but his argument is valid and compelling, and isn´t unique to the Galapagos.  Any community which initiates tourism treads this fine line, of benefitting from the income tourism brings, but also suffering from the effects of turning their lifestyle into an attraction for outsiders to pay to observe.  There is a new wave of "sustainable" or "eco" tourism, which aims to mitigate the harmful effects of tourism as much as possible.  But it seems like it will always be a double-edged sword, and if a community relies entirely on tourism for its economy there will inevitably be comprimises.  

However, moral dilemmas aside, I did decide to be a tourist, and it is truly an enchanted place.  I spent about 20 minutes just swimming around with a giant sea turtle, and a good 10 minutes persuing a white-tipped shark.  It did dawn on me during this time that chasing a shark was an odd thing to do, but he didn´t seem to mind all that much.  We had a healthy dose of land and sea iguanas and plenty of seals, frigates, and even some penguins on the last day.  By the end of the trip, I returned to Quito sunburnt, still swaying from the high-speed ferry boats, and mesmerised by the natural magic of the Galapagos.

Next post: my three weeks living with a shaman and his family in the jungle.  There´s a perfectly normal sentence...

More photos of Quito here and more photos of Galapagos here.

Livin´ Large in the Big Easy

New Orleans gets a lot of hype. It´s deemed one of the best places to party in the US, the best place to get some jazz, the best place to clog your arteries with delicious and distinctive food; it also caught the attention of the world in 2007 with the devastation it suffered because of Hurricane Katrina and the country´s ineptitude in handling the aftermath.  New Orleans does encapsulate all of these things, yes; but during my week there I got the feeling, more than with other cities, that New Orleans is all about perspectives.  Every perspective is valid in its own way, but no one perspective encompasses what the city really is, not in its entirety.  Each is a narrative of experience, of what we as individuals saw or chose to see.  There was the Dutch guy in the hostel with a suspiciously Russian accent who spent every night on Bourbon Street and every day recovering under a tree in the courtyard, and my couchsurfing host who didn´t believe in bad neighbourhoods, only overly paranoid people who attracted negative attention.  Then there was Chad, who had spent all his life in New Orleans and recently moved to Atlanta.  He was back to work at Jazz Fest, but he couldn´t wait to leave New Orleans; he hates the place.  He told me about the deep-seated racism that´s getting worse rather than better.  The corruption of the police force, the degradation of the schools (New Orleans had only a 40% literacy rate before Katrina), the fearless gangs of young people who have no qualms about killling someone who walks onto the wrong street.  "You see all these people here enjoying themselves? Black people, white people...at the end of the festival it´ll all just go back to how it was, they´ll go back to hating each other."  It´s a damning view, but it´s his perspective and it´s not wrong.

My perspective was a bit different, though.  I´m a bit in love with New Orleans, with the booming personalities and the po´boys and the music.  Music has a different status there: it´s as ubiquitous and essential as the food.  The people there have suffered, and it dates to well before Katrina, though her name still hangs over the city and frequently slides into conversations.  I was sharing lunch with a lady from Baton Rouge who was also volunteering at Jazz Fest my first day in New Orleans, listening to her stories of 20 people staying in her house for months after the storm because they had nowhere to go, and the tales of water rising faster than the people scrambling up the stairs to their attics, when the waitress caught a snatch of it.  "Are you talking about Katrina?"  "Yeah."  "Yeah..."  And that mutual, slightly pained, almost reverent pause before the stories continued.  But life goes on, because it must, and to me, it seemed the music is a catharsis for all that hardship.  On street corners, at the Jazz Fest, in dive bars, in front of coffee shops, people poured out music, damn good music.

 

 But on to less serious things.  My first few days in Nawlins was spent toing and froing to the Jazz Fest, where I jammily managed to get a volunteer position.  My expertise now extend to children´s canvas painting assistant, Assess Tent sitting, and Recycling Centre standing.  But even better than gaining this CV-worthy skillset, I got to see Mumford and Sons, Tom Jones, The Decemberists, Low Anthem, bits of jazz and bluegrass, and on and on.  So not a bad endeavour at all in the end. 

The hostel I stayed in for the first four nights was delapidated but clean, and more importantly full of interesting folk happy to swap tales over a beer or five.  One man, who´s currently moonlighting as the maintenance guy, used to work on a pleasure boat that was right next to Deepwater Horizon when it exploded last year.  He´s currently waiting for his $450k cheque from BP to come in and quite looking forward to it.  Among others, there was also an 85 year old Swiss man who´d lived most of his life on the Amazon carrying tourists to and fro, and a doctor from Brazil who played violin, but only with a backup track and speakers - he held regular nightly concerts by the barbecue.

The final three days I stayed with a Couchsurfing host and became travel buddies with another Couchsurfer who was staying there.  Together we were able to tick crossing the Mississippi, seeing City Park and its associated bayou, and getting in some proper dive bar jazz off our lists.  The dive bar in question was called Bullet´s Sports Bar, and for all you Treme fans out there, yes it was the Bullet´s featured in the first season with Kermit Ruffins.  

 

I finished out my last night in New Orleans with a good old cheesy ghost history tour.  Not one to shirk cultural responsibility completely, I picked a tour that leaned heavily on the history side, and it provided a (mostly) factual look of the weird, twisted past of the French Quarter, with a bit of flair thrown in ford good measure.  Our tour guide had a colonial Indian accent that suited his flowing garb and feathered trilby, and his penchant for cackling at the end of each harrowing vignette served its unnerving purpose.  Among the bits of insight gleaned from the tour (which, by the way, I would recommend to anyone visiting: Haunted History Tours) were that all the buildings in the French Quarter bar three are actually in Spanish colonial style due to the entire area and all its wooden buildings burning down twice in the space of six years, the inhabitants are descended pretty much exclusively from convicts and prostitutes shipped over from France (the first time the convicts asked the king for women he sent them over nuns), and Johnny Depp has recently bought a very haunted house from Nicholas Cage which seems to bring a curse on all its owners which he intends to turn into a museum in the next year.

 

I definitely left New Orleans with a taste of more in my mouth (and not just for the bienets from Cafe du Monde); hopefully I´ll have a chance to dine once more on the Big Easy.

Nom nom nom...Later ´gators.

 Next stop, Quito. Photo albums are temproarily suspended until I figure out a place in South America that doesn´t take 5 hours to upload a single picture.

Update: More photos of New Orleans can be viewed here.

Departure from the House of the Sun

Somewhere between the snow drifts and the extended sunsets, three months managed to slip by unnoticed, and so my Icelandic adventures have come to an end.  I'm once again packing up my possessions and willing, cajoling, and threatening my bulging bag into closing. My time at Sólheimar is finished, and as I glare at my unpacked bag, my thoughts are on the past three months.  It is said that REM cycles go in 3-hour segments, a theory which, whether it be true or not, I can oddly attest to: 3 hours of sleep is better than 4, 6 hours of sleep is better than 7, and 9 is simply dreamy.  For the same people who buy into this questionable hypothesis (semi-guilty as charged), I propose a similar theory for time cycles: the seasons come in 3-month segments, the financial quarters come in 3-month segments, and 3 months seems to be the time when you finally begin to settle into a new place.  So of course, in true vagabond style, I'm ripping up my roots before they grow too deep, gathering them about me like a pile of cumbersome petticoats, and waddling on down the road. 

So what has been my experience working in an eco-village in Iceland?  Sólheimar isn’t really an eco-village, and so it shouldn’t be advertised as one.  The way of life isn’t particularly focused on living in an ecologically friendly way, and in this respect it doesn’t add up to other well-known eco-villages in the world; some of the more extreme like Findhorn in Scotland and Lammas in Wales come to mind.  But whether or not Sólheimar is a sustainable community isn’t as black and white.  Obviously the issue of eco-mindedness will come up here as well, but there is more to sustainability than this.  A truly sustainable community is able to continue itself in all aspects: population, culture, life-satisfaction.  Sólheimar is a vibrant, thriving community, and that itself is an aspect of sustainability that is difficult to find.  It's a place where after a few days people will recognise your face, and if you're not at the morning meeting or at work, someone will come by your house to make sure you're alright.  Its inhabitants look after each other, but they're also very willing to accept new people, whether they're just visiting or here to stay.  Sólheimar has people with intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities, terminal cancer, people who are completing their prison sentence, artists, and students.  It has an organic tree nursery, greenhouse, and bakery; creates ceramic, wax, carved, and textile art; it has a choir, theatre group, and chicken coop.  I was surprised that when it came time to say goodbye, it was quite tough.  I’ve done a lot of moving around, and three months isn’t much time, all things considered, to feel like you can know a place well enough to really miss it.  But Sólheimar is a special place.  The people don’t put up walls like they do in other places, and because it’s all about the community, you become a part of it almost immediately.  And leaving that, knowing you’ve had your own little part to play in it, is difficult. 

While it hasn't taught me about life in an eco-village like I had hoped, it has taught me things I hadn't expected.  And so for all of that, I say takk fyrir, Sólheimar.  This place is doing some wonderful things, and has the potential to do everything it sometimes implies it does.  I wish it and all the people in it health, happiness, and above all else, a sustainably run pub.

  

Café-Hopping in Reykjavik, or, Why I Couldn't Sleep on Wednesday Night

My battery was dying and there was a plug in the corner, but to get to it I’d have to confront the table full of English gap year students behind me who had been discussing the healing properties of the ocean and the epic night of drinking followed by vomiting they had the night before at length for the past hour, and the comfort of staying where I am was just not worth dealing with such an interaction.  I packed up and shipped off into the lashing Icelandic spring day.  I was caught at that awkward time when some cafés close and others with alcohol licenses remain open and slowly transform into a pub with the gradual descent into evening and inebriation.  I scuttled from café to café looking for one that would stay open long enough for me to finish my work, but as I’d forgotten the word for “closed”, I was left mumbling the awkward phrase, “At what time are you not open?” wherever I went.  


Generally my Icelandic is atrocious and I can only manage a few mangled words.  But in Reykjavik, where most of the foreigners congregate and everyone speaks English, I try stumble through basic conversation and am mighty pleased with myself when I succeed.  Although the polite smiles the waitresses give me are probably fuelled by pity at my lack of vocabulary or grammar of any sort, I like to delude myself by hoping that I may have them fooled into thinking I’m just a very reticent local.  In the café, I was able to order “Kaffi og kleina, takk” while the girl behind me conducted her order in English.  After I finished my coffee and a suitable amount of time passed, the waitress came up and asked something.  A master of context clues, I knew she was wondering if I wanted anything else.  “Nei, takk.”  Nice one, I totally had this.


When it came time to pay the bill, I passed the test by mumbling incoherently and making the international, “I’d like to sign the bill now” motion.  In the home stretch now, I was going to make it!  But then she asked me a direct question.  I smiled.  She waited.  I smiled again…she waited.  “Ha?” - “What?” in Icelandic; I could have just been hard of hearing.  Not that repeating it would help me any.  She asked in English, “Do you want the receipt?”  I looked bashfully at the floor.  “No, thanks.”  Defeated by a technicality.  Better luck next time.   

Hoi, Who Drank MyVatn? And Other Second-Rate Puns

Last week found us a mere 90 km from the Arctic Circle and loving it. Claire and I, sharing a common love of good beer and random sounds, decided we'd make a good team on an expedition up to the the snowy north, and so on Thursday evening we began the six hour journey with nothing but the steady row of power lines and the ubiquitous whiteness as company.  We stopped first in Akureyri, the self-proclaimed capital of the north.  Since the real capital has only 200,000 people and two or three main roads, we thought it best to set our expectations beforehand.  What we didn't expect was a 15-foot snowman in the centre of it all...

Snowman done gone and got himself super-sized...

After our initial frosty reception, we strolled about the town taking in the sights.  In fairness, there aren't many of them; but Akureyri does have quaint picturesque buildings and boasts ice cream good enough for Reykavites (self-coined term, I think it'll catch on) to travel up for.  Yes, I did sit outside in sub-zero temperatures eating ice cream.  Whatever; when in Rome, get hypothermia. 

The next day we rented a car and made our way to Myvatn, a lake about an hour's drive to the east.  Named for the massive black columns of midges that swarm the place during the summer months, Myvatn is like a geologist's Valhalla, except without the dying part.  It has volcano craters, it has steam plumes, it has oodles of waterbirds, lava pillars, hot springs, caves, squidgey algae balls, nature parks...In short, it's a pretty damn cool place.  The only thing better than touring all these sites is touring all these sites while being hosted by a local.  We stayed with probably one of the most hospitable Couchsurfers in the world, who welcomed us into his home and showed us all around the area for two days.  He comes from a family of sheep farmers, and during our time there he showed us some of the work they do.  In recent years they've stopped selling the sheep to meat producers and have started handling all of the preparations themselves.  He said this way they can get a much fairer return for each sheep, and they can also ensure that there's as little waste as possible.  I could tell that for him using everything that could be used from the animal went well beyond costs; it was about respecting the sheep and not being cavalier about the process.  His family produces artisan sausages and meats at the moment, and are even experimenting with a smoked sheep meat similar to the jamón you find hanging in shops in Spain.  I still had fresh in my mind an article I'd read a week previous about the horrible conditions for both chickens and chicken farmers in the US because of the meat monopoly large companies have created, and it was great to see farmers taking matters into their own hands to demand fairer livelihoods for themselves and maintain better lives for their stock.

On Saturday we started at Hverir, the sulfur fields full of grey bubbling mud pots.  Now, mud pots stink a lot, but we thought we were old hat at eau d'sulfur, since every time you turn on the hot tap you get a whiff; however, nothing could have prepared us for this.  To pin it down, I'd say the smell was the usual rotten eggs, mixed with a tin of rancid tuna, wet dog, and the severe body odour of a champion sumo wrestler after a particularly arduous match.  Gag reflexes were well-exercised after a stroll around here.  But still, it looked pretty cool.  NASA has been known to bring astronauts up to train in its lunar landscape.

Just be thankful it isn't scratch 'n' sniff...

Next stop was Dimmuborgir, the site of lava pillars and rumoured home of the Yule lads (see episode 2 for more on them).  

Shortly after, our host took us to the locals' favourite hot pot cave to unwind after a long day of sheep shearing (his) and having a laugh (ours).  The water was a steamy 45 degrees, and this particular hot pot sits in the rift between the continental plates.  Because of its location, it also means that I swam from America to Europe. That's one more thing to tick off the list so, pat on the back.

The next day brought a lot of "My God, but we are jammy dodgers..." moments, as our host took us snowmobiling and ice fishing.  The snowmobiles themselves were aging, albeit loyal, beasts of burden: one didn't start unless it was on a hill, the other didn't steer, and neither had brakes any more.  Claire and I clamboured onto the one without steering, and dutifully threw ourselves to one side or the other based on where we wanted to go, hoping the thing would go more or less in the direction we needed.  It generally worked out fine, until Claire got a bit over-zealous and started doing spins on the ice.  Spectacular wipe-out; chuckles had by all; no reported deaths.

Photo by Claire Cornet

Photo by Claire Cornet

Ice fishing was done the traditional Icelandic way: bore a hole the size of a decent pancake into the ice, bait your dorga (fishing rod made from a bent sheep's horn) with some shrimp slightly cooked by the heat of the snowmobile engine, and then wait.  We had forgotten to bring some beer or hot chocolate, which was a grave oversight, but other than that I think we did a pretty good job.  Except for the catching fish part.  Out of the four of us, the only one who caught a fish was Claire, the vegetarian.  She had firmly stated that she was only there to feed the fish, and when she felt something tugging at the line she screamed, "Noooo, let go, be free, don't bite it!"  But the deed was already done, and so there was nothing left to do but smoke a cigarette.

Photo by Claire Cornet

The rest of the day was filled with a visit to the bird museum and a few more sites around the lake.  By the time we left on Sunday night, we were overwhelmed by true Icelandic hospitality and the natural beauty of the Myvatn region.

Monday was hitchhiking day, and we traipsed some 20 minutes outside the town to strategically position ourselves on the only road to Reykjavik, hopeful that no one would be able to resist our smiling faces and Claire's strawberry hat.  Over an hour later, it had begun to snow, what looked to be the same woman had passed us for the fourth time, and I was in desperate need of something to look at besides the changing lights and the construction company sign across the road.  After a short lift that carried us 8 km down the road and another half hour, an electric blue Ford Focus pulled over and we jumped in.  And so we came to meet Magnus, the old fisherman from the East.  He spoke very little English, but had a kind, slightly awkward nature and was going all the way to Reykjavik.  After a quick exchange of half-Icelandic half-English sentences and a few minutes of weighty silence, he pointed to the CD player and asked, "You music?"  I gave an eager, "Já, já!", and when he pressed the eject button out came Mamma Mia!.  He turned slightly red and mumbled, "This is my wife's car..."  

Two complete runs of Abba covers, two CDs of Icelandic country singers, and a stop at the Viking restaurant later, we were back in Reykjavik.  We said a warm goodbye to Magnus and headed down the small crowded shopping street into the city twilight.

More pictures when I figure out how to fix my computer.

Snæfellsnes and Friends

So it turns out Iceland can get even more beautiful than the thermal springs, volcanoes, and geysers of the south.  Enter Snæfellsnes, the finger-like peninsula on the west coast above Reykjavik.  It may sound like a children's show character, but this place is shockingly beautiful.  It has its own volcanoes and glaciers to brag about, and it was the setting of Jules Vernes' Journey to the Center of the Earth.  It is also believed to be a place of great spiritual energy and supernatural activity, if that floats your boat.  Chakras and novels aside, our weekend was spent climbing volcano craters, exploring hidden caves, walking cliffs, and watching Northern Lights in one of the most stunning places I've been.  Two thumbs up to you, finger-like peninsula!

View from Stykkishólmur lighthouse

The fjörd of Kolgrafa, of course...

Now before we'd left for our adventure, my supervisor's boyfriend had given us some tips about what to see in Snæfellsnes.  He advised staying in Stykkishólmur overnight.  The smaller towns of Ólasvik and Grundarfjörður were worth having a coffee in, but he told us that they were the kinds of towns that if you went to the pub at night and said you were from the wrong country, you'd get a punch in the face.  Oh, those types of towns... As it turned out, the hostel we stayed in was in Grundarfjörður but we avoided the pubs, and thus returned home with our noses intact.  Our minds may have received a bit of a battering with the ontological conundrum that met us in the hostel, however...

"This is Not Here." It's not? But..I could have sworn...isn't the...it's...never mind.

Mind games and disgruntled locals aside, Grundarfjörður had its own gems to behold.  On the Saturday night we were treated to Northern Lights over the sea.  Add good company and a can of Polar Beer (yes, the mascot is a polar bear), and you have one very fine evening indeed.  It ended as only such a night could, watching Lawrence of Arabia with Icelandic subtitles.

Back in Sólheimar, we've reached that irksome time of year when Spring is trying to begin, but Winter doesn't want to relinquish its hoary grip.  It's as heartening as watching a doberman and a chihuahua fighting when you've put all your money on the under-dog.  The snow is followed by rain, which is followed by hail (wash, rinse, repeat) and the subsequent slush lies in waiting on the dirt roads, ready to ambush oblivious feet everywhere.  Wet socks abound.  This is the springter of our soggy discontent.  

Things soldier on regardless.  This month is "Environmental March" (the pun only works in English, alas), a collection of recycling workshops, sustainable cooking classes, and the like put on by the interns for the home people and helpers in the village.  

Ok, so it's in Icelandic, but you get the gist...

The goal is to raise more awareness about sustainable living and to get the villagers involved in acting in a more eco-friendly manner.  So far Claire and Yvonne have held recycled craft classes and Paulo has put on a "Will my Grandchildren See this Plastic Bag?" quiz game.  Pami and Will are preparing their locally sourced cooking class for next week, and Paulo and I are getting our forest walk and planting workshop organised for the following week.  They're small things, yes, and deal with issues that should have been addressed a long time ago in an eco-village, even one that focuses primarily on reverse integration for people with disabilities, but it's a start. 

Sometimes, you just need to stop stressing about the monumental task ahead, and get on with it.  It's like reading all the news about climate change deniers, the constant slips and setbacks in green policy that governments undergo (most recently Republicans in the US voted to bring back Styrofoam to their canteen, because it's more "fiscally responsible".  First of all, idiots.  Secondly, why is their attention focused on the utensils in their canteen and not something a bit more important like, oh I don't know, pretty much anything else?!), the droughts and natural disasters that are setting us up for a potential global food crisis this summer, the fact that roughly one third of all the food produced in the world is wasted and could potentially feed one billion people (it is speculated that the irrigation water used to grow all the food that is thrown away is enough for the domestic needs of nine billion people - see here for more facts and figures if you're interested)...It all gets pretty grim after a while, and it inspires the two most useless emotions: guilt and helplessness.  Most of what's going on, depending on how it's presented, will cause an "Ah feck, this is all really bad, and I'm a part of it, and sure I can't do anything because it's too big, so what am I meant to do like?!  God, I'd love a pint..." reaction and we'll want to just ignore what's going on because we feel like there's nothing we can do.

But the answer isn't to ignore it (I included the links on purpose); the important thing is to not get overwhelmed by the issue.  Sure, we're all doing things that are adding to the problem.  We all could be doing a bit more of this and a little less of that.  But instead of feeling guilty about it and then clamming up because we don't want to listen to things that make us feel guilty, change something.  Just something small.  Start composting food scraps, or make an effort to buy foods with less packaging, or try to buy fresh fruits and veg at a local farmers' market if possible instead of buying grapes from South Africa and watermelons from Brazil (unless you happen to be from South Africa or Brazil, in which case, congratulations for being the most international reader!).  And then concentrate on that thing you've done, bask in the warm fuzzy feeling of benevolence, and use that warm fuzziness to fuel another change.  Is composting a few old apples or using a canvas bag going to save the world?  No.  But doing those little things to start, and feeling good about them, is so much more productive than becoming stagnant in a flurry of guilt and denial and running to the nearest bar of chocolate to make yourself feel better.  

And on a larger scale, we need to be aware of what's going on, but also make sure we look for the good things as well.  I recently read an article about new technology that uses seawater and solar power to entirely fuel and irrigate greenhouses.  I then came across an article about six "Ethical pioneers" who are fighting the good fight online, through activism, in economics, and more.  I came out on the other side thinking, "Hey, we can actually do this.  We're a bit of sticks in the mud sometimes, we humans, but look at all these great ideas.  We've been in space and built a 27 km tunnel that crashes protons into each other; we can fly, for feck's sake!" We are capable of sorting this out, this and far more besides, if we just get down to it.  Sure, funding is in the wrong place and the system in which the world currently operates holds profit as the bottom line and there are plenty of barriers, but concentrating on why we can't succeed isn't going to do anything.  As a fortune cookie once told me, "The person who says something is impossible should not interrupt the person doing it." We've got a lot of work to do, lads, and we're not going to get it all sorted in one go; but what do you say we start anyway?

~~~~~

Soap box is resolutely put away for the moment.  Since we've given back the cars, we're having our first quiet weekend in a month, unable to galavant around the countryside like the good old days.  We considered renting horses for this month, but alas, we have no hay.  It's just as well we're about the village I suppose.  Apparently last time we were in Reykjavik my wine-induced loquaciousness arranged to play a concert with an Icelandic opera singer in the church this weekend.  So now I find myself practising the guitar solo of "Let it Be", on violin, to be played during mass, with an Icelandic opera singer.  The things I get myself into...

More photos of Snæfellsnes, caves, and the like can be found here.