hofn

Date travelled: February 20, 2017

No sleep for 36 hours so everything seemed kind of like a dream. I was struck by how quickly the landscape went from moss, to moss over ice, to snow, to rock, to foothills.

Stopped to see some casual roadside waterfalls on the way, and we weren’t the only ones. It was the first or second natural feature in a series of views that kept blowing me away, signalling we’re not in North America anymore. This was my first time out of North America.

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Next we parked at a black sand beach in a place called Vik. I took a piss while others ran into the treacherous wind. At this point we may as well have been on another planet and I may have been a different person, based on how surreal everything seemed and felt.

We wanted to take pictures of houses and barns half-built in the side of mountains until we realized we’d be stopping a lot of we kept doing that every time. I don’t know about how comfortable it would be to live half underground but it looked cool as all hell.

There was a lot of hail in the country. There were a lot of dunkin donuts as we were driving out of the city. When we arrived at our airbnb, it was an old lady who lived alone without much English and poor directions who tried to feed me horse meat. She made us all breakfast the next day and showed us a photo album of one time she went to Japan, which we got the feeling she showed every group of tourists who stayed over. She was honestly such a nice woman, and when I meet people like that who I know I will never see again, there’s a bit of melancholy in the memory. But at the time there wasn’t much room to reflect because it was off to the even more remote Icelandic southeast.