Northern Iceland - what's it like?

Cold. But hell, what do you expect. It's on the same line as central Alaska or Baffin Island. Just out there across that cold blue sea is an imaginary line called the arctic circle.

A large part of this area looks like this:

Or this:

It's endless lava plains interspersed with slag heaps, and the occasional vehicle.

This one was the demountable which the two professional birders from the Netherlands had hired. It cost them nearly 4k euros for their visit, but this is their seventh trip to Iceland so I guess it was worth it.

But the bleak is more than matched by the simply stunning - available everywhere:

As I moved west, the mountains got higher and whiter, and Akureyri, the second city, and a handsome, prosperous-looking place, was ringed with snow-capped peaks:

The municipal campsite was closed so I had to go out of town to an area of young forest and huge cliffs. On the town side is a huge new building programme with ultra-modern houses and flats. It has the feel of a boom town, but it's June and everyone is going round in winter clothes. They've not lost their sense of fun though:

And I was amused by these two contrasting ideas or Nordic manhood:

The locals don't seem to mind the temperature, but the poor German family I met the next night at a little bird haven up a lovely valley, Oh dear, they did not look happy. I saw the D plate so tried out my rusty German

"Woher sind Sie?"

"Munich"

"Ah Munchen" I corrected him. (What?) He was in English speaking mode so the German didn't last long. He had two boys with him and they had only arrived a couple of days ago. The boys were in a little pop-up tent and he was struggling to sort out all their gear in a small VW low-roof camper with just a bed it seemed.

"Oh it's so cold!" It was evening, cloudy and not much above freezing.

The little villages and scattered farms remind me of Australia - the tin roofs and concrete utilitarian houses. From what I've seen on the TV most arctic settlements look like this: streets laid out in grids, houses built for shelter not for appearance.

Then you get to the towns and there is much more visual appeal. Few are without one or two good  examples of modern architecture:

This is Dalvik, which like many of the towns round here is based on fish catching and whale watching:

None of them anywhere remind me of Britain and very little of the landscape - only the moorland.

But that's why I'm here. I want to experience a place that is utterly different.

Akureyri is near the end of one of the longest fjords - Eyafjordur and has a delta of the sort of marshland/grassland habitat that a nature reserve in Britain would give their eye teeth for - if indeed a reserve can have any kind of teeth.

As usual in this area, I'm the only person there, the sun is shining, and all around me are a host of birds. The air is full of their cries, all of them are worried about me in different ways. A little bit of me is concerned that I am disturbing them, but I am much less of a threat than a dog or a fox would be and it just feels so good to be tramping out in this cold clear wide-open space.

The greylag geese sit on the water and move warily parallel to me. When they get uncomfortable they all take to the sky with honking away and looking like a Peter Scott painting:

Every hundred metres or so there is a pair of redshank, and  it is their plaintive peeping which is so evocative of estuaries and wild seashores at home. Like most birds they have a wide repertoire of calls, and these are very loud and delivered while circling round my position.

I assume they have chicks nearby and are telling them:

"You just keep your heads down. Don't move. There's a human here and you never know with humans what they might do next". I hope they reassured them after I passed.

The arctic terns, if you get close to the nests, will attack, and can draw blood on hatless heads. Some came close but they knew I was a nice person. Then there are the gorgeous Godwits. They seem less concerned but still let out a really loud aggressive sound which the word peep doesn't do justice to. One of their calls reminds me of a small xylophone played very fast.  The Whimbrels - well they wimble, another sound which could be electronic. As for the phalaropes they are too sweet for words - tiny little birds, in flight a bit like hummingbirds. I can see their beaks opening but can't hear anything - must be too high even for my electronic ear to pick up. This is a phalarope on the left, Godwit on the right:

The strangest landscape was at Dimmuborgir on Myvatn, a big tick mark on the tourist trail. As Steingrimur the musician told me "It's like another planet". It's no wonder Iceland has been used for so many fantasy films. Here the volcanic activity had pushed up great chimneys of lava which had got craggy and wrinkled over the millennia. To make me feel more at home there is a big conservation programme under way to reclaim them for planet earth. Wind-blown sand was threatening to turn the area into (insert name of fantasy planet) so they've planted lots of marram grass and now the birch and willow is beginning to create a natural forest.

Dick and Mira had told me there was a white Gyr Falcon here but I didn't see one, or any bird except the usual redwing or two, but nevertheless really enjoyed a quite challenging 2 hour hike.   

Choosing which pictures to post and what to say turns out to be very time consuming, so I'll take a break now and get on with enjoying the land of Iceland.