Iceland, Land of Fire and Ice - part 1
It was early April when I first started playing with the idea of doing a weeklong photo-adventure to the Northern Atlantic country of Iceland. After several months of looking up good shooting locations on Google Earth and using the free iPad app, Stuck on Earth; I decided to limit myself to part of the Central highlands (near Landmannalaugar) and to the Southern coastal area.
Even though the Northern European country of Iceland is more than 3 times as large as my home country Belgium, it only has a total population of 320.000. In contrast, Belgium has over 11.000.000 inhabitants! Adding that 200.000 of the total population live in the wider Reykajvik area, one can imagine that the remainder of the place is pretty much "empty"!
Beside having big financial troubles in 2008, Iceland is recently best known as the "volcano island", after the Eyjafjallajökull closed large parts of the European airspace system in 2010. In one of the next parts of the blogseries, you will see where the "Ice" part comes from in Iceland's nickname: Land of Fire and Ice.
Most tourists limit themselves to driving the Route 1 also called the "ringroad". This 1300km hard paved road takes you all the way around the island with some pretty nice scenery along the way. Wanting to explore the even more remote parts of the country I knew early on that a 4x4 would be needed... In hindsight this has proved to be very valuable!
As a relatively experienced off-road driver on sand and rocks, crossing the first few rivers was an interesting experience. Not for the faint hearted...
While hydro-power plays a large role in Iceland's energy providers, over 90% of the households use geothermal energy to heat their homes. There are plans to make Iceland a 100% fossil free nation in the near future!
Even though Iceland is officially not part of Scandinavia, one can often see the influence of these Northern European countries in the Architectural style etc...
On the second part of the Land of Fire and Ice series, I'll take you to the spectacular area of Landmannalaugar and we will have a look at some of the more interesting waterfalls.
More images of my amazing trip to Iceland can be found here, however at this time only a small number have been edited and uploaded. Please make sure, you revisit to see more in the coming days...
Till then, remember; "Wherever you go, there you are"
BJORN
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