oy, i´m sorry this is my first real post in iceland, but there really aren´t internet cafes here, only exhorbitantly priced computer stations at the tourist center where a million people are crowded around to book their tour for the golden circle. anyway, i shall start with yesterday, a near perfect day, and work my way backwards to cover the beginning in due time. yesterday i rode icelandic horses!!! it was a 3 hour tour with a company called Ishestar (hestar meaning horse) that has a farm of 80 icelandic horses....little guys, sturdy and adorable, with thick fur and shaggy manes, all descendants of the original viking horses due to a ban on the import of foreign horses that has been maintained for centuries. the farm is only about 20 km outisde of reykjavik. i was on a little dark brown mare named prithi who is about half the size of patrick. we rode out through the moss-covered lava fields of the reykjanes preservation area, over a river, and to the base of mt helgafell, an old volcano. the ground was soft and ashy and scattered with small pebbles of perforated hardened lava, with bigger black boulders covering the sloping base of the volcano. i saw my first three trolls among these boulders! the clouds were low and dark and dramatic, and spat rain for a bit. basically, it was perfect. as we we re ripping along (a relative term for someone who has spent ten years with an ex-racehorse), one of the other horses lost a shoe, so we had to turn back and wait around for a while while the horses grazed by the river until another horse was delivered from the farm. though i was disappointed at not being able to circumnavigate the volcano, the lost shoe was a bit of a boon, as we got to take another route after that, heading for greener pastures....the sun came out full force as we galloped through bright grassy hills and trees (there aren´t many of those here) and around a lake with children bathing and looked back at helgafell, still covered by dark cloud. having a cast didn´t matter one bit, even though i didn´t experience the famed fifth gait of the icelandic horse said to be so smooth one could carry a glass of champagne and not spill a drop. the whole thing was well worth my money, and brought me back to my magical teenage years with patrick all alone running the trails of rock creek park after school. everyone should have horses in their life, take every opportunity to smell them, touch them.
anyway, once i got back to the city, the weather was so unbelievably gorgeous after a few gray days. the clouds in iceland are always fabulous, whether the cover everything in a white fog or on a blue day billow above the bay, white with dark bellies. i started to wander around outside of downtown and found, of course, one of my favorite things to visit, a cemetery. compared to the clean, bright, simple architecture of the rest of reykjavik, this cemetery seemed more european, with its crooked trees growing out of graves and rusted iron and moss-covered stone. there´s something so particular about the light in cemeteries like these, it´s ability to penetrate the trees and cast long shadows of crosses and pillars on the occasional bright patch of grass. it always feels so peaceful, as it should.
i spent the rest of the day walking by water, first the lake and then the atlantic....where i sat on rocks by the bay in a sweatshirt and flannel reading until midnight by natural light and went to bed only because i got too cold.
what has been on my ipod during these wanderings? can you guess? i bet you can. the trifecta... what erin wrote on my cast the night before i left: 'holler bjork! (--sigur ros, mum.' cheesy to do this? i don´t think so, i am trying to make the connection between the music and the land. i hear it. this place is magical.
so...i leave tomorrow for helsinki and then riga. there is much more to tell about the other wonderful things i have done here, but let me reflect for a moment on those i have left undone, for i am a firm believer of the philosophy that one must always leave things undone in country one loves in order to have a reason to come back. i have not seen puffin nor whale nor glacier, and i have not seen the blue lagoon, and i have not tried putrid shark meat (sorry stephan)...but that reminds me, i did eat fish my first night here and...wait for it...three bites of BEEF. wow. next time i am in iceland, i will be in an off road vehicle seeing the remoter interior and driving the cicle of the entire coast.