Hope you are all doing well, that summer has kicked off to a great start and you are not dealing with freezing temps and snow in your may… Iceland sucks. so boring: these massive ice choked fjords whipped up by brisk northern winds, often painted tangerine or purple from a setting sun that finally sinks into the sea around midnight for a couple hours; boiling geysirs and steam rolling out of the earth at any given point, dotting the horizon with peculiar clouds that seem to fill the hills and dales with wispy tufts of smoke; an ever shifting landscape scraped into ridiculous enormities and thinnings of molten crust by ancient glaciers now holed up in a few corners of the country; emerald slopes stand in stark contrast to barren/tundra-esque highlands, dotted by pearl lakes and off in the distance you can make out massive cones of snow and ice, sprialling out from massive blankets of glacier, so enormous you think you are looking at sky but it is all untouched glacial sheets; the most perfectly healthy and beautiful stout horses, with glorious flowing manes, longer and softer than any I have seen before, graze next to thundering waterfalls that fill the otherwise crisp, silent air with a steady droning hum. Agh… you know how it is… Just been climbing mountains and eating and drinking strange concoctions of the sub-artic, getting in touch with my Icelandic roots (which seems to involve visiting subterranean homes built into the hillside and looking back in time through blood-curdling sagas), little bit of blasting across the country in the cousins´ mercedes or land rover (unexpected), mountain passes or coastal highways, its all the same dull scenery really. And well, tomorrow morning, I think we will head to Grimsey by boat, it is the northernmost inhabited region of iceland, a 4 square kilometer island just above the arctic circle where puffins and terns outnumber humans some 1000 to 1. Were gonna set up camp and spend a couple nights with the avian species and handful of animated locals, the arctic ocean crashing against the basalt cliffs, a midnight sun hovering over the ocean´s surface, threatening to set but instead painting mainland iceland (some 20 kilometers south) in a violet haze. Just the worst kind of camping. Afterwards we are visiting Hrisey, an island at the mouth of the fjord my cousins´ live in (Akureyri, where I currently am) that my old man lived on and fished from, I think we´re crashing with his old skipper and taking off next week in his fishing boat northeast towards Flatey island, a favorite among the local populace for “getting away”, the surrounding waters of which serve as the highest concentrations of Minke and Humpback whales in Iceland. And after that, we borrow a car and spend a dozen days circumnavigating the country… Really though, You wouldn´t like it!