It is a wonderful evening, 20 something hours of sunshine and daylight the whole day. Clear days though often lead to clear and somewhat cold nights. I woke up to ice on the inside of the tent, and made a mental note to leave a flap open the next night to lessen the condensation build up.
When I said in my last blog that there was nothing for a 160kms, there was a petrol station, but not of the Wild Bean Cafe variety, just a shed and pump and no-one in attendance. So you really have to carry everything with you on your bike, all of the time, except for water – which is in abundance everywhere and very safe to drink.
Iceland sits amid the mid Atlantic ridge, the great undersea gash that separates the American and European continental tectonic plates. This means that the whole country is pretty raw and jagged, and looks as though it has just been made, infact it grows a couple of centimeters each each as the plates spread. There are volcanoes everywhere, some active and some dormant, not a day goes by when you don't see some steam rising from the earth. Iceland also has the most glaciers outside of Antarctica and Greenland – combine these two elements, heat and ice and you get a truly powerful landscape.
Iceland is also famous for its deserts, one in the north-east and one large one in the centre. I have just passed through the remote barren region of the north-east. It is what I would imagine the surface of the moon to look like. Dust, rocks, sand, mountains and craters. Everything is black, brown or grey. In the 12 hours it took to cross, we saw 5 cars, other than this we saw no-one (not even a tree to rest out bikes against!) This vast and empty landscape is truly humbling to experience, I read on a Tourist Information plaque the next day, that NASA had used the area to test the moon buggies for the Apollo lunar missions!
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