What a difference a night makes! When we got out at 5.45, it was pouring rain. But we didn’t come to Iceland to sleep in, so we drove to Jökulsárlón and got to see the beach in a completely different light (literally!). I was super-careful to keep away from the waves and that shows, my pictures aren’t anything to cheer about… but I wanted to concentrate on catching the power of the waves anyway instead of getting close to them. I’m just not used to oceans at all, so I spent much of the morning just looking at the waves rolling in and being amazed at how the waves picked up the sand so you could see that the wave had a black core (which you can see in the picture below as well).
When we and our gear were sufficiently wet, we drove back to the guesthouse for breakfast and to dry up. And after a couple of hours, we were back on the road again, trying to find something that would work in these epic Icelandic conditions where the wind blows so hard that you can’t stand up straight and you have to walk backwards because the rain hurts too much when it hits your face. Needless to say that it made photography a big challenge and I didn’t get much done, just a snapshot from this big canyon and a few frames from Eldhraun, which is a huge area of lava rocks covered with moss.
What surprised me about Iceland is how green it is. Most of the green is courtesy of this moss that covers lava fields and Eldhraun is a prime example. I tried to walk in the field but I felt so bad when I saw how the moss was breaking under my foot that I stayed on the road. You can see the footprints of other people in the middle here. You can also just barely make out the mountains in the background and I can tell you that it’s not fog or low clouds that does it – it’s just rain.
