Globetrotting : Iceland

"If Icelanders were animals, we would be sheep", said an Icelandic magazine editor

The trip to Iceland was pretty eye-opening. Rough terrains, icy mountains, and unexpected gust. The hardest time to bear was the night out to hunt for the Northern Lights with the excursion tour. The wind was so strong, the surrounding was pitch black and the weather was extremely cold.

However, the night was pretty surreal. It was my second time to be able to look up to the clear starry sky, after my first, when I was in the National Service back in Malaysia.

Like how the caving instructor once said, "there is just too much light pollution nowadays. Finding a peaceful mind in a noisy world, or finding tranquility in the city, is impossible."

The Orion's Belt, the Ursa Major and many more unknown stars surrounding the moon. This reminded me how I love astronomy when I was younger, while I was reading the Rakan Sains magazines. Since then, hunting for amazing celestial events have been a dream in the heart.

Soon after, it was there. The Northern Light. The green dancing light appeared. It was as if the fluorescent green acrylic paints fell off from the palette of heaven. It got brighter. Then the reddish/ purple light emerged as well. The sky was full of dancing colours for a brief moment.

I still remembered the moment. Everyone punched his/her fist to the air and kept cheering, just like how we cheered when Lee Chong Wei won his badminton matches.

A Singaporean couple from NTU, who came to Europe for an exchange came to us and asked us whether we could take a picture of them with the Aurora. They didn't have a good camera to take with the beautiful landscape. So, we took for them. We hoped that this would be one of the best memories they share together in their lives.

Along the trip, we met this kind old man, who was the owner of the restaurant where we had one of our dinners. He gave us a souvenir, a picture of him when he was younger, and carrying an unknown species of fish. He reminded me of the book, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It seemed to me that the preserved fish could be his first catch when he became a fisherman. We didn't manage to get more out of his great stories because we couldn't speak Icelandic.

I wondered what were the stories behind his catch. A catch which he has kept for so many years.

But, yea that was Iceland for me. Full of folklore, the great fisherman stories, the amazing aurora and many more geographical miracles like the geysers, icy waterfalls, and the separation of tectonic plates. All the knowledge I learned in form 3 Geography kept flowing back. "kawasan tundra.." etc

"So, if the Icelanders are sheep, they are as gentle as a lamb. Those who survive since the Vikings, those who play the Icelandic Airwaves music, and of course those who still believe in the tales of Yule Lads and the age-old wisdom that the Vikings have bequeathed to the Land of Fire and Ice."