They say if you don't like the weather in Iceland, wait 10 minutes. There's then usually a small pause into which a polite giggle should be offered. Local humour! Anyway, four seasons in one day? Well not quite, but certainly the word 'changeable' is up there, along with many others, most of them less than favourable. Which is a shame, because the weather is a fundamental part of the Icelandic experience. You come here for 'experiences', apparently. I like a bit of weather, and on this trip there's been a fair amount of it.
It rarely rains down here. Mostly sideways, and on occassions, up! Whatever, it's always in your face irrespective of where you point it. It means, therefore, if you intend on running, say at 6.00am, you are going to get wet and it will be dark. Sunrise is around 11.00am this week, sunset shortly after. Words like dark and wet are hard to avoid, a little like asking if the Pope is Catholic or if Bears shit in the woods. But my goodness, it's been dark and wet. So I took a run out towards the lighthouse to the very west of Reykjavik, by the golf course.
On your way out there, the houses stop and so too do the streetlights. Then it's just you and the head torch. And the wind and the rain, but that's a given, remember. Like the boy I am, there's that irresistible urge to turn the torch off...just to see how dark it really is. It was really dark! Dark enough to induce a small and hopefully private panic where I'm fumbling with a degree of comic urgency for the on-switch of my torch. The lighthouse is just a small speck of intermittent light (look closely) as its beam whips by.
It was the sort of dark like someone had just put a tight fitting box over your head. Not how you might imagine, where your eyes are left to relax and gaze into a soft and inviting blackness that lasts forever. No, this was an unpleasant poke in the eye darkness, coupled with the sound of crashing waves close by and the recollection of a sign that said something like 'beware of the tide, it's coming to get you' as I started to traverse the narrow causeway toward the lighthouse. Had I been a bit of an idiot, I was starting to think?
The thing is, I've been here before, in the day, or rather during the light. In summer, it's always day, even at night! And it's fine. I know where I am, and how to get back. I think I was just surprised at how dark it really was, not what I was expecting, and I felt a little vaulnerable. The run back to town is good. And you can see how they use the dark days and nights here to illuminate the beauty that in summer shines in an altogether different way. The Viking Ship, for example, almost how I remember it, but missing something.
