Photo Link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/YK6amh5q5SbPj4ER6
When I sent my northern lights pictures to my grandma over WhatsApp, she responded with a voice message (since it’s easier for her to speak in Tamil than type in English) that I am “the luckiest boy in the world”. It made me take a step back and realize that over the past 2.5 years, I have seen so, so many cool natural phenomena – the Tibetan Plateau in Ladakh, the soaring and desolate lands of Tajikistan, Volcan Fuego in Guatemala, wild mountain gorillas in the mist in Uganda, the Great Migration in the Masai Mara (granted, this was pre-retirement), wildlife in the Serengeti, climbing Kilimanjaro, the sand dunes of Namibia, the deserts of Jordan, swimming in the Devil’s Pool on top of Victoria Falls, horseback trekking through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, and now the Northern Lights in Iceland. Whenever I stop and think, I do realize just how many incredible things I have seen, and how many more incredible things that are out there that I have yet to see…paraphrasing what Calvin once told Hobbes, it really is a magical world out there that is worth exploring. And I think I’ve done a fairly good job of responding to “setbacks”, if that is even the right word here – got to visit Iceland after my tiger safari plans in India fell through, only visited sub-Saharan Africa after Ukraine last year because that was the only area of the world open, and not moping around after COVID struck and getting in shape for the first time in my life, which has enabled me to see many of these things. Though I will say, I strongly dislike the notion that what I am doing is in any way spectacular or out of the ordinary. What I have *seen* and *experienced* is, but anyone without college debt and family/personal health issues (which is a good portion of the people I know) can do what I’m doing…hell, I “only” saved 80k USD for all of this and I’m fairly certain most of my high school and college acquaintances can get that much and more in savings somewhat easily, especially since I never earned more than 80k USD a year (and that’s really 62k pre-tax since I was deferring 18k/year to my 401k). If you *really* want to travel, it only takes the willingness to sacrifice future income and status, which for me is easy since I can live spartan very happily. And besides, I know that I will never have to worry about starving or homelessness because of my parents in New York and extended family in India, which is an excellent luxury to have, but one that most people I know also have. I also have a nest egg of 150k+ in my 401k thanks to my prior employer’s insane 40% match, so that also doubles as an emergency fund for life I guess?
Iceland was a great, great experience. To be honest, I’m actually surprised it lived up to the hype – I feel like a lot of these “du jour” places that American yuppies rotate through and go to en masse each year, like Lisbon, wind up inevitably disappointing (though I haven’t been to Portugal, it just looks so aggressively “eh”). I swear one summer I knew 10+ different people, none of whom knew each other, in Lisbon at the same time. And ditto for Iceland the previous year. To be fair, I do think that had I visited in the summer, it would have been a classic “good but not great” country – sort of like a better Scotland. But in the winter, it is majestic. Everything is blanketed in snow, so as you drive around the country all you see are giant hills and small mountains as white as can be. It truly felt like the ultimate polar landscape, almost everything I could have imagined. I’d confidently place Iceland behind Ladakh and Tajikistan but right up there in the next tier for me in terms of pure, unadulterated natural beauty – I’m a sucker for desolation and the barrenness of Iceland certainly increased my appreciation for the country. Definitely the coldest place I have visited yet, with windchill consistently hitting -20 celsius (I am a full time convert to the metric system now), and all my gear was just about enough to get by – I wore my athletic leggings, then my wool leggings, then one of my two thin, water-resistant hiking pants. Wore a regular pair of socks, then thick wool socks, all in my insulated cold-weather hiking boots. Only had two hiking tshirts so wore both, and then my light down jacket and then water-proof outer shell layer. Also had a neck buff, a wool hat, and thin water resistant gloves. And I wore my thicker mask to double as a scarf. Really just my forehead and fingers were exposed in this getup – not bad for what is effectively travel gear packed for efficiency vs arctic comfort…besides this, I just had 4 collared tshirts for casual wear (which I always wear with one of my two hiking pants).
The only reason I last minute decided on Iceland was because my friend Brad went here for a week with his girlfriend literally a few weeks ago, at the end of January. His pictures were cool, he gushed about it, and I needed something to do relatively quickly before coming home for my booster/seeing family and friends before a Puerto Rico wedding and then South America. So it was a confluence of factors that just lined up perfectly. Really the only negative of the entire country was the exorbitant prices…in other expensive places like London and Paris, a bakery meal was the cheap way to eat, and that would cost no more than 5 USD for a few delicious items. Here, the same meal was closer to 15 USD. Restaurants were easily all 25+ USD at a minimum and that was the cheapest spots (2 slices of pizza and a cookie at Sbarro’s was over 15 USD…), where “decent” restaurants would run well over 40 USD, so I wound up eating convenience store sandwiches (like 8 USD vs 4 USD in England for Pret, which is also way higher quality) and gas station hot dogs (~3 USD a pop, by far the cheapest hot food in the country) way more than I would have liked. And unlike the cheap bakery food in the rest of Europe, this stuff was purely sustenance and highly mediocre. Even my tours were quite pricey…given the winter road conditions, I opted to do day tours based in Reykjavik instead of renting a car. Besides, the cost to solo rent without splitting was, as you can imagine, not worth it at all.
The first day really kicked off the trip in style. Did a five+ hour glacier hike on Solheimajokull glacier, which was my first time hiking with crampons. I was honestly shocked at how “easy” it was to hike with crampons – this was a legit glacier that is around 200m thick with ice, yet I was able hike normally. Only difference is that each step has a bit more force in it, and you need to land your feet flat when going both up and downhill (instead of walking heel first like normal) to get all the spikes in the ice. But the dissonance between expecting to slip when walking up and down steep slopes of pure, blue ice versus the ease of actually doing so with crampons blew my mind every time I took a step. Speaking of the blue ice…the glacier was a perfect sky blue, since glacier ice is compacted snow, which is blue, while “regular” ice is just frozen water, which is clear/white. The bits of clear that you see in the blue ice are actually air bubbles (like what most of what regular ice is, hence the clearness). Just such a surreal setting. While doing this hike in regular conditions – so identical elevation and distance, but on land – would have been a piece of cake, it was actually mildly tiring because it was a glacier. I think the main thing here is that the cumulative force of every single step (the not-quite stomping while walking) adds up. While on this 5 hour adventure, we came across a handful of tiny tunnels that we could crawl through – this was definitely my favorite part. Sort of like a mini ice cave, it was so surreal to just crawl on all fours inside random pathways inside a glacier. And these pathways come and go throughout the year…obviously nothing is permanent. The inside is just the purest blue imaginable as well. There were also tons and tons of sky blue glacier cliffs and sky blue rolling hills. A lot of it was covered in snow from the storm that happened a few days before I arrived, so the glacier wasn’t as blindingly blue as it could have been, but it was still an amazing view. The glacier was almost like an exaggerated version of the country as a whole – just a breathtaking, endless expanse of snowscapes with rugged mountains and giant round hills in every direction (only in this case, the “hills” were all pure ice). It has me really hyped up for the glacier hike I’m scheduled to do in Argentinian Patagonia next month.
The next day was the classic Golden Circle tour, which to be frank, was a little underwhelming. We saw this national park that had a great sunrise vista but nothing much else (it did have the tectonic plate boundary but that honestly just looked like a set of small inconsequential cliffs), then a geyser that was like a worse version of Yellowstone (and I thought Yellowstone highkey sucked), and then this set of waterfalls that was cool, but I think for waterfalls to wow me they have to be *magnificent* like Victoria Falls was, and these were squarely “good but not great”.
That night, however, was incomparable. It was the only clear night in the week before and the week after, so I got so incredibly lucky with my timing for the Northern Lights. Had we not seen it, I would have gotten free rebooks every night until seeing it, but as every night before and after for a considerable period was super cloudy and stormy, all those trips were either cancelled or very mediocre sightings, from speaking to other people at the hostel. We drove out to a field and for the entire hour+ we were out there, there was a giant, rainbow-like arch of the lights in the sky. Usually they apparently come and go, but this was here the entire time. The shapes would slowly change, and you could see the lights dance around. To be fair, in person, the lights are a strong offwhite color with the mildest hint of a dull green, but in this specific case you know it’s the lights based off the shape, luminescence, and dancing behavior. The name “Northern Lights” certainly makes sense as it’s more fluorescent than anything else. Cameras really just bring out the green color. The guides were saying that on cloudy days, it’s sometimes hard to differentiate the lights from the clouds, so again, very lucky with my totally clear sky. Before going, I googled the ideal camera settings and set them up on my camera. The article did note that you might have to adjust based off of how the lights actually show up, but it was honestly way too cold and windy outside for me to bother adjusting with these settings that I had only just learned about (and besides, I would have had to use my headlamp which would have added light pollution for all the other people taking their own photos). So as a result, while my photos did turn out pretty good, they are definitely on the blurrier side. Overall, still thrilled with them and the experience was incredible. Towards the end of our time out on the field, there was this massive “explosion” and the entire sky lit up with these dancing lights, and you could even see faint traces of purple and pink with your naked eye…this was the one case where live viewing was better than the pictures and videos. The photos only captured what looked like flames of green and yellow, which still looked very badass (and a bit like the Kings Landing flames in Game of Thrones). Just such an amazing and unique experience. In terms of pure nature, up there with the Acatenango hike to see Fuego erupt in Guatemala for me. Not to nitpick, but besides my camera settings, the only two things I would have changed about this would have been to have a more dramatic backdrop (we were in an open field, would have been amazing to have mountains in front of the lights), and again, the bane of my outdoor existence, the full moon. I absolutely despise full moons and this was no different – added a ton of light pollution and hid away all of the stars.
To be honest, the hike and northern lights alone made Iceland worth it. The next day, I did a tour of southern Iceland, which included seeing a couple of dramatic waterfalls that in my opinion were more picturesque than the more famous Golden Circle one, as well as a surprisingly neat black sand beach with cool volcanic formations. Like the Golden Circle day, this was a bit “eh”, but still glad I saw it. I guess it’s just hard to follow up on the Northern Lights and glacier hiking.
While the main highlighted stops on the Golden Circle and South Coast tours were only OK for me, the best part of both these tours was the landscapes. As mentioned above, just an endless expanse of white with towering mounds all around you, and the occasional jagged mountain. I love the feeling of driving in a giant vehicle while feeling dwarfed by the surroundings – really drives home how inconsequential we are. There were glaciers and volcanoes galore, all blanketed in a perfect white snow. It was a winter wonderland. And in an added similarity to Scotland, you could see the impact Norse mythology here had on Gaelic mythology there – instead of faeries and giants in Skye, you had elves and trolls here in Iceland, all playing the same exact role. I also couldn’t help but envision Norse mythology during this entire trip, especially recalling the PS4 God of War game that I played last spring/summer.
I had a tour booked the following day for a peninsula to the northwest of Reykjavik, but that got cancelled due to an incoming blizzard. Would have been neat to see, especially the tall conical mountain Kirkjufell which is featured in Game of Thrones in the lands beyond the wall, but I was still very happy with my Iceland experience and at least got a full refund out of this. This gave me more time than I had planned for Reykjavik, and to be perfectly blunt, Reykjavik was a thoroughly mediocre city. Not really worth more than a few hours, but it’s obviously a good base to see the rest of the country. I could have extended my trip in Iceland and done more activities but didn’t think it was worth the cost – tons of cool stuff, like snowmobiling on glaciers, ice climbing (which I would LOVE to do but my boots aren’t correct for, so there’s an extra cost for a boot rental), and further ice cave exploring (I was happy enough with my ice tunnels that I crawled through during my hike), but honestly, each one of these activities was 250+ USD so I had to call it somewhere, and again, I was more than happy with my glacier hike and northern lights experience so I feel like I could leave Iceland on a high just from that.
On my final night, I actually got dinner with my friend Amar and his wife – they just got married in Oct while I was in Iraq,, and had landed that morning for their own Iceland winter vacation. So my parents actually rented out a single room in his parents’ house back in the 80s when they first got married and lived in the US, and his parents actually still live in that house. My parents would eventually buy an apartment down the block from his parents’ place in Kew Gardens, Queens (which is where we lived until 1999, moving to Manhasset), and his parents babysat me for a couple of years, when I was like 2 to 4 years old. Amar is a few years older than me, but he’s really like the first person my age I even remember meeting. I had posted on my Instagram story how I’d be home in NY for a bit, and he messaged saying he was getting into Iceland the day before my flight, so we coordinated to get dinner that night. His wife was vegetarian so we went to a noodle shop, and this was my second proper hot meal of the entire trip (the first being lunch in the town of Vik, near the black sand beach).
So after this, I’m flying back to NY for a couple of weeks. Getting my booster shot since a lot of countries are starting to require boosters for the J&J vax to be “fully” vaccinated, and obviously seeing my parents and sister along with some friends in NYC. Then flying to Puerto Rico for my friend Tim’s wedding (I actually met up with him and his wife-to-be in Bangkok waaay back in the end of 2019 when they were doing a SE Asia trip), and then in Argentinian Patagonia for 2 weeks with a high school friend of my college friend Kris, who I got to know well last year for Kris’ bachelor party and then his wedding. Plan is to hang out in South America and maybe Central America (really just Nicaragua is on my must-see list) until Burning Man, and then do my final year (time really flies).
Overall, I definitely saw a good chunk of what I really wanted to see in Europe the past few months. I “only” have ~18 months left so definitely trying to prioritize to a certain extent, but I would say the top places left in Europe I want to see are Trans-Nistria, Switzerland, Norway, and Germany (with other places like Transylvania, Sicily, and Poland also up there but not as “must-see” for me). And if we’re doing Europe-adjacent, I would say Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon and Syria. But I do think that for my final year I would love to focus in on Asia – more of India, Vietnam, more of Indonesia, and Japan/Taiwan/Hong Kong/South Korea/China – but that’s obviously very COVID dependent. New Zealand is also up there. And of course I know that there are plenty of spots that I won’t see that I will have the rest of my life to visit (when I have to deal with annoying realities like vacation days), like some of the places listed above along with places like Madagascar, Mali, Afghanistan, Antarctica, and Chile (which I most likely won’t see on this South American rodeo because of COVID restrictions).