The ride between the airport and Reykjavik is through a surreal moonscape, all black rocks and thick green lichen. It's a landscape that lends itself to darker skies, and the way that the sky is a freshly scrubbed shade of blue makes the ground look all the stranger. These are rocks that take all the light and give none of it back.
Iceland is a place where the Earth shows all its seams, slowly tearing apart where the North American Plate and the Eurasian Plate meet. All the way through the country the ground steams, hinting at just how close to the surface the center really is. In some places it seems as though you could look into one of those cracks and straight down to the middle. Jules Verne started the journey to the center of the Earth in Iceland, and it's obvious why.
On Sunday we took a fourteen hour ride over the south coast and back, landing at the midpoint in a lagoon where parts of the glacier break off and become icebergs. As we were leaving the lagoon our tour guide gestured offhandedly at the seawall across the street and mentioned that there was no land between where we were right then and Antarctica. No land, and an entire planet.
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