I'm in the northern part of Iceland right now doing a Vivation training, and the place here is spectacular and beautiful, fantastically green and desolate. Although it's one of the greenest places I've ever been, there are almost no trees. To change this Icelanders have over the last 30 years been planting trees all over the country. I saw over a million trees fully mature trees spread out over several square kilometers near Akureyri. It was an impressive sight to see a regrown forest that wasn't there 30 years earlier! I've taken almost 400 pictures so far… too many to share (so I've put them up on Facebook). In Sauðárkrókur, where I'm staying, the whole town goes to the beach to June 20/21 to watch the sun almost set, then rise back up again for a day that never ends. It's 24 hours of daylight, and the first day of summer. This "afternoon" party starts around 9pm and goes to 6am. They watch as the sun goes half-way below the ocean horizon before rising again into the "morning" sky.
Me above Sauðárkrókur, on the far north of Iceland, almost exactly on the Arctic Circle. It looks like it's 3 in the afternoon, but this shot was taken around 8 pm!
Here I am sitting on the most amazing bed of soft fern like foliage. It's hard to describe, but it's like green leaf sponge.I have no idea what it's called. Within a few hundred feet of me are millions of "artic" berries, what Icelanders call very berry berrries. They taste like a super blueberry! Yum!
The lights are going out in Iceland this week so people can gaze at the night sky.
Authorities in the capital Reykjavik will turn off street lights on Thursday evening and people are also being encouraged to sit in their houses in the dark, writer Andri Snaer Magnason said on Wednesday. While the lights are out, an astronomer will describe the night sky over national radio.
The event is part of a film festival taking place on the small north Atlantic island, which gets most of its electricity from abundant thermal energy. The lights are due to go off at 10 p.m. (2200 GMT), about two hours after nightfall, for half an hour.
Magnason said the capital's population of around 250,000 might be able to see the Northern Lights, a flickering curtain of light often seen in northern climes which is caused by solar particles being caught in the Earth's magnetic field. Two other Icelandic towns will also turn off their lights.