Mommy mommy the mud is boiling!

There’s one last thing I wanted to blog from the Iceland trip. This is it.

Now, it would have been silly to visit Iceland and not see a geyser, right? So we set out to find one of these wonders. Right after our Yaris-experience we found one, but since it wasn’t one that was frequented by tourists it wasn’t being activated. They actually have to somehow get these things started for them to spew out water, god only know how. Perhaps they pour laundry detergent or sacrifice a seal in it or something… Since I’m too lazy to google this I will probably forever remain ignorant on this one topic.

Near to the geyser was a sign warning you about the heat, which actually was a bit unnecessary since there was steam rising out of the earth all over the place.

The geyser looked like a field of pock-marked ground, discolored in several interesting ways. The colors ranged from a poisonous-looking green through red and blue to white, and gave an indication of the amount of chemicals rising up from the earth. There was also a lot of steam and smoke all over the place, and the smell was quite nauseating. I would give a lot to know what the vikings were thinking when they first arrived here and saw this thing. Or christian missionaries in later years. This was a direct connection to hell if I ever saw one.

It was also quite astonishing to see that there were a lot of holes in the mud, and in those holes was boiling mud. Wow. Boiling mud!

Since I do not know the boiling point of mud I decided to not touch it even though it was very tempting. I’m sure this was wise. The Icelandic hospitals probably have a lot of nasty boiling mud-related incidents each year, and I didn’t want to add another stupid tourist to those statistics.

Here’s me standing on a platform that had been built on top of the geyser. What you probably can’t see from the photo is that I’m not breathing because of the quite intense smells emitting from the geyser… I hope the stench comes out of those pants.

These shots are available on flickr.