For the Christmas/New Year holiday season, R — my wife and travel companion — and I flew to Reykjavik for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see our favourite band, Sigur Ros, and some of their closest artsy friends party it up at the first Norður og Niður, North and Down (“Straight to Hell”) festival. In the process, we hoped to enjoy a little winter wonderland, chase the aurora, and field test our iPhone Xs as travel cameras.
So late in December, we winged it from a balmy and blue-skied Tokyo, north, north, north, above frozen Russia and Scandinavia, almost to the Arctic Circle and Santa Claus country.
Lit. Go North and go down; fig. “Everything’s going to hell”
A dream come true! Our all-time favourite band, Sigur Ros, play their first concert in their hometown of Reykjavik for the first time in years. And not just any old end-of-tour concert, but a whole festival of music and art from the band themselves and all their friends and collaborators…
I shot this series of “skyscape” pictures over Sweden on a recent SAS flight from Tokyo to Copenhagen. I recently received an iPhone X — my first smartphone! — as a Christmas present, and I’ve been eager to play with the camera in particular.
In late June, I swung a three-night stopover en route from Tokyo to Toronto. As R and I already planned a self-drive adventure further afield in July, I would explore Reykjavik instead, drifting around town with a camera in hand and nowhere to be, nothing to do for 72 hours…
A triptych of essays set in — or on the road to — Ontario’s “sweetwater sea”
Part One: Day-Tripping Flowerpot Island, the Bruce Trail, The Grotto, and Overhanging Point on southern Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula
The Bruce Peninsula in southern Ontario separates the cooler waters of Georgian Bay from the rest of Lake Huron’s “sweetwater sea,” and makes of the Bay an unofficial, sixth Great Lake. It’s the kind of iconic Canadian landscape that drove artists such as Arthur Lismer and the other Group of Seven painters wild.
The rugged, 100-kilometre finger of pine-studded shale and limestone, set amidst the granite and precambrian rock of Shield country, points northward from the rolling hills of southwest Ontario’s farm country, all head-high corn and sulphur-bright canola, through Boreal Shield country and towns with names like Kapuskaping. North north north, to Moosonee and the wetland plains of Hudson Bay and, somewhere way up there, the beluga-backed Arctic Ocean…
I have visited Iceland twice now, in late spring two years ago and again this year at the height of summer. I blogged before, during, and after my travels, including such random trip planning resources as inspirational music videos and good reading. Now Im work on a landscape photo essay about this summer’s trip. Meantime, check out my trip reoprts and travel resources at Iceland: Emotional Landscapeshttps://medium.com/iceland-emotional-landscapes
Candid travel photographs in the cold and the rain from my – ongoing – summer trip to Toronto, Ontario, a.k.a. (among others) CondoToronto – and rightfully so! Toronto often gets knocked for being an ersatz city, lacking any real sense of place. That “There is no there there,” as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland. In this photo essay I go looking for T.O.’s genius loci – and find it there, among the historic brick buildings and glass-and-steel skyscrapers. https://medium.com/@aaronpaulson/toronto-kills-me-a8e9b799da5
To kick off a new photo gallery project, the eponymous Exit Booted (but now on Medium.com), I’ve uploaded sets of photos from the summers I spent in Spain and Portugal in the mid-2000’s.
I’ll add more sets from my world travels as I continue to work my way through my photo library. Next stop: Siem Reap and the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia. But first, back to Iberia 2004/2005…
Cool beans! Not exactly sure how to take this – ‘though the expression “with a grain of salt” jumps to mind – but apparently I have earned “suggested writer” status in the Travel section on Medium.com.
I’m genuinely flattered, and it makes me want to sit down and write more essays and stories and publish them online, though to be honest I’m not sure what, exactly, it means to be a suggested writer. Is it a decision made by a cabal of wise gnomes at Medium.com, or is it some less-personal, more automated process, an algorithmic accretion of views/reads/recommends?
In either case, I’ll put aside the salt for a moment, as well as the self-deprecating humour, and take the credit gracefully and gratefully.
Abraham Ortelius’ Islandia circa 1590, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Ultima Thule: “beyond the borders of the known world”
Pining for the fjords, thoughts of a summer in Iceland send my Nordic heart a-viking…
This summer we celebrate my partner R.’s 50th birthday by traveling north north north, almost to the Arctic Circle, to Iceland – land of fire and ice. We’ll spend a week with camera and notebook exploring Iceland’s insomniac landscapes under a midnight sun. If I can stay awake: there’s a nine-hour time difference between Tokyo and Reykjavik.
R. and I first visited a couple of years ago in spring, a trip that was one part intervention into the ever-widening gyre of our stressed, workaholic lives in Tokyo, and one part mad dash to catch the aurora during the vernal equinox (R. got pics; I slept through it).
We couldn’t get enough of Iceland’s austere, astringent beauty: the glassy fjords, active volcanoes, creeping glaciers, and haunted wastelands. We vowed a return trip, as we do every time we spend a few days in a place that needs a lifetime to explore (which is every place…)
And this time, we mean it. With a little out-of-the-box thinking, I re-routed my annual migration route from Tokyo to Toronto to include stopovers both ways in Reykjavik, coming and going.
On the first leg, I’ll have a few days alone to get over jet lag and explore Reykjavik. I look forward to some time just to wander the small city with a camera.
On the stopover on the return flight to Tokyo I’ll meet R. for a week of independent car touring in the west and north.
So, on a weekend in late January we put on some appropriate Icelandic music (“Little Talks,” Of Monsters and Men) and start to plan… and quickly discover that, if anything, Iceland is almost too much on the tourist map these days. A half-year out, and already we find ourselves scrambling after quickly filling flights and hotel rooms.
Seats on flights from Tokyo to Reykjavik via Copenhagen on SAS and Icelandair were no problem, but it’s a different story from Reykjavik to Toronto. I just barely managed to get on board the flight I wanted. And what started as a casual browse for accommodations turned into a panic attack when room availability in Vik, one of the towns we wanted to use as a base to explore the south, was already nul. Even big-city Reykjavik (population about 119,000) is already more than a third full: 38% in June, when I first arrive; 44% in July, on the return flight to Tokyo.
Then, as we continue to research, we realize that maybe we shouldn’t rely exclusively on one travel site such as Booking.com: yes, the room rates might be lower than if we contact places directly, and it’s helpful to see what availability is like in real time, but the travel site seems to fill up faster than the hotels themselves. After an initial panic-driven flurry of reservations to make sure we’d have somewhere to stay in high-season July, we check at the source several listings which previously seemed off-limits… and manage to upgrade several of the small rooms with shared baths we’d been consigned to, to larger rooms with private baths.
Lesson learned: don’t get lazy and rely on the convenience of a single travel site: shop around.
So after a few weeks of intense planning, booking, and booking again, we’ve got our itinerary for a weeklong (10 days, in my case) trip to Iceland in June and July:
I will arrive in Reykjavik the third week in June and spend a few days solo in the city. I don’t have a definite plan at this point, other than to walk around town with my camera – hopefully to catch some of the sites, such as the volcano-inspired Hallgrímskirkja church and harbour-side Sun Voyager sculpture illuminated in polar “white night” 24-hour sunlight. Then again, the last time I was in Iceland I managed to sleep through the aurora lightshow, so I don’t know how much I’ll get to see of the midnight sun…
A few weeks later, mid-July, I’ll return to Reykjavik from Toronto (about a six hour flight) and meet R’s flight from Tokyo. Then we’ll rent a car – two-wheel drive, not four – to explore.
One of the best things about travel is the anticipation, the planning of the trip. Because we toured Iceland on that aurora-hunting expedition a few years ago, mostly around the “Golden Circle” route in southwest Iceland, this trip we’re gonna stretch things out a bit and hit some specific destinations which have been on our list:
Landmannalaugar for day hikes through colourful rhyolite mountains and lava fields.
“Diamond Circle:” the town of Akureyri near the Arctic Circle; geologically active Lake Myvatn; and the powerful Dettifoss waterfall
The fjords of the Snaefellsnes peninsula, including the town of Gundarfjordor and Kirkjufell mountain
A half day in Reykjavik for shopping
A road trip south, including Seljelandsfoss, Black Sand Beach and the town of Vik, Svartifoss and Vatnajökull National Park; Jokulsarlon lagoon; the Glacier Kayak Adventure at Heinaberg Lagoon
The double rainbow – if we’re lucky – of Skogafoss waterfall, near the south coast
And as a send-off, before a 15-hour return flight to Tokyo, we’ll indulge in the silica mud baths of the Blue Lagoon.
That’s the plan so far, and travel to Iceland being as popular as it is, we’ve already had to make reservations for all nights’ accommodations and most activities, though we can probably hold off on booking a time at the Blue Lagoon until we’re in-country.
So in the meantime, there’s a lot of great Icelandic music to listen to (see links to a couple of current faves, below), as well as some reading up to do…
I shot this series of “skyscape” pictures over Sweden on a recent SAS flight from Tokyo to Copenhagen. I recently received an iPhone X — my first smartphone! — as a Christmas present, and I’ve been eager to play with the camera in particular.
Exit Booted 