Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.11.2013, Blaðsíða 29

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29 Travel The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 17 — 2013
Fifty kilometres north of Iceland’s Þingvellir National Park, a drop of water
melts from the glacier Lángjökull, liberated from the 1,000-year-old frozen
mass. The drop falls into porous, volcanic rock where it spends 30 to 100
years being filtered through the ground until it emerges into the cracks and
fissures that skirt Þingvellir lake. By the time it reaches these fissures and
this lake, it is some of the most pristine water in the world.
The most notable fissure to be found along Þingvel-
lir lake is the Silfra fissure, a rift in the earth’s crust
between the North American and Eurasian tectonic
plates. When you step into the near-freezing water of
the Silfra fissure as a diver or snorkeler, you are liter-
ally stepping between two continents. This is a dark,
cold and spectacular place.
Suiting up
The difference between a national park in Iceland
and the rest of rural Iceland is subtle. When the van
toting a group of five middle-age Danish women and
I arrived at Þingvellir, I hadn’t actually realised that
we’d entered a national park. It was winter, the sky
was grey and the water reflected it. The landscape
around the lake is sparse and volcanic, surrounded
by distant snow-topped mountains and plateaus. It’s
otherworldly in the way that the Icelandic landscape
demands you acknowledge something in its nothing-
ness.
There are things that sound more appealing on
a winter’s morning in Iceland than jumping into water
that is 2°C. We stayed in the heated van for as long as
possible, took instructions from one of our snorkel-
ling guides in the van, learned how to suit up in our
dry suits in the van and then we were cut loose to
dress ourselves in a thick, down onesie that made us
all look doughy. Over that we put on bulky dry suits
and pushed our bowling ball heads through a latex
collar the width of a CD. We pulled on neoprene div-
ing hoods that covered the top of our heads and our
necks and squeezed our hands into neoprene gloves.
Right before diving into the water we put on snorkel-
ling goggles, stuck a breathing tube in our mouths
and then flopped in with our flippers.
To understand the initial shock of that water on
your face, your lips, your head and your hands, you
have to understand that neoprene is wetsuit material,
not drysuit material like the rest of the get-up. Those
parts of the body protected by neoprene get wet and
there is really no relief for your hands during the 30
to 40 minute submersion. Your lips lose feeling fast
and you won’t be bothered, but the hands remain icy
limbs that you can only hope to forget about while
you take in your surroundings.
Beneath the surface
The water that on the surface had looked rather dull
was surreal from beneath. Visibility in the fissure is
around 100 metres and we were reminded that in
the ocean, on a good day, it’s about 30 metres. The
deepest most mind-bending blues—Super Man blue
to glacial, icy blue to a dark, starry night blue—were
all represented at various depths. The fissure is quite
shallow at parts and reaches 63 metres down at its
deepest. Scuba divers that come here get to go lower
into the divide but visibility is so great that all who
look beneath the surface see the bottom.
Small bits of algae dance suspended in front of
you, writhing slowly to the backdrop of the dim light
filtered through from the sky. When you hold your
breath and lose the trail of the person in front of you it
is so quiet and so isolating. From what I’ve heard and
read about sensory deprivation tanks—the feeling of
floating in an abyss, of mental wandering, of medita-
tive peace—this could be very similar. The lava rock
walls are covered with a translucent, orange algae
that looks like the skin of a jellyfish. This is the only life
most snorkelers and divers see in Silfra. Occasionally
a trout will swim in, but even that is rare.
Very little swimming is done along the journey. A
slow and steady current carries you through most of
the fissure to the final ‘lagoon,’ a 120-metre long pool
where we exited the water onto land. While everyone
walked around, shaking out their hands to try and re-
gain some feeling, our guide told us that we still had
one more aquatic emersion ahead of us.
We walked to a rock ledge that was about four
metres above another small pool of water in the fis-
sure, and took turns jumping in without goggles or
breathing tubes or flippers. I thought that any traces
of sleepiness had escaped me when I initially entered
the water for the snorkelling journey, but few things
wake you up as instantly as icy water pouring into
your ears and your eyes and your nose on high im-
pact. The pure beauty, and untainted taste and feel-
ing of that water is somewhere between invigorating
and electrifying and I literally gulped it up as I made
my last swim back to land.
Elli Thor
Words
Alex Baumhardt