Atlantica - 01.04.2006, Qupperneq 79

AT L A N T I CA 77
Just Another Day
It was one degree Celsius on a Wednesday and snow was blowing parallel with the ground when a
photographer and I arrived at 7am in the gravel parking lot at Jökulsárlón, Iceland’s spectacular and
well-known glacial lagoon. We were there to document and photograph a day’s worth of visitors to the
lagoon, whose white and turquoise icebergs you might recognize from Tomb Raider, Batman Begins or James
Bond’s Die Another Day.
First the animals arrived. Within the first ten minutes, hark! we spotted a rare arctic fox on land, and
seven minutes later, a seal popped up 007-style from beneath the calm, icy water.
And then there were people.
More than 100 people showed up between 8am and 4pm, including a tour bus of 27 glaciology students
from the UK’s Exeter University. The bus, as luck would have it, got stuck. As a joke, the driver thought it
would be funny to drive the bus down to the water, its front tires kissing the lagoon. After 15 minutes of
trying to reverse the four-wheel drive bus up the hill, he realized it had been a bad idea.
While the bus plotted an escape route, folks from America, Iceland, the UK, France, Germany, South
Africa, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere around the world took a quick turn off
Ring Road 1 to gaze at the clunky icebergs piled haphazardly on top of one another and floating like white
bath toys in the placid water. While most visitors came because most guidebooks say this is a must-see, the
first visitors of the day, a family from America, came for one reason.
“James Bond, yes!” said Norman Turnquist, from Carlisle, New York. “We love James Bond. We read
about the lake and before we left, we watched the bonus DVD of Die Another Day.”
Despite my nearly frostbitten hands, the day ended on a mostly good note for all of us: visitors went
home wowed, and after watching the stubborn bus driver trying to move damp earth with a shovel for
seven hours, a truck from a nearby farm finally came to its rescue during our eighth and final hour. All
seemed copacetic until we passed the bus en route to Reykjavík with its yellow hazards flashing.
Text by Sara Blask
Photos by Páll Stefánsson
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