The wind's coming from behind me,
the camera might get rained on,
if I look tired... it's because I am.
This video ended up being a disaster,
there's no other word to describe it,
but I have travelled too far and expended too much energy
to throw it away entirely.
And I have learned quite a bit of stuff about how Iceland is handling
tourists flocking to its new and dangerous volcano.
So, from the outskirts of Reykjavik airport,
here's a story that didn't work how I expected it to,
but which I hope is still interesting.
First things first: Iceland has a new volcano.
And it's close to the airport, and relatively easy to get to.
So the plan was:
film a video with a flowing river of lava behind me.
And as the plane's landing,
I can sort-of see the volcano out of my window,
there was a lot of low fog and it was all a bit fuzzy,
but the volcano was clearly erupting.
So early the next morning,
I meet up with Bjorn, who's my guide and drone pilot.
He's very very good at his job,
I've got him for one day and one day only,
he's working on a dozen other projects all over Iceland this month.
We drive the 45 minutes to the volcano site,
and then walk along one of the tourist trails up the mountainside.
I took a bit of video as we went.
We've got to head up the ridgeline
that you can see in the distance in that shot.
It's a bit of a steep climb at the start, but it's very possible:
you can see silhouettes of people up on the ridge,
and there were folks of all ages going up to see lava.
It takes about 90 minutes of steady climbing, give or take:
sometimes we're overtaking slower tourists,
sometimes we're getting out of the way
so that runners from a climbing race can speed past us.
I have no idea how they managed to run the downhill bit without slipping on loose
rocks.
But anyway, we get to an overlook point.
That's not the volcano: it's just where the lava
spills over into another valley
when there's too much lava, like water out of an overflowing bath.
And that view is our first bit of bad news.
Because just a few hours earlier there was active, flowing, red-hot lava there.
You could see it on the webcams that various companies have set up.
Now: solid rock, on the surface at least.
And Bjorn sends up the drone to see what's happening.
That's his volcano drone, by the way,
it's a little bit melted in a couple of places from too many close encounters with lava.
And the drone goes over the main basin, and then over the crater itself,
and the pictures that it sends back show the volcano is completely quiet.
It has just... stopped.
We keep climbing anyway, over the next ridge, to the main overlook point.
Few hours earlier, we would have seen fountains of lava exploding from the main crater,
and flowing through the valley.
We could have climbed down and stood... maybe not next to it,
but a few metres away?
But as it is... there's just a lot of disappointed tourists looking at some rock.
So at this point, I need to introduce you to The Graph.
The Graph is data from the Iceland Meterological Office's sensors,
and they track the rumblings at certain frequencies at all the seismic locations around Iceland.
So when the graph for this volcano is high, it's erupting.
When it's low, it's quiet.
It's been erupting for a long time now.
Bjorn shows me the graph on his phone, and it's clear: at 5am, the volcano just...
stopped for some reason.
And activity is low, and it's trending downwards.
There will be no new lava for...
maybe for just the day.
Or maybe it's all over and it'll never erupt again.
But okay.
I can still make the best of this.
We head down into the valley, next to the cooled lava.
So the bit I was sitting on was still just slightly warm?
And while we knew that bit was safe,
there were other parts where there'd be semi-liquid rock underneath ready to kill
you.
Earlier on, we'd spotted a couple of fools walking out across the lava.
Don't do that.
Anyway.
We set up, I make some adjustments to my script,
I try to rehearse my Icelandic pronunciation a bit, which is not good,
and we start.
“In March 2021, Fagrads--
“sorry, I screwed that line up, let's do that again, sorry!”
“In March 2021, after months of rumblings and warning signs,
“Fagradalsfjall, this volcano in Iceland, finally erupted.
And, uh,
“well, it's not quite as dramatic as you might hope.
“You will have noticed that there's not any
moving or spraying lava behind me.
“The volcano... is not performing today.
“I’m not saying don’t come to the Icelandic volcano,
“but this is unpredictable...
“and unpredictable things that spew molten rock aren't exactly safe.
“But I'm not here to talk about the volcano itself.
The question I've got is:
“how do the folks in charge of this area deal with
“an unexpected, unpredictable and potentially-lethal new tourist attraction?”
Because that was going to be the main point of the video.
I did't just want to go "ooh, volcano",
because lots of people have done that,
I want to talk about the infrastructure around it.
I've got interviews set up the next day with someone from
the Iceland government's civil defence and emergency management department,
I've probably got those words in the wrong order,
and with a geologist.
And I know that Bjorn can provide some shots of what the volcano looks like
when it's in full flow,
he's got a lot of footage from many many trips he's taken over the last few months
and he's never published it before.
Well, he's published lots of it, but there's shots that he hasn't,
so I figure okay, I can use those new shots,
in context, of course, I'll tell the audience when they are,
but I can make it work.
So, I get the rest of my script done.
Bjorn suggests that instead of going up the hill and retracing our steps back down,
we walk through the valley alongside the cooled lava flow.
Which sounds good, but it turns out
there's a reason that hardly anyone goes that way.
It looks spectacular, the lava formations look like something from another planet,
there's heat haze--
Actually, no, I guess that's because all the other planets are filmed in Iceland.
Anyway, looks great, but it turns out it's like walking on a pebble beach,
a sloped pebble beach, for kilometre after kilometre.
And then we get to the bit that's a 45-degree slope down and...
“At this point, it's less climbing and more surfing...”
That's a good ten, fifteen minutes of steady, slidey, ankle-wrenching descent,
I fall on my arse several times.
But I know to keep my centre of balance uphill,
because a gentle fall back is better than tumbling all the way down,
and we get back safe.
I'm a bit disappointed as we get back to the car park,
no other way to say it,
but I'm pretty confident I can make it work in the end.
Bjorn drives us back to Reykjavik,
we part ways, I take a nap, I get some dinner.
But we both keep an eye on the Graph.
And at about 6pm, the activity starts to tick up again.
9:30, the live webcams that are pointed at the volcano,
they start to show lava explosions, just in the main crater.
And Bjorn knows that there's an angle,
at the top of the western part of the hills,
where he can get me and the crater in shot,
lava behind me, and he can also send the drone over,
and maybe it'll even start flowing into the valley again.
It is very late, and we are so tired,
but it's time to climb the volcano a second time.
By the time we arrive at the car park, it's 11pm.
There are a few other optimistic tourists,
who I guess have looked at the same data and images we have.
This time we take the western route up.
Still a long climb, still a bit of scrabbling up hills,
it's really really tough.
We pass another dried lava flow,
and we pass the giant earth wall that's been constructed to
try and make sure the lava goes in a particular direction.
It's midnight by the time we're approaching the top, but,
it's Iceland in midsummer, so it's still light!
And... we have to stop short of the crater.
And we can't film.
Because we reach the clouds.
In the time it took us to get up there, fog has rolled in, low cloud has rolled in,
and the toxic gases from the volcano are now drifting that way as well,
and if we go any further it won't be safe
and we won't be able to see anything anyway.
The crater is so close but there's no way to get there.
Bjorn sends the drone out and gets some incredibly atmospheric shots
from directly over the crater, he nearly melts the camera...
but all we'd see from the path is cloud and smoke.
And then there's one last bit of hope.
Because Bjorn noticed that there's clearly lava flowing.
Maybe it's going to go down the valley and...
no, it's going into a hole in the ground and it's disappearing.
So we head back down.
Because there's nothing more we can do.
Down the hill, back to Reykjavik, in total we've spent
seven or eight hours of the day hiking up and down mountainsides.
Bjorn has gone above and beyond.
And I figure that I've still got a couple of days left,
maybe the situation will change and I can go back on my own.
I won't have a drone,
and without a guide I'll have to stick strictly to the tourist route, but...
maybe it'll work.
I can still do the interviews, too, they will help.
And then I got a really bad case of food poisoning.
Because I guess Icelandic-Mexican fusion cuisine was a bad idea!
So now, I am physically exhausted,
both from the hiking and from spending a day in my hotel room
"talking to Huey on the big white telephone".
I had to cancel the interviews.
And even if the volcano had changed
and started flowing over the last couple of days,
which it hasn't...
trying to hike for hours to somewhere with no, um, facilities,
while my body is knackered, is not an option.
And I can't extend my stay here.
The last time I visited Iceland, I quoted Sam Hughes, science fiction author,
and I'm going to do that again with a different part of their work:
Iceland is the place you go to remind yourself
that planet Earth is a machine,
and that all the organic life that has ever existed amounts to a greasy film
that has survived on the exterior of that machine thanks to furious improvisation.
I did not get to see lava close-up.
Volcanoes are unpredictable and dangerous,
and there aren't many that are tourist attractions for exactly that reason.
I did learn a few things about Icelandic infrastructure and emergency management,
and I can share them with you now,
so I guess: technically, mission accomplished and I've still got a video.
But this is kinda my furious improvisation, not the lifesaving kind, but
sometimes these things don't work out,
and you've gone too far and put too much effort in
to just throw it all away, and you improvise,
and this is what I've got you.
I wish I could wrap this story up in a neat bow,
but the only way that this could possibly have a good ending is if,
somehow, in the few hours just before now, just before I leave Iceland,
the volcano decided to have a sudden, massive eruption,
sending tens of thousands of tons of lava flowing down the hill,
and by coincidence my stomach settled down as well,
so I could gather what feels a bit like the very last of my strength,
hike out there one more time
and at least get a shot standing in front of lava.
No.
The volcano's just gone quiet again.
I'm going to go get on a plane.
And I will bet that damn volcano erupts--
[muffled, with background noise] --just after I take off.
Did I just pull my microphone cord out of...
Well either that or it wasn't plugged in at all
and none of that worked, so here's hoping!