Walking on the moon

I’m sitting here at just above 66 degrees north, and just about 50km from the Arctic Circle, a line on a map which is much more exotic than tropic.  To put it into Southern Hemisphere perspective, if you head south from Australia, at 66 degrees south you have made landfall in Antarctica.  This is the furthest north I’ve ever been, and barring a few minutes tomorrow while we drive from here across the top of the peninsula, the furthest North we will touch this trip.  I’ve been looking forward to this point on our itinerary ever since we planned the trip.

Some days it’s easy to forget that geology underlies our world, and that this is not it’s end state, but just one point on a very, very long timeline.  Today wasn’t one of those days.  The landscape today was scarified fjords, volcanic plains and geothermal vents.  It was geology laid bare, and our place walking it’s surface shown to be tenuous at best.  You can’t help but think when you look across places like this.

We saw lush, habitable lands.

And within a few kilometres we saw lifeless, lunar landscapes where there was arid death in every direction – with patches of snow picked out on the black, volcanic mountains just to emphasise the point.

In few places can the thin ribbon of road stretching across the landscape have seemed so friendly as it did here.  And, then, at the end of it, we reached an area where the Earth’s very core touches the surface, venting sulphide gases and steam from the ground, the literal image of hell as depicted visually and linguistic for the Millenia during which that term has had currency, but I would guess for much longer in the vernacular.  

Luckily for us, we had tickets for the baths, and so it all worked out pretty well.  

Sitting here now, gazing off to the north in light drizzle and about 4 degrees and reading about snow home in Canberra, it’s easy to forget that this is summer here.  I’ve become aware on this trip that summer in these places is not about heat, as it is in Australia, but rather about light.  It’s so easy to slip into imagining that our own narrow snippets of the world are what is normal, and it is the constant joy and satisfaction of travel to remember that it’s not.