Anti-Christian Icelandic heathen bastards… why in the world was I searching for that on Google? …I’ll get to that in a second.

    While I was researching things I wanted to see in Iceland I happened to stumbled upon this amazing time lapse video created in Iceland.  One of the scenes in the film depicts the airplane above… and that was enough.  I had to see it and take pictures of it myself.  Now, I know when you see this picture you immediately think Iceland… 🙂 I just can’t help it though. I see things like this and I just have to see them for myself.  Anyway, after quite a bit of research I found that the plane wreckage was in the Sólheimasandur area of Southern Iceland and found some rough instructions on getting to it.  After Holly and I visited the Solheimajokull Glacier (don’t worry, I can’t pronounce it either), the weather had mostly cleared up so we decided to give our navigation skills a test and we set out across the “black sand desert” in search for our DC3 carcass.

    Now, the intriguing thing to me about this plane was partly the wreckage itself, and partly the surroundings it sits in.  Lots of the pictures I found of the plane appear to be almost black and white images because the area is so devoid of color.  The ground is totally black and on an overcast day, the sky is basically white / grey.  Definitely other-worldly.  This DC3 sits about 2 miles off the main highway and all this coarse black sand slopes gently down to the ocean… to the point when you’re out there, all you can see is black, ocean, and mountains WAY off in the distance.  A little freaky.  So Holly and I park the car a little ways off from the plane and proceed to walk to it.  On the way out there we can see that there are other people already there.  I immediately think “great… these people are going to be in my way”.  As we get closer we notice that there is a girl there wearing a long white dress, which has now turned black at the bottom… and there is another person there that appears to be wearing a long red robe of some sort.  Okay… well that’s a little strange.  The closer we get, the weirder it gets.  This dude that’s in the red robe is also not wearing a shirt… and it’s freezing outside… and he’s got what appears to be blood all over him AND his face is painted red with a white stripe across his eyes.  To make matters even more interesting, there was what looked to be a coffin laying in the sand not too far away.  Holly is obviously thinking they’re going to kills us and drink our blood by now and is suggesting… quite insistently… that maybe we should just leave.  I, on the other hand, am a little less moved by the situation and bound and determined to get my shots, and… I recognized these people.

    The previous night Holly and I had walked into a local dive in Vik that was a gas station with a little diner in the back.  If you’ve seen our pictures on Flickr or Facebook, the picture of me eating a hamburger with a fried egg on top; well, that was this place.  As soon as we walked in I had noticed a table full of people.  They all had a punk rocker look about them and were apparently having a good time.  One of them was obviously American and the rest, I guessed, were Icelandic.  When they got up to leave I looked and the back of one of their shirts said “Anti-Christian Icelandic Heathen Bastards”.  Nice.  As a Believer my mind began to wonder what kind of place I had stumbled in to.  As fate would have it, our paths would cross again… these people with fake blood all over themselves… were the same group we had seen at the diner. 

   They didn’t kill us… in fact they were quite nice.  I didn’t ask what they were doing, but it was obvious they were shooting a video or movie of some sort.  I could see that some of the shots they were doing were going to turn out pretty cool, so I’ve been curious ever since then to find out what they were making.  Well… it got the best of me yesterday and I started Googling.  A MySpace page led to a Facebook page… which led to a music video… of a girl dragging a coffin and this very plane in one of the scenes.  Crazy the world we live in isn’t it?  Sólstafir is the name of the band, and while I wouldn’t really recommend them, I must say this video turned out pretty cool. The song isn’t bad either… but that may be because I can’t understand what they’re saying. :)  The really cool thing is we visited all the places in the video, and when the crazy painted up dude with the long fingernails and stringy hair smiles in the video… I was standing right behind the guy holding the camera… clicking away as I do when surrounded by such beauty; and sometimes weirdness.

–Dan Thompson