In Search of Puffins
Published in the print edition of AElta Magazine 02 + Cover
During the days as I prepared to leave Canada, my mind raced with questions. Canada may be just as well known for its harsh winters, but Iceland loomed a much different beast, a vast unknown ahead of me. What would happen if I was soaked from my first day? What if the cold feels unlike the cold I am used to – freezing winds unlike any I’ve experienced before? Would I survive the winter camping?
If I was unable to prepare myself for this journey mentally, perhaps the best way to approach it all was to simply accept that no amount of reading books, blogs and internet reviews (which I did in abundance) would change the way I was feeling. Instead, I believed that I would adapt.
It was reading, too, that had cemented my fascination with puffins. Living in the North Atlantic region, this bird spends most of its life out on the ocean. Until Summer, that is, when the warmer days bring them ashore to rest, nest and ready themselves for a return to the open waters. These striking birds, known as sea parrots, are a nature photographer’s dream. The reality was a little more complicated than that; the days ahead would turn out to be long, complex and filled with the unexpected.
My brother says that the most challenging part of any trip is the first three weeks. I was in Iceland for four. Arriving at the airport, I was greeted with the rain, wind and freezing temperatures. No surprises yet, then. But for those four weeks, the forecast was for 26 similarly overcast days. Just four days of sunshine were predicted, and a lack of sunsets and sunrises unsettled me. Yet, the puffins were waiting.
I travelled Iceland for the first 20 days along the ring road that connects the inhabited parts of the island. Those first days were character building. Over time, I acclimatised to the wet socks in the mornings, a perfect complement to the cold of the night. Iceland tested me. Yet, every day ended with me appreciating just how amazing this country is.
I didn’t see the sun for a week. As I continued to hitchhike around the country, I felt low, questioning if I should simply abandon this harrowing experience. This lack of morale is complicated; hitchhiking is lonely, and I longed to meet someone to turn this into an epic adventure, to bring more colour and experience to the trip. It’s only with hindsight that I realised it all was.
One day, in the late afternoon, I arrived in a small village. Out of food, I discovered an Icelandic holiday underway and every store was closed. Deflated and annoyed with myself for not being more prepared, I set about finding a place to pitch my tent, resigned to going to bed hungry, and repeating the mantra tomorrow is a new day. But while I was searching, I met a young mother and her two children, who offered me a place to stay for the night - though no food - and I was finally not alone.
Awakening the next morning, my belly empty and growling, I waited in front of the supermarket for it to open. Once I had food, I walked to a small lake, sat down and quelled my hunger.
“Philippe!” – my name was being shouted from a small car heading my way, in a place where I felt alone, who could know me? Of course, the small moment of kindness from the day before began to intensify. Moved by my stories from the night before, the mother offered to take me to the North-West Fjords. It was a jolt. This is why I love travelling; the unexpected, the warmth of strangers, the spirit of adventure. Somehow, my stories had inspired the family to go camping for the first time since the birth of their children, and they wanted me to go with them. We drove the entire day, finally setting up camp on a long, empty beach of black sand and white water rolling in. Here in the north, as the day began to end, I saw my first Icelandic sunset.
Four days later, my new friends and I headed to the small town of Mývatn, hidden from the rest of the world and usually inaccessible to tourists. Somehow, I convinced the community to allow me special permission to cross the lava fields that lead to one of the world’s most incredible hot springs, crystal clear waters of nearly 10metres deep that sit at the meeting point between the North American and European tectonic plates. I felt vulnerable, the raw elements giving no choice but to remember the power of nature. Succumbing to this feeling, my low mood was lifting, and my simple goal – to visit the puffins – came alive again.
Although I initially headed to the West Fjords, my luck with puffins was found in the south. I spent the entire day hitchhiking back down to the coast here and finally, in the last light of that day, saw my first puffin. Flying faster than you can imagine, making one with the wind and disappearing onto the water, I realised that as beautiful as they are, I wanted to capture the essence of the bird and their environment with my photographs.
I camped in Vik, a small village near the nesting site, and hiked every morning at 3 am to the cliff to wait for the puffins to appear. With the arrival of the Arctic summer, the days are long, until the sun doesn’t go down at all. For ten days, I stayed all day, waiting for the few moments where the puffins would appear on the cliffs, finding stillness in the few frames I snapped each day. It was quite the contrast to the days spent waiting on the clifftop, where weather was master, and I was alone, again, with just my own thoughts and expectations as company.
This duology never went unnoticed; my mood was affected by extreme winds, snowstorms and, on my last night, the biggest storm of the year. It ripped through my tent, it lashing me about the face and leaving me exposed to nothing but the outside world. I moved. Or at least, I tried to move, to keep warm, but it was a slow process, the wind and rain moving me every which way, and my body weighed down by my now water-logged bags.
It took six hours to find a place to rest, a small cabin beside a hot spring. Once my body had returned to a near-normal state of being, I approached the springs, looking out over the bare lands of Iceland, so untouched and yet so human in the places where you find people. The view here was like nothing I had seen so far and somehow perfectly represented everything I had experienced over the last four weeks.
There, with my clothes stuck to my body, I embraced the ups and the downs and noted that I had lived.
