So we have this quaint little holiday called “Halloween.” Adults binge-watch slasher flicks and Tim Burton movies while kids dress up and go door to door begging for candy. Grown-ups being grown-ups, we buy our own candy and gorge ourselves silly. All of this somehow goes back to the Catholic observance of All Saints and All Hallows Eve, transmogrified into the autumn equivalent of Carnival as hosted by Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Aside from the holiday being awesome, I’ve also heard it pointed out recently that Halloween is the line in the sand that keeps Christmas from advancing any further up the calendar year.
You Shall Not Pass!
In Mexico and other Latin countries, the Festival of the Dead is taken much more seriously and is, ironically, even more fun. Down there, they haven’t forgotten the “reason for the season.” They’ve kept the muerte in Día de los Muertos.
Readers of this blog will recall that Lea and I have a thing for touring cemeteries around the world. In October 2016, she and I went for a mainline fix of this habit by taking a trip to see Day of the Dead celebrated properly. We didn’t aim for any crummy coastal tourist town, either. We went hardcore: We went to Oaxaca.
(Pronunciation: Wah-Hah-Kah. Now you know.)
Just chillin’.
Oaxaca is the southernmost state capital in los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. It sits on a mountain plateau in that southernmost bend where the country swerves north into the Yucatan before crashing into Guatemala and Belize. It was home to both the Zapotec and Mixtec cultures, and relics of that era still pepper the whole region. The Oaxacan people and their culture still wear their ancient heritage proudly, of which the Day of the Dead celebration is only the most visible and well-known example.
The hombre in black.
Now, we did a lot in our week in Oaxaca, and not all of that had anything to do with Día de los Muertos. I’ll save the other stuff for my next post; today I want to focus solely on the Day of the Dead. During our time there we watched comparsas, took photos of catrinas, and visited celebrations at big city and small town cemeteries during the height of the festival. Each place had its own special character, and every one was worth the trip.
Trick or treat?
Definition time: A comparsa is a group of singers, musicians, and dancers, of which we got to see many during the festival. A comparsa isn’t a parade, but at night they do parade down the boulevards of Oaxaca City, usually dragging a festive mob along with them. During Día de los Muertos, the comparsas are more often than not accompanied by people in costume, on stilts, and/or carrying giant effigies of the dead.
The dead can dance.
Catrinas, along with the ubiquitous sugar skulls, are perhaps the most recognizable Day of the Dead iconography. La Catrina is an elegantly dressed female skeleton, and she can be found literally everywhere. Though she’s dressed in the finest European fashions, La Catrina can be traced back to the death-goddess Mictecacihuatl, who oversaw the remembrances of the dead in Mesoamerica long before the Spanish conquest.
Hanging out with new amigos.
Ofrendas are altars to the departed. They usually contain pictures of the deceased as well as enough food for a banquet and items representing what the honored person loved most in life. There are many different regional styles of ofrendas, all of which we saw displayed at an exhibit at the San Pablo Cultural Center. Pay attention to the schedule of activities, and you’ll probably be able to find a traditional ofrenda in the act of being assembled.
Everything a couple could possibly want for the afterlife, including their dog.
The celebration in Oaxaca begins as early as October 28. The north-south pedestrian street through the city’s central district, the Calle Macedonio Alcalá, becomes a thriving market full of stalls selling all manner of holiday paraphernalia: sugar skulls, skeletal dolls, bouquets of flowers, religious icons, and knickknacks that you can either take home or leave on the graves of your loved ones, who’ll be coming to visit and trade gossip from the Great Beyond.
Lonely ghost.
If you’re worried about Oaxaca being infested with American tourists during this season, don’t be. We were told – by locals even – that the city is overrun with tourists at this time of year, but one look at the busy (but not overly crowded) thoroughfare and we said, “Pfft! Have you seen Mardi Gras?” In the year we went, Oaxaca was crowded enough to be festive, but not so much that it was in any way suffocating.
October 31: All Hallows Eve
On Halloween night, we took a cab to the cemetery in the Oaxacan suburb of Xoxocotlán, referred to locally as “Xoxo,” where one of the most traditional Day of the Dead observances is held. Outside of the cemetery, there was a full-on carnival atmosphere. Vendors sold food, flowers, and glow-sticks for the kids. A full band played at the city gates, and the smells were that of any State Fair I’d attended in my life.
A typical grave in Xoxocotlán.
Inside the cemetery, the noise went down by half. The mood was still festive, but mixed with courtesy and respect. On October 31 and November 1, families in Xoxo sit vigil with their loved ones, bringing picnics to their family graves and sharing news with the spirits of the dead, who are believed to be present on these nights. The graves are decorated with flowers and lit with colored candles. In Xoxo you can also find many examples of graves decorated with tapetes de arena – meticulous sand paintings of the departed or religious figures. For a traveler, this first night of Día de los Muertos brought mixed feelings of reverence and the excitement of discovery.
Mary painted in sand.
November 1: All Saints Day
On All Saints, we stayed in town to walk through the Panteon General, the large municipal cemetery in Oaxaca City itself. The cemetery has clearly grown over time, the older sections separated from the new by the complex’s original walls. Class divides are evident as well, based on the grandeur and upkeep of various mausoleums. The cemetery walls themselves are full of crypts, stacked five high and running along the entire circumference of the necropolis. During Día de los Muertos, those crypts are lit by candles, bathing the stone in tones of sepia.
The living are more ephemeral than the dead.
The Panteon General is less colorful than the cemetery in Xoxo, but the monuments are beautifully sculpted. I know that despite all the time we spent, we didn’t come close to exploring all the grounds. We saw them first during daylight hours. When we returned at night, we bought flowers from a vendor outside and laid them on several graves that had gone unattended.
An angel in the Panteon.
November 2: All Souls Day
On our last full day in Oaxaca, we visited cemeteries in the small town of Santa María del Tule and in the neighborhood of Xochimilco not far from our hotel. Both were very vibrant, with the tombs painted like the houses of Valpariaso and many of which were used as garden beds for a variety of flowers and succulents native to the arid Oaxaca region. The burials in Xochimilco were nestled so close to one another that it was impossible to walk through the cemetery without stepping on grave after grave. The plots in Tule were spaced farther apart, with many shaded paths leading in between and – unless my memory fails – a hot dog stand and balloon vendor near the entrance.
The guy with the giant sombrero tombstone wins.
What makes Día de los Muertos special is that it’s not about mourning the dead, but instead is about celebrating their lives. Despite the trappings of skeletons, devils, and other grisly images, the holiday has as little to do with “horror” as riding a roller coaster is about plunging off a cliff. Día de los Muertos is a celebration of remembrance, with a little sadness, but also joy – joy in the reminder that death is a sign that life nevertheless goes on.
In August 2014, Lea and I bought plane tickets to visit Iceland the following January in order to see the Northern Lights. Just a few days after booking our flights, the Bárðarbunga volcano erupted. Thankfully, this wasn’t a monster ash-spewing eruption like the Eyjafjallajökull event that shut down air travel over Europe in 2010, but seriously. Come on.
(Prior to this, Lea and I had a track record of causing heat waves, freezes, torrential storms, and major floods by the simple act of reserving a camp site. We’d grown to expect natural disasters, but this felt like a case of the universe trying to one-up itself on us. However, the eruption would add an extra layer of awesome to our experience. More on that to come.)
The view just down the block from our Airbnb.
This trip was prompted by a deal we saw on Groupon, but we didn’t use the Groupon. Vacations advertised on Groupon are not necessarily cheaper than those you arrange yourself, but they can give ideas for itineraries and destinations. Plus, booking everything on our own gave us flexibility that we wouldn’t have had on a packaged tour.
Another reason to go to Iceland at that time was the peak of the eleven-year solar activity cycle, which made it a prime year for viewing the Aurora Borealis. In 2015 we would be catching the downslope from the peak, but it would still be (we hoped) a relatively strong time for viewing the Northern Lights. Armed with a spanking-new Canon EOS Rebel T3 DSLR camera, and having recently crammed the book Canon EOS Rebel T3/1100D for Dummies into my brain, we flew into the Great Frozen North in the dead of winter, lava flows notwithstanding, to take magnificent photos of amazing, fantabulous, and spectacular aurorae!
So of course I forgot to pack the tripod.
Hallgrimskirkja at “noon.”
Reykjavik
Early in the morning of January 15, 2015 we landed at Keflavik International. I say “morning,” but in Iceland concepts like morning are theoretical generalities not strictly tied to things like, say, daylight. A former U.S. military base, Keflavik is a long ride from Reykjavik itself, and after our all-night flight the first thing we had to do was find our Airbnb and crash. We woke in time for sunrise (around noon?) and used our few hours of daylight to walk around Iceland’s capital. But first, breakfast!
Directly across from the Hallgrimskirkja, the giant church that looms over the city, we found a little brunch place called Café Loki. We also discovered that we wouldn’t be able to eat out much during our stay. Breakfast for two – Lea bought a bagel with salmon and I went with the “Icelandic Sampler” – cost about $50 USD. As you’ll see in the picture below, the Sampler came with ham on toast, salmon on toast, and mashed potatoes on toast. The white thing behind the Icelandic flag that looks like some kind of pastry is actually fish jerky. That bowl of cubes the flag is sticking out of – that’s the fermented shark.
Dig in.
Y’all. I highly recommend going to Iceland and trying the fermented shark. It is the single most foul thing you will ever put in your mouth, short of drinking bleach. In fact, that’s kind of what it tasted like, with an added whiff of ammonia. Fermented shark ranks way above such paltry culinary delights as durian fruit, frost-blackened potatoes, and stir-fried intestines, all of which I’ve also tasted. Seriously, go and try it. Afterward, your mouth will be grateful for any other meal you eat that isn’t fermented shark.
After that adventure, we tooled around downtown Reykjavik and enjoyed two really interesting museums. The first was Reykjavik 871±2, also known as the Settlement Exhibition.
In 2000, when clearing the ground for a new hotel, excavators discovered the well-preserved remains of a Viking longhouse from the tenth century and other relics from even earlier. The settlement is one of the oldest man-made structures ever found on the island, and can be dated so precisely because of a layer of ash that was deposited in 871 from a volcanic eruption. Once the site was unearthed, they simply built the hotel above it, leaving the excavated longhouse in place in a basement museum.
By mid-afternoon, what we would consider the “hot part of the day” in the southern U.S., the sun had already set. We still had time to visit what is possibly the most fun museum anywhere in the world: the Icelandic Phallological Museum. This small exhibit space is dedicated to the science and art of all things phallological, and it’s impossible to walk through it without a goofy smile on your face. For example, here’s a photo of Lea standing next to a… specimen… from a male whale.
First Night
Tours to see the northern lights leave every evening from the main Reykjavik bus terminal. Since they can’t guarantee the ability to see the lights, or if the lights will even appear, you get a free ticket for the following evening if your initial trip is a bust. Before arriving in Iceland, Lea had contacted a guide who led smaller, private tours, but after arriving we weren’t able to get in touch with him. For our first evening, we elected to follow the tourist cattle call. After all, it would at least be good practice to try out our new equipment.
Suited up.
Back home we’d practiced using the Canon Rebel T3 by going out at night and taking pictures of the stars in near total darkness. While walking around Reykjavik, we shelled out $130 USD at a camera shop for a tripod to replace the one I’d forgotten. This turned out to be a good investment. The one I bought in Iceland was strong, sturdy, and heavy enough to hold still in the fierce northern winds. The aluminum tripod that came with the camera would have blown right over had we tried to use it.
As for what to wear on an Iceland winter’s night, we weren’t taking any chances. We each wore two layers of underwear – one of which was military grade thermal long johns, and heavy-duty thermal socks. We brought jeans that were a size too large to make room for all the extra padding we were wearing underneath. We wore sweaters, high-visibility winter coats, gloves, glove liners, toboggans, masks, and long, wind-resistant raincoats. My gloves were specifically designed so that I could pop my fingers out for short intervals to operate the buttons on my camera and then stick them back under cover so as not to freeze them off.
All of this gear proved necessary on that first night of sky watching, as our bus took us straight into a blinding snowstorm. Three buses, carrying about fifty tourists each, pulled off at an old country church where the whole teeming mass of us waited in the lee of the building for the snow to break and the skies to clear. They didn’t, so back to Reykjavik we went. It did prove a useful trial run of setting up and stabilizing our camera in adverse conditions. It also reinforced my commitment to never live anywhere north of the Alabama-Tennessee state line, at least until global warming really kicks in and the South becomes an unlivable desert.
Not the lights we were looking for.
Bárðarbunga
So, I mentioned that a volcano erupted after we bought our tickets. The eruption was still going strong in January. Bárðarbunga is a “subglacial stratovolcano,” meaning it was erupting under and through Iceland’s largest ice sheet. Unlike the Eyjafjallajökull eruption that sent enough ash into the air to shut down airports all across Europe, Bárðarbunga was spewing out Mount Doom levels of hot red lava.
(Let me pause for a moment to mention that I strongly suspect the Icelandic people of pranking the rest of the world with their language. I think there’s a real, secret Icelandic language in which geologic features have names like “Mount Bob.” I refuse to believe that “Eyjafjallajökull” is an actual word.)
Vatnajökull National Park.
I should also mention for those new to the blog that Lea is a professional geologist. She considered volcanology as a field of study until, as she puts it, she realized that every major eruption takes a volcanologist or two with it.
When we learned that instead of spoiling our vacation plans, we could buy tickets on a charter flight to view the volcano from the air – well, we had to go. It was expensive – really, really expensive – but when was the next time we were going to have the chance to fly over an eruption of this magnitude? Possibly not in our lifetimes. We were sold.
Our ride.
So, on Day Two of our visit, we spent our few meager hours of daylight making our way to Reykjavik’s small, regional airport and boarding a turbo-prop airplane that could maybe hold twenty passengers. The plane took us out over a landscape reminiscent of the planet Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back. The snow and ice went on forever until BOOM – eruptions of molten lava spewed into the sky amidst an enormous field of fresh, black igneous rock.
The red was so red it didn’t look real; it looked like a special effect. As high as we were, the eruptions were clearly enormous. Since we were constantly in motion, I set my Canon on rapid-fire mode and took several hundred photographs as our plane circled the volcano multiple times, giving us a variety of angles and views. It’s hard to get across the sheer sense of scale in pictures, but here you go:
In terms of thrills per dollar, that was some of the best travel money we’ve ever spent, and it completely made up for the whole fermented shark thing.
Second Night
We still hadn’t heard from the guide we’d been hoping would take us on a private tour, but since our first evening on the Mass Tourist Excursion had been for naught we were entitled to a second ride for free. This night was crisp and clear with nary a snowstorm in sight. This was a blessing and a curse. Whereas we had three buses of hopeful stargazers with us on the previous evening, there were nine tour buses this time, packed to the gills with people hoping to see the Aurora Borealis. Any time there are that many people in one place, a sizable fraction of them are bound to be idiots.
Our first stop was a restaurant on the edge of nowhere. It was far enough from Reykjavik to easily see the stars, but near enough that the city lights were still visible. This proved a benefit, because it gave me a clear horizon line on which to focus my camera. There was no aurora to be seen, but we had crystal clear views of the sky. We also got to watch the aforementioned idiots, of which there were plenty, try to take pictures of the stars with their phones.
Using the flash.
Thinking the night was another bust, we piled into our tour buses and headed back toward the city, only for our eagle-eyed guide to tell the driver to stop minutes later. She’d been watching for signs of aurorae out the front window and had spotted something. Soon all the buses had pulled off next to an empty roadside field as we watched the ghostly northern lights take shape overhead.
The lights weren’t as dramatic to the naked eye as photos had led me to believe, but they were still marvelous to watch and the color came out well with long exposures on the camera. What surprised me was that I was able to see the aurora move and change shape in real time. I had expected it to be more static, only changing form and position slowly, like clouds on a windless day. Instead it rolled and waved like a giant streamer in the sky.
I set up my tripod, focused on the horizon, then angled my camera up with the F-stop cranked as low as it would go, the ISO dialed up fairly high, and the exposure time set to ten seconds. Voila:
In many shots the landscape was overexposed, in part because of light from the street and in part because of people trying to take pictures with their flashes. But… We’d bagged our first aurora!
The Golden Circle
In the dead of winter, there’s not much of Iceland you can see, what with the country being buried under meters of snow and ice. However, it’s still possible to do the traditional “Golden Circle” tour of the three big natural wonders in the southwestern part of the island. We signed up for one of these tours on our last full day in the country. The bus picked us up from a nearby hotel early enough in the morning that we would hit the first location around sunrise and still be able to see the last of them before sunset a few hours later.
The first stop was Thingvellir National Park. (Or rather, Þingvellir National Park. I swear, now they’re making up new letters.) At this park you’re standing right on top of the North Atlantic Ridge and can see where the North American and European continental plates are pulling apart from one another.
The real continental divide.
Next was a geothermal field in the Haukadalur valley containing many active geysers. The one conveniently named “Geysir” is currently dormant, but “Strokkur” erupts every five or ten minutes. The cutest was an energetic, bubbly little hot spot called “Litli Geysir.” I’m serious. The fun thing about visiting these geysers in the winter, and by “fun” I mean “constant fear of slipping and breaking a bone,” is that all the water vapor finds its way back to the ground and freezes into a perfectly smooth, slippery layer of ice everywhere you might want to walk.
Strokkur! Good name for a metal band?
Last on the list was a sunset view of the Gullfoss, or “Golden Falls.” The walk to the falls included much hiking up and down through tightly packed snow and then, for the stupid people like me who wanted a closer view, ducking under a chain marked “no admittance past this point” and a nerve-wracking stroll along a narrow, snow-covered ledge to get right up to the falls themselves. In my defense, no one was paying attention to that sign.
Gullfoss: Icelandic for “Watch your step.”
Third Night
Lea finally managed to get in touch with our private guide only to find out that he’d been sick but had hoped to get well by the time for our tour. No such luck. Not willing to give up, Lea searched and contacted several tour agencies and at last procured us seats on a nighttime excursion into the wilderness, away from the crowded tour spots and big city lights.
We were picked up in a 4×4 and joined a convoy of four vehicles carrying maybe fifteen sightseers plus drivers and guides. Once we left Reykjavik, our drivers took us off-road back into Þingvellir National Park, following trails into the hills with snowbanks two or three meters high on either side. At first the night wasn’t as clear as the previous evening. We stopped at several hilltops and ridges, pausing for half an hour at each location and watching as the aurora struggled to take shape. The sky grew clearer, but the northern lights were still hazy and indistinct.
In the end we pulled up to a lake ringed by snow-covered hills, with the lights of a road and a handful of houses on the far shore. And the sky above us exploded.
The lights we saw from that lake were phenomenal: brighter, more active, and more complex in form than those on the previous night. Because we were on the shore, the lights were also reflected in the water. I could gush forever, or I could just show you:
Because we were with a smaller, more serious group, we were able to watch the splendor of the lights in relative silence. Those of us taking pictures used tripods, long exposures, and in general knew a little more about what we were doing. There was still some flash photography and “light painting” going on in order to take pictures of people in front of the lights, but it was minimal. As the night drew on and got even colder, our guides served hot chocolate – with vodka. As frigid, starry nights go, it couldn’t have been more perfect.
The Blue Lagoon
No, not the Brooke Shields movie. On the road from Reykjavik back to the airport, there’s a geothermal spa called the Blue Lagoon which is probably the single most visited tourist spot in Iceland. The lagoon began life as a reservoir near a geothermal power plant. The water is rich in minerals from the surrounding lava field, and is blue because of the silica that also forms a grey mud on the bottom of the pool. You’re supposed to spread this mud all over your face and skin for whatever magic “fountain of youth” properties the spa fairies imbue it with.
Though the air was a solid zero Fahrenheit, the water was a balmy 100 degrees. Lea and I paddled around happily in nothing but swimsuits while spa staff walked around the pool bundled up to their noses. The tricky part was the dash from the shower room to the pool itself. For that brief stretch, you have to make it barefoot across slippery, ice-crusted decking without busting your butt before you get into the water.
Zero to 100 (degrees) in thirty seconds.
And that was it for Iceland. After drying off, buying gifts in the gift shop, and digging out pain meds for Lea (who stubbed and probably broke her toe on a silica stalagmite in the pool) we took off on an evening flight to YYZ and a grueling slog through customs before returning to the States.
There are so many places we want to see in the world that there are very few on our “Go a Second Time” list. For me, Iceland is the place I’d most like to return to. However, next time we go we’d like to see it in summer, rent a car, and drive the ring road all around the island. The country is incredibly expensive, but its natural beauty makes it worth the cost, whether you have twenty hours of daylight to enjoy, or only four.
Safe travels, everyone! In a few weeks, for Día de los Muertos, The Escape Hatch will feature a quiet city in southern Mexico where the dead come out to play.
