Admiring the sea view with a friend on my first visit to Iceland. Late 2016, Reykjanes.
SEPTEMBER 20th 2018 — When I first visited Iceland in 2016, my hosts showed me many places, among them the southwestern tip of Iceland and of Reykjanes (“Smoky Cape”) Peninsula, a memorial site for geirfuglinn, the great auk. Eldey (“Fire Island”), where the last great auks were killed in the 19th century, can be seen 16 kilometers off the shore.
Other than the one above, I currently have no access to the photos I took at this particular place, but following my earlier post where I mentioned the great auk, Thomas Bouakache Trosborg in the Facebook group “International Students at the University of Iceland” kindly offered the photos below to share here.
The stone statue commemorating the last great auk. This and the following photos by Thomas Bouakache Trosborg.Iceland has documented and annotated numerous sites with durable information plaques like this.Eldey in the distance, to the southwest of this most southwestern point of Iceland.Information plaque about the fateful (for the great auk) island.
Thank you for sharing these photos, Thomas!
The remains of the last male great auk were found in Brussels in 2017, as reported by ICELAND MONITOR:
I'm the author of the series of illustrated coffee table books suitable for all ages called YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'LL SEE IN THE HAUNTED GARDEN.
I moved to Iceland in the summer of 2018 after a sojourn in Paris the winter before. I was born in Finland. I will soon retire this journal and move to writing on Medium. It featured explorations of various works of art & entertainment undertaken while here in Iceland.
Before embarking on my own solo projects, I wrote for games such as SERENA (downloaded on Steam more than 2 million times).
View all posts by Simo Sakari Aaltonen
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