“Accidental incest. It’s a problem here”.  Quite an opening to a conversation, don’t you think?  Sitting at a bar in the center of Reykjavik, I was introduced by a business acquaintance to one of the least expected hazards of living in a country with fewer than 400,000 people and with a long history of isolation from the rest of the world.  Of course, Icelanders, an imaginative and ingenious bunch in my experience, have a solution to the tricky problem of inadvertently propositioning a close relative in a bar: a smartphone app that displays your lineage (back to the 9th century in the case of my acquaintance) and tells you if you’re related to the man or woman to whom you’re attracted.  Clever?  Yes, of course, but Icelanders seem to me like pretty resourceful and pragmatic people, so not a great surprise.

It was De Montherlant who famously wrote “Happiness writes in white ink on a white page“.  He might have said the same thing about beauty because I find it very difficult to describe Iceland. Stunning. Unique. Unforgettable. That just about does it.  Anything more tends to sound trite and unnecessary.  Of all the places I’ve visited, only New Zealand gets close for scenic beauty.  Vivid green, mossy plateaus stretching towards ice-covered mountains, beaches of black sand, stunning waterfalls, and bubbling hot springs: these are the treasures and memories of Iceland.  That app was pretty impressive, too.