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I Am a Polar Bear

traveller. adventurer. blogger. Viking.

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Welcome to my repository of all things Iceland! This is where you can read my blog posts (find them by region in the interactive map above) but I’ve also got a lot of stuff you might find useful organised by series for ease of finding what you need.

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Julie
Traveller, adventurer, hot water fan, loves Iceland, kayaking and writing.

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Iceland on TV over Christmas

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The House of Terror sounds like a great fun spoopy

The House of Terror sounds like a great fun spoopy thing to do the day before Halloween… but it’s not. I knew that going in. It was on Boti’s to-do list with several warnings that it’s “not fun” and “heavy”.

The House of Terror is a museum in the former Nazi headquarters “House of Loyalty” telling the story of Hungary’s double reign of terror, first under the Nazis and then under its own communist secret police. The museum is spread over three floors, features recordings, interviews, photos, clothes and a reproduction of the basement torture cells to tell the story of the last century of Hungarian history. Even now, I know I’ve got so much research to do filling in the gaps in my understanding when I write the blog post on this. I knew nothing about Hungary a week ago and now I’m realising how much there still is to learn. It’s very easy to see Budapest in a bubble of bastions, baths and beer buses but we travel to see a little below the surface, right? #budapest #houseofterror #communism

It’s my last night in Budapest and instead of pa

It’s my last night in Budapest and instead of packing, I’m using it to start going through the pictures from the last week, starting with the first adventure on the first day: going to Szechenyi Baths. I have a colleague from Budapest who made me a list of things to see and do and this bath did not make the list, no matter how many times I observed “Oh, that’s near the yellow baths, isn’t it? Oh, the yellow baths? Yellow baths???”. And now I see why.

Oh, it’s all very beautiful (needs a fresh coat of paint) and the outdoor pools are lovely but the indoor pools and saunas feel very clinical in an almost Victorian way and it’s very busy and stag parties do love to yell WOOOO in the whirlpool. I love thermal baths but I didn’t love this one as much as I expected to. Luckily, Budapest has a lot of thermal baths… #budapest #thermalbaths #szechenyibaths #travel

I like to swim and this is easily the most exotic

I like to swim and this is easily the most exotic dip I’ve ever had: in a flooded crater on the edge of a flooded caldera lake over an active volcano. Not recently - last time I was up here, magma activity underneath had made Víti a bit too cold and a lot too acidic to swim in, the time before that I left my swimming stuff in the truck because I thought we wouldn’t have time but the time before that, in 2013, on a hideous cold foggy day, I waded into this warm, milky, unfathomably deep water and had a very tentative swim around the perimeter, petrified of putting my foot through the fragile bottom and sucking us all down with the water to the bowels of the Earth.

That day finished with the truck breaking down and all of us, many hours later, walking into Mordor (we broke down for the fourth time a hundred or so yards from the edge of Möðrudalur, which we were told was too difficult for our non-Icelandic tongues and to just call it Mordor) and eating lamb soup at 9pm before finally being ferried back to civilisation for 11.30pm. Worth it to swim in a volcano though. #iceland #travel #viti #asjka #volcano #swiminavolcano✔️

Here’s something that I don’t think I really m $Here’s something that I don’t think I really made enough noise about at the time: my No-Cruise Cruise to Southampton. Not being a fan of big boats, I was never going to do a cruise but I’d heard people raving about the facilities on modern cruise ships - theatres and bars and spas and activities and I began to think… I can do all that for a fraction of the price without leaving solid land. So I booked a cheap plasticky hotel room that approximated a cabin for a fraction of the price in cruise capital Southampton and went off to: • a spa evening • buffet breakfast • swimming at the adventure pool complex • sea views • shopping • glass atrium • axe throwing • dinner out • a theatre evening • a morning stroll along the deck • mini golf (scuppered by not being open so early in the year) You can call it a weekend in Southampton but I was pretending to be on a giant ship the whole time, but with no risk of seasickness and for less than two years’ salary! #nocruisecruise #southampton #weekendsaway #hampshire$

I haven’t done anywhere near as much camping thi

I haven’t done anywhere near as much camping this summer as I hoped I would and now it’s far too late in the year to get a tent out again. That said, this camping trip to the New Forest was too early in the year - I was just about the only tent on the campsite and I froze half to death both nights. Oh, it looks idyllic. There are cows and horses roaming free and the sky is blue. But the horses invaded my tent and I never sleep well in a tent even when I’m not cold. Maybe I’m getting too old to camp. Maybe a caravan is over the horizon of my future already (it’s not. Do you have any idea how much those things cost, to buy, to store and to insure? Give me a tent any day!) #camping #newforest #outdoors #shecamps

My all-time most-hated Instagram vs reality is thi

My all-time most-hated Instagram vs reality is this myth that autumn is cosy. People waste the entire summer looking forward to putting on jumpers, drinking spicy overpriced milkshakes, lighting candles and the world turning orange and brown.

In reality, autumn is grey and wet. My swimming pool is closed, kayaking is over for eight or nine months, it’s dark too early to do anything but too late to stargaze and it’s going to rain for the next four solid months. See me out in full-length waterproofs and wellies for this afternoon’s walk.

But I’m making an attempt to be cosy this evening. I’ve got out my pumpkin glass! I’ve got a Lush Halloween bubble bar and I’m taking a book into the bath. I’m supposed to be reading some non-fiction again today but cosy autumn calls for fantasy fiction and, to be honest, so does my soul. I don’t read nearly enough fiction these days. Still don’t feel particularly cosy. Just feel like I’m trying to fake it for Instagram but then again, I think that’s what most people are doing. #fallisnotcosy #bathbomb #autumnwalk #instagramvsreality

After plotting and planning for months and coming

After plotting and planning for months and coming up very short, today I wrote the first 1000 words (well, 1144 technically) of The Bath Book, to be renamed as soon as I can come up with anything at all for a title. It’s going to be a trip around bathing culture and hot water and involve a few “research trips” because I’m really short on material at the moment. That’s partly why the plotting and planning - my first two books had a reasonably obvious narrative, a continuous journey with a start and an end (and ok, neither of them happened in one go or even in that order in real life). I can’t weave The Bath Book into a continuous narrative and eventually I decided all I can really do is start writing, figure it out as I go along, patch it and bodge it where I need to and pretty it up once I’ve made some sense of it in my own mind. This is going to be the roughest messiest first draft ever written and I thought five years of first drafts for Lava Land was rough and messy. But 1) recent confidence boost and 2) I’m using it for the Myself for my Voyage Gold Award (and the research trips for the Explore My World - I think the assessor will appreciate that!) so it was time to stop dithering and worrying and just get going. Fingers crossed it’ll actually get somewhere. #iamwriting

I was finishing off my thoughts on Moderate Becomi

I was finishing off my thoughts on Moderate Becoming Good Later this morning and I finished with reflecting that we could all be a bit more Toby sometimes - challenge ourselves a bit more and reach for something more than ordinary everyday life. Which made me realise that’s what I try to do.

As a general thing, my life features a lot of spreadsheets and maps, I’m at Rangers and Brownies every week and if I can be lazy at the weekend, I will. But back in 2008, six or eight months into my first proper full-time adult job, I realised my life was an endless cycle of work and bed and work and bed. So I took up swimming (that’s been a bit on and off over the years, whatever it may be doing right now) and booked a flight to Finland and since then, travel and adventure has been my break from normal everyday life. I’ve got a travel blog that’s been going about eight years now, I’ve written two books, I’m going to apply for INTOPS next year and my boss has taken to saying “of course you did” whenever I mention anything slightly outlandish that I did at the weekend, be that learning to make stained glass, go on a kayaking expedition or take the Brownies to the carnival dressed as a Minion.

These photos from Altitude 2010 are the first time I came back from a trip with pictures of myself - selfies just weren’t a thing on that first trip to Helsinki in November 2008. I wish they had been but since these are the first pictures of me on what I once called “my grown-up gap year”, they’ll do to illustrate this. Oh, once I tracked it, trying to complete a gap year using nothing but my annual leave over however many calendar years that took. Maybe I’ll have a look at that, see how much of my life I’ve actually been away for - after nearly sixteen years, I must have hit that year by now and until I have a mortgage, I don’t think I plan to stop. #travel #grownupgapyear #bemoretoby #france #meribel #snowboarding

A few pictures from around Great and Little Mis To

A few pictures from around Great and Little Mis Tors last weekend. The GoPro takes really dramatic landscape photos - well, it’s the sky really - but I hadn’t really noticed the tinge of autumnal gold at the time. #dartmoor #nationalpark #tors #shehikes

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