Story behind the photo: Sleeping seals

Somewhere in the beginning of 2009, for the first time in my life I planned a trip to a place where it was actually colder than at home. Iceland.
The plan was to drive the whole southern coast from Reykjavik to Höfn and back, making a couple of detours along the way to visit glaciers, waterfalls, the “golden triangle” and Vik.

When we were driving back from Höfn, we were kind of behind on schedule because two heavy blisters had slowed us down for quite a number of kilometres. But we were getting tired and hungry and we felt that we really needed to stop driving for at least half an hour or so. I looked in my guidebook and noticed that we were close to a place called Jökulsárlón, famous for its glacier lake.

We had seen numerous glaciers and lakes the days before, but we decided to stop anyway, for the sake of getting out of the car into the fresh air for a while.
It appeared that we had the place more or less to ourselves, judging from the fact that there was only one other car on the parking.
A couple of hundred meters we saw the lake, but what intrigued me more was a sound that I couldn’t place.
It was certainly an animal.
It sounded a bit like a cow.
Maybe moose? Or reindeer? We hadn’t seen one of those yet.

When we got closer we saw movements in the water, little heads going up and down, creating small waves in the lake.
And then we saw them, on the coast of the lake there were several herds of seals, enjoying the afternoon sun, taking a nap or a swim.

Being there by our own, standing at the lake, looking at the seals surrounded by an endless white background made us feel small and quiet.
These are the places where nature will always overcome mankind.
Here is where mother earth has won.

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