“Temperature is 109F, feels like 125F,” read my phone’s home screen today. August in the Middle East is one of the hottest parts of the year. I was lucky enough to escape the first few days while away in Iceland.
The contrast between the two countries in terms of climate – environmental and otherwise – was as stark as the dune landscape.
Where I worry for my electronics here as phone and watch screens fog up within minutes of stepping out the door, summer temperatures in Iceland hovered in the low fifties.
Where blue days and desert haze plus a relatively middling north latitude means that the timing around my sunrise and sunsets throughout the year in Abu Dhabi mean a relative balanced amount of daily light and dark, Iceland’s sunset happened well past 11:30 p.m., and sunrise started only a few hours later.
Most of my time traveling around featured some amount of daylight, making me grateful for the relative ubiquitousness of blackout curtains at lodgings across the country.
When it came to physically getting around the country, Iceland had a few driving rules I found unique. Headlights had to be on, always – whether to account for the often gusty and unpredictable nature of Iceland’s weather, to provide a visual stimulus to alert drivers to the presence of an oncoming vehicle along Iceland’s long, often remote and lonely, and frequently one-lane roads, or for some other reason, I don’t know.
Icelandic tunnels also featured an incredibly cooperative one-lane set up, with pull-outs for all the drivers going in a particular direction, with the expectation that traffic collaboration would result in smooth transitions to allow single cars to pass without any other kind of signaling. I passed through these tunnels about four times while driving up in the Westfjords, and I was shocked and impressed by how seamlessly the system seems to work.
Iceland was a brief but welcome break from the heat and bustling population of the UAE. While I’m back to contending with the juxtaposition that is heavily surveilled roads with the resulting unpredictability from an international mesh of driving cultures, it is a relief to no longer have to worry that rounding the next bend might bring on an unexpected herd of road-crossing sheep!
Byte-By-Byte Column
By Dr. Miceala Shocklee
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