Iceland is a landscape that’s still being born. While much of the world’s once-jagged peaks have gradually worn into sloping hills, gushing rivers and mighty waterfalls have slowed to a trickle of their former flow, and remnants of the last Ice Age melted long ago, it’s not so in Iceland. This a young land, one that’s still being shaped by the same primeval forces that made much of the world — fire and ice. Its massive Vatnajokull glacier, which dominates about 10% of the country’s landmass, is so large that it’s technically classified as an ice cap. The European and North American tectonic plates meet in Iceland, and more than 130 volcanoes have sprung forth from the gap between them. Iceland has only been populated since about the middle of the ninth century, but already in that short time there have been dozens of major eruptions and lava flows, many of them devastating to human life. Almost every minute of the day there is an earthquake happening somewhere in Iceland.

It’s also one of the least densely populated nations in the world — only about 320,000 people live there, three-quarters of them in the relatively warm and urbane capital city, Reykjavik. The rest of the country is wild and wooly, and of immense geological variation. It’s like the world’s most interesting interactive geology textbook. My wife and I spent the last two weeks exploring it — we rented a 4×4, crossed our fingers that we wouldn’t regret declining the extra insurance, and lit out for the countryside.

Click on any picture to open a larger version.

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Some of our readers may remember my Strange Geographies columns from April and May, all about my time in Amsterdam and my road trip through Belgium and Luxembourg, where with the expert help of a Dutch urban explorer I sought out grand old abandoned buildings to play the role of Miss Peregrine’s house in the trailer I made for my novel. But those columns were different from my usual Strange Geographies photo essays — most of the pictures were stills lifted from the hours of video I shot. After editing the trailer, I made this: the story of how I went looking for Miss Peregrine’s house across the pond, and what I found there. If you read the other Strange Geo columns, you’ll recognize a lot of the locations.

Warning! One NSFW word happens very early in the video.

BTW: apologies if this post has appeared and disappeared from the site a couple of times; technical issues! It’s here to stay.

Today’s Strange Geographies post revisits a place I’ve been several times before — the Salton Sea. It’s one of my favorite places to visit; just a few hours from my house, it may as well be on the moon. This time, though, I shot video rather than photos while I was there, and the result is my first Strange Geographies-style short film. Hope you like it!

[See all my Strange Geographies photo essays.]

So last week, I told about half the story of my recent adventure to Belgium and Luxembourg, where I was looking for atmospheric abandoned chateaus to film inside for a book trailer I’m making for a novel I have coming out in June called Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. I was, ostensibly, looking for the Home, trying to find an exterior and some interiors that looked something like the grand-but-decaying house that figures somewhat centrally in my book. I found the perfect exterior right away — you can see it at the top of last week’s post — and while the long-disused garden statuary workshop we discovered further down the road from it was fascinating, it wasn’t really what I needed for an interior. I was looking for that rarest of abandonments: a place filled with objects from another time, gathering dust but more or less undisturbed.

Usually, when a place is abandoned for awhile, local kids and vandals find it before explorers do, and all the original character of the place disappears: things get broken or stolen, spray-painted, and generally messed-up. But my explorer friend and I would get lucky on this trip. We found a couple of places that really and truly seemed like time capsules.

Before we crossed into Luxembourg, we stopped in the dark and forested Ardennes in Belgium, where American tanks still rust on the outskirts of some towns, vestiges of the fierce Battle of the Bulge that was fought here against the Nazis during WWII. But the forests have secreted away much more than just tanks. Take, for instance, this disused train station we found. The story I heard (but couldn’t verify) is that it was built more than a century ago for the private and sole use of the king of Belgium — and then left to the elements when he didn’t take to it. It’s been empty ever since, trees growing up through the middle. Trains still run past it, but never stop. Today, explorers use it as a camping and party spot. Scenic, no?

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I recently spent eight days traveling around the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, though explaining why I went is a bit complicated. The short version is that I was there on business: to film the interiors of abandoned houses. The somewhat longer explanation is that I have a novel coming out in June, and my publisher asked me to make a book trailer for it. (Related explanation: a “book trailer” is a bit of viral marketing which publishers hope will reach a different audience than other kinds of book advertising, and they’ve exploded in popularity over the past two or three years.) I made one for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters a while back and had great fun with it, so when it came time to make a trailer for my own book, of course I wanted to be the one to direct it.

Still more explanation: the book, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, is peppered with 50 creepy vintage found photos, many of which its 16-year-old protagonist finds in a haunted-looking abandoned house on a remote island off Wales. I wanted to show the house, in the trailer, inside and out, and find some of the old photos in that decaying environment, as my character does. The house is fictional, of course, so to accomplish this I would have to go and find a house, or several houses, that looked sufficiently like the one in my head, and find my way inside of them.

There’s a certain indefinable look that old houses in Europe have that’s difficult to find in America, especially on the West Coast, where I live. More than that, finding a house that looked right but was also abandoned — and still relatively untouched, in terms of graffiti / squatters / junkies (which ruled out Detroit, for instance) — would be almost impossible. Incredibly, my publisher agreed to send me to Europe to search for just the right locations, and an explorer friend from the Netherlands who knew where a number of amazing old abandoned houses and chateaus were agreed to show me around. (Did I mention how nice Dutch people can be?) So I packed my camera, flew to Amsterdam, and embarked on a road trip through Belgium and Luxembourg with my explorer friend, hopping from village to village, abandonment to abandonment.

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I just got back from a week in the Netherlands (and Belgium and Luxembourg) and my head’s still spinning — from the jet-lag, heavy beers, and dizzying awesomeness of that part of the world. I’m just starting to go through the intimidating mountain of images and videos I took while there, but just to kick off what will be probably several weeks of occasional posts about the region, I wanted to do a quick overview of Holland, which as it turns out has a lot more to offer than tulips and wooden shoes (though it’s got those, too).

The first thing you notice about Amsterdam are its canals. The second is all the bikes. It’s got more of both than anywhere else — more canals than Venice, and more bikes than people, some 1,000,000 unsexy-but-practical granny bikes for a population of just 700,000. Decades ago, the city had a lot more cars speeding down its narrow lanes, but Amsterdammers realized that fitting any more automobiles into Amsterdam was going to require paving some of their historic canals. So they decided to encourage bike use by making the city friendly to bikes, building thousands of km of bike lanes and giant bike parking lots (one of which — the top of a multi-storied structure — is pictured below) and unfriendly to cars. It’s very expensive to own a car, buy gas for a car, park a car, or even get a license to drive a car in Holland — the test costs more than 500 euros, and if you fail, which is easy to do, you’ve got to pay it all over again on subsequent attempts. Little wonder then that so many people ride bikes. It’s the fastest way to get around — and fun, too!

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Mount Airy, North Carolina is known to most tourists as the birthplace of Andy Griffith and the inspiration for Mayberry, where his titular sitcom was set — and indeed, if you walk down its main street, as I did last week, you’ll find nothing but Andy Griffith memorabilia: tee-shirts in every window, restaurants named for its characters, Barney Fife’s face peering at you from life-sized cutouts. They even pipe the Andy Griffith Show theme song into the air on a semi-continuous loop (I still haven’t been able to get it out of my head). But in the 19th century, Mount Airy was home to someone considerably more famous. Two people, actually: Chang and Eng, the legendary conjoined twins, who after years of touring the world with P.T. Barnum, married a pair of local sisters and settled in Wilkesboro, a small farming community just on the outskirts of Mount Airy.

A community stuck happily in the 1950s, where today many of the 1,500 descendants of the world’s most famous sideshow freaks reside. It’s as strange a juxtaposition of culture as I’ve ever run across.

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One thing that surprised me about Venice was that graffiti was everywhere. There’s almost as much art on the streets as there was in churches and museums, which might be because Venice is a city of blind alleys and dark corridors, a warren of hiding places that are perfect spots for taggers and street artists to do their thing. Initially it was a little shocking to see so much spray-paint applied to the exterior of twelfth-century cathedrals and otherwise beautiful crumbling walls and even on people’s front doors — but once I stopped being offended I started being fascinated. While the oil-and-canvas masterworks hanging in the city’s galleries may reflect of Venice the Renaissance era, it’s what’s painted on the outside of the museum wall that reflects what Venetians — at least the ones wielding cans of spray-paint — are thinking now.

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Venice is a city known for its stunning art masterpieces and its architectural marvels, for its famous canals, for being the birthplace of Vivaldi and a haven for classical music and opera lovers. It is not widely known for its ghetto — and yet the very word itself comes from Venice. Prior to the 16th century, the Jewish quarter of Venice was a foundry, or in Italian, a getto. To control the spread of fire should one break out, the foundry was on an island bordered on all sides by canals. But in 1516, when the city became crowded with refugees after a war with the Papal States, it was decreed that Venice’s 1,000 Jews should all live together in one place — the old foundry island, where they could be locked in at night, though free to roam the city during daylight hours.

The ghetto still stands today, and though it’s obviously no longer mandatory, some 450 Jews live there and many more come to attend synagogues, study, and eat together at the ghetto’s excellent kosher restaurants. Though officially-designated Jewish quarters existed in Spain and elsewhere hundreds of years before Venice had one, when I visited Venice several weeks ago, I was curious to see what the place where the word “ghetto” was born looked like today. This is what I found.

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If you’ve got the money, you can live in Venice. If you’re a romantic, you can die in Venice. But you cannot be buried in Venice. That rule was adopted in 1807, when Napoleon’s inspectors surveyed the sorry state of parish plots scattered across the city and decided that it was unsanitary to bury people in Venice proper, a city where you can’t dig more than a few feet without hitting water (or wooden pylons, or sand). Elected as an alternative was the nearby island of San Michele, formerly a prison, which today houses dead Venetians packed heel-to-toe by the hundreds of thousands — many times the current living population of Venice. Grassy lanes shaded with rows of cypress and a distinct lack of crowds make it one of the most peaceful spots in the lagoon to spend an afternoon; even though it’s just one stop from one of Venice’s busiest vaporetto (waterbus) hubs, it feels very far from the tourist trail.

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