Rauðasandur – the Red Sand Festival

Rauðasandur! A little music festival in a remote bit of the West Fjords of Iceland, that I'd been dreaming about for at least two years. But planning a trip to Iceland just to go to one festival would be crazy.

But if you happen to be in Iceland anyway...

Trying to figure out how to get to the festival (it's so remote that buses don't run there) was a lesson in learning to be as last-minute as an Icelander – not my natural mode, to say the least. I don't think I've ever met a group as categorically last-minute in their life planning as the Icelandic people! (One Icelander I talked to linked this to their catastrophic financial crash of a few years ago – Icelanders are amazing at coming together to help each other after a crisis, she said, but not so good at sparing a thought for how to avert the crisis in the first place.)

Nonetheless, by some miracle of good luck, I managed to land a ride north to the festival from Reykjavík with a laconic guy named Þórður (pronounced Thor-thur) – to me, he seemed the epitome of the old Icelandic fisherman type – quiet and implacable, but kind-hearted in that Icelandic way where they don't even notice that what they're doing is above and beyond – like stopping to help a stranded tourist whose rental car had broken down in the rain in a remote fjord. Also in the same car were Arndís (bizarrely, it's pronounced more like "Ard-nis") and her boyfriend Koosha. The two of them were fantastically open and fun (Arndís may be the least Icelandic Icelander I've met, in that respect!) and they ended up being my constant companions through the weekend. The music at the festival was enjoyable and all, but the real magic was in the friendships forged in just those four days.

The location for Rauðasandur (literally "Red Sand") is a stunning red-sand beach at the foot of a steep cliff exposed directly to the Atlantic and all the wild weather that entails. Of the festival's three nights, we actually spent two in nearby (by which I mean a 40-minute drive away) Patreksfjörður, which is more sheltered, inside a fjord. In fact, I was woken up on Saturday by Arndís shaking me and saying we had to break camp immediately and move back to Patreksfjörður, because a storm was coming in. The wind was so strong, it bent two of the poles of my tent as we were taking it down! I've never woken up, taken down a tent and packed up all my belongings faster.

Rauðasandur: Some kind of magical mix of stunning location (seriously, just the skies over the sea at Rauðasandur I could try forever to describe) + a whimsical sampler of Icelandic music, from electronic to folk to reggae and everything in between + friendships forged in the enjoyable kind of "adversity," the kind that involves rolling with the weather-changing punches and having all the more fun for it. 

I could write pages and pages and pages about the experience that was Rauðasandur, but I'll let the pictures tell the story:

ÍSLAND: Rauðasandur