Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Monday the 13th of November and all through the weekend I've been keeping an eye on Iceland.

And today I want to talk about people who are perhaps concerned about trips there in due to go imminently

but also why i am not one for one moment worried about a shutdown of the sort that we saw

in april 2010 if you can remember that far back perhaps if if you were involved, like me, you will remember

exactly where you were. I was just about to get on a ski lift in the lovely Norwegian

ski resort of Trussel. My phone went, it was a senior aviation figure, shall we say,

who said, you want to keep an eye on this Icelandic volcano,

which he didn't attempt to pronounce, but I will.

A fiatio yucut.

Let's see how that gets on.

Anyway, it led to basically a week of shutdowns.

50,000 flights cancelled.

8 million people had their travel plans torn up,

including me.

I went out to Norway as a passenger on SAS

and I came back as freight on a container ship,

but at least I got back after maybe just a few days late. Well, in terms of what's

happening now, of course, as you will be aware, the very seismically seething southwest of

Iceland is looking quite lively at the moment.

The rest of the earth is rarely more restless than it is in lovely Iceland, which is one of the youngest countries on Earth formed about 15 million years ago.

And you can actually visit. It's one of the great things on the tourist trail, of which there's so much to see, where you can actually visit it's one of the great things on the tourist trail of which there's

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