The great thing about piers from a photographic perspective is that the straight lines lend themselves so well to compositions. I always try to make a point of directing any diagonal lines into the corner of shots if I can.

As it was November it was cold enough to give everything a sheen of ice so we were quite careful on our first evening there but had a reasonable walk along part of the Icelandic shoreline before heading inland. We had no plans to visit anything at that time, just take in the lay of the land, make a note of anything interesting, and grab some shots of the varied architecture.

Water featured heavily in the town with rivers, a lake, and a reservoir in addition to the Atlantic coast.

We noticed a few pieces of art and sculpture and there was obviously some sort of street art scene going on in the area too.

On the final day we would discover Hellisgerdi Park and its abundance of artwork.

By the ocean’s edge I was quite taken with a piece of brutal architecture but I couldn’t work out what its function was.

A processed image of something that may have been art or may have been functional or may have been both.

Our first stop was the most obvious landmark in Reykjavík, the Lutheran church Hallgrímskirkja. As we exited the impressive building we happened upon a wedding photo shoot taking place using the church as a backdrop. I made sure to take a few shots of the action as well.

After the church visit we walked the short distance down to the Reykjavík shoreline which provided some lovely views across the water to mountains around the Icelandic coast.

One of the features of the shoreline was the presence of a beautiful, stainless steel sculpture called The Sun Voyager. There were quite a few people hovering around, braving the bracing temperatures to take a photo or two and, unsurprisingly, I did the same. I also took a photo of an Icelandic man in front of the piece of art who drove up, hopped out of his car, and asked if I would. I’m nice like that.

Further along the water’s edge was the Harpa Concert Hall, an interesting piece of architecture that reminded me a little of the sand crawlers in Star Wars. We didn’t go in the building because there was a music festival taking place in Iceland in the week we were visiting and entrance was for ticket holders only.

We wandered around a little bit more after that taking more photos of Reykjavík’s streets and buildings as well as some of its street art while there was still light enough to do so before hunkering down in a few bars to grab some food and drink. Expensive, as you probably could guess with it being Iceland, but what we had was very good.

I found some of the architecture of the buildings in Salou very appealing. There were elements of brutalism amongst the modernism that you come to expect in any hotel or apartment complexes raised in holiday destinations in the latter parts of the twentieth century. Getting under the buildings and looking up to their shaped balconies produced some pleasing angled photos against the sky.

Moving away from the shops took us through some more green and shaded spaces, looking beautifully welcoming against the scorching temperature we were feeling from the relentless sunshine pouring down on us from above.

We then came out on the main promenade separating the beach areas of the Salou from the beach. Everything seemed very clean, very bright, very wide, and incredibly photogenic which was good as I’m quite fond of taking advantage of photogenic things and taking photos of them, so that’s what I did before we started back along the coast to the hotel area once again.

Grey skies blended with grey seas but the humidity and general strangeness of a reasonably quiet cruise past rocky islands and the man-made harbour area, coupled with the ghostly feeling accompanying the near-complete lack of seeing anyone else around made for a wonderful experience nonetheless.

You know you’re not far from the port when the pilot boat comes alongside the cruise ship to allow the local expert to guide the huge vessel to its dock.

Keelung is typical of the industrial ports that cruise ships tend to dock at because of their size. Cranes, containers, towers, warehouse buildings, and other ships and boats made up most of the view from the ship as it passed from the open sea into close proximity to the city. I don’t actually mind these views because there are lots of patterns and repetitive shapes that help to form decent imagery for photographs and I have a fondness for the raw power in brutalist design anyway which you tend to see in some form or another around the world in docks.

I liked the attempt to brighten up some of the industrial elements of the port with imagery, even if it didn’t quite bring the splash of colour that perhaps was intended with the decidedly grey conditions of the day on which we approached Keelung.

Coming in closer to the city of Keelung it was interesting to see the the modern buildings, dirty-looking from the dampness in the air and the grime from the industrial location, contrasted with the clean, bright yellows of the taxis and buses waiting for tourists, as well as the ancient temple structures on the hillsides around.

Ullandhaug was the area of the city to which we first headed. There would be two components forming this part of the excursion and both from very different parts of Stavanger’s history. We started at the Iron Age Farm open air museum. The location of Jernaldergården felt a little anachronistic, being overlooked by apartment blocks on one side, and this did detract from being able to immerse yourselves fully in the history, but it was still very interesting to visit and the guides did a fabulous job of recounting tales of what life was like in the period between 350 and 550 CE.

We didn’t just wander around the exterior of the farm buildings like the sheep in the area, but also were taken inside one for some more iron age storytelling. The buildings were very interesting, set into the ground and with turf laid on the roofs to keep the places as warm as possible. They were, however, awkward to get into and out of without a lot of bending and risk of bumps to the head.

Staying in the Ullandhaug area we next paid a visit to Ullandhaugtårnet, a telecommunications tower and landmark overlooking the city of Stavanger. Built in 1964 and standing sixty four metres in height there were some delightfully brutalist elements to the design that I loved and that many of our fellow passengers on the excursion couldn’t stand. As a light drizzle accompanied our visit to the tower and there were steps involved to get onto its viewing platform, a fair number of people decided to stay on the bus for the short time of our visit as a result.

Other than providing some lovely views of the Norwegian landscape around Stavanger, the tower itself did not have a lot of history, although it was built next to the spot where another tower commemorating the Battle of Hafrsjord had been erected in 1896 but which had been mostly destroyed during the Second World War. Stone markers with Viking symbols indicated where the remains of the tower had been removed the year before the telecoms tower had been constructed.

We enjoyed the scenery and tutted a little at the mediocre quality of the street art decorating some of the walls before heading back to the bus which was waiting to take us back to Stavanger.

In Buenos Aires airport we were met by representatives of Princess Cruises (and I was offered a job because I helped out some other passengers having trouble understanding the process) and were taken on a slow drive through the Argentine capital city’s traffic to the port area to board the ship.

As with many places that cruise ships dock the port area of Buenos Aires was a commercial zone with not a huge amount of interest to look at if you’re not fond of shipping containers and cranes but the weather was gorgeous, we were in a foreign country, I had my camera to hand, there were some lovely pieces of brutalist architecture on show too, and photographs were quick to follow.

In addition to taking pictures from our mini suite balcony when we first arrived in Buenos Aires we took a walk up onto the top deck of the cruise ship and I snapped some photos of the commercial port and the Río de la Plata from there too.

Our coach pulled up in the Recoleta district of Buenos Aires and we gathered outside the walls of the cemetery to hear some of the details of the location from our guide. Naturally, I wandered off and took some photographs of the surrounding area and its concrete-friendly architecture and missed all the information.

We then entered the cemetery itself for close to an hour to explore its street-like layout of above ground crypts. As it would turn out this would not be the only cemetery filled with above ground crypts we would visit on our South American cruise aboard the Star Princess; it turns out they’re fond of these things down that way.

Other than tourists, a few relatives (perhaps), and a few workers, the only other living things wandering the impressive alleys between the equally impressive crypts of the cemetery were cats.

La Recoleta cemetery’s most famous inhabitant is, of course, Eva Perón, whose body lay within the crypt marked by her family name of Duarte.

We had time for a few more photographs of the Recoleta district surroundings and buildings outside the walls of the cemetery before boarding our coach for the next stop on our organised tour of Buenos Aires.

From going back and looking at the photos taken of the brutalist buildings along the port area one of the things I missed at the time was the lovely, socialist design work in the concrete of one of the structures. Worth looking at these images in full size.

The spectacle of concrete style couldn’t go on forever and, much as I like it, there was the matter of a two week cruise around South America to deal with which did have more than its fair share of appeal too. We left brutalist Buenos Aires behind and passed the remainder of the commercial port area.

The port was soon behind us as we turned out onto the river that would take us to our next stop, Montevideo. The dipping sun had just enough light left to provide a few nice shots through some of the buildings along the waterfront area of Buenos Aires and we got to see some distant high rise structures that hadn’t been evident when we’d been in the main part of the city. We also noticed a pier with a narrow-gauge railway leading along it.