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BBC MUNDO RADIO
Updated
The Eyjafjallajokull eruption has stranded thousands of travellers - including the ABC's Lexi Metherell (Reuters: Lucas Jackson)
Being in Iceland as one of its volcanoes was erupting seemed like great timing.
It had been 200 years since this one, Eyjafjallajökull, last blew its top, so I booked myself on a tour to see the apparently rare spectacle.
As it turns out, thousands of Icelanders and other tourists were like-minded that night, and my four-wheel drive took its place among the cars and buses cavalcading through Iceland's otherworldly landscape, on the three-hour drive from Reykjavik to the volcano.
Well, not actually the volcano. I'd had visions of skirting around lava flows and of peering into the crater - but OH and S and common sense meant we stopped several kilometres away.
From our vantage point I did question whether looking at this blob of glowing orange in the distance was worth the kronur I'd shelled out, beaten down though the currency may be.
Not to mention the pneumonia I thought I was contracting amid the minus 10 degrees Celsius conditions with an added intense wind chill factor.
I turned then to the thought that's consoled many a disappointed tourist: "at least I can say I've seen it".
Fast forward several weeks to last Thursday. I was in London, slightly warmer, getting ready to fly home as a friend's text arrived: "So, Lex. I've organised some Icelandic volcanic ash to keep you here. Check your flight details. Not lying."
But the sky above London was clear, and besides, I was flying from Heathrow. Heathrow doesn't close. It can't. That would mean unthinkable chaos.
"Nice try," I wrote back after checking the website. "Heathrow open. Great to see you." And off I set to the airport, of the belief that in just over two hours, I would be in the sky, destination Melbourne.
If I didn't think the volcano was all that spectacular first time around, it certainly gave a worthy encore performance.
Less than 24 hours after its second eruption, its plume was wafting across Europe, and the airports that hadn't already closed, were closing.
And as I was motoring ignorantly down the M4, the unthinkable was happening. Heathrow was closing.
I arrived at Terminal 3 to cordons being drawn across the sliding doors by staff in those neon waistcoats worn during emergencies.
They were putting their 'dealing with difficult situations' training in to practice on the growing crowd which was coming to the realisation that no one was going anywhere. At least, they told us, not between 11:00am and 7:00pm that day.
So, I called Qantas and had my flight rescheduled to 10:00pm that night, and then rejoiced in the extra handful of hours I'd have to mill about London.
A handful of hours has turned into days, and I'm still in London, where the sky has been eerily empty - apart from the potentially hazardous volcano ash, invisible to people on the street and, more problematically, to aeroplane radars.
Heathrow eventually gave up announcing proposed times of reopening and closed the airspace indefinitely.
If I was still in Iceland I probably would have been able to get home by now - ironically, its main airport has been barely affected. But instead I've been on permanent ash alert.
In hindsight, much like the hopes I had of standing atop an exploding volcano, my optimism that Heathrow would remain open was ridiculous.
There were no wardens guarding Europe's busiest airport telling the ash cloud to turn back please, we're awfully important and rather under the pump right now.
I had just succumbed to the assumption that my plans were impenetrable - and so, it seems, had lots of others.
Admittedly what's been happening has been almighty and unpredictable, but just like me blithely making my way to the airport, we have a great ability to underestimate these sort of things.
It's been striking how slow the official reaction has been. Surely the chaos that would ensue by closing all these airports even for just a day could've been anticipated.
The UK government has a few things on its mind, namely getting re-elected and performing some kind of economic miracle, but it took five days of closed airspace before it swung into action, calling on the Royal Navy to rescue some of the estimated 150,000 stranded Britons.
As for the European Union, it was also late in the piece that EU Ministers emerged, pledging that member countries had pledged to work closely together on the crisis.
Now most European airports are reopening. But recovering from this calamity, which has ended on the score nature 1 - technology nil, is going to be slow.
Mine was among the first flights to be cancelled, but still it looks like it'll be almost a fortnight before I finally get to enjoy all the quirks of air travel on my way home.
Meanwhile there'll be the post-mortems, and the discussions of lessons learnt.
Perhaps the first should be to react more quickly in future. Especially if there's any truth behind the rumours that Hekla - one of Iceland's biggest volcanoes - is due.
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