Wednesday August 8th. Morning broke cold and rainy. We rose early and made the sometimes hairy drive along rough dirt roads to an amazing waterfall called Dynjandi. Even with the rain coming down, walking up to this massive curtain of falling water was simply amazing. There are no guard rails or signs warning you away, you can simply experience the thing. Very different from a similar natural area in the States.
The past couple of days had taught us that the roads in the West Fjords region were a great deal slower than we had anticipated. This was especially true in the rain. Jen and I decided to forgo our plan of circumnavigating the entire peninsula and instead heading down to the passenger ferry in the town of Brjanslaekur which would bring us to Stykkisholmur. No, I'm not making these names up! This would turn a seven or eight hour drive into a three-hour boat ride where we could relax a bit. Definitely worth it. The ferry ride was a bit bumpy but uneventful.
On our drive south we were treated to the brightest rainbow I've ever seen. It stayed with us for a good twenty minutes. It was absolutely stunning. If you looked close you could actually discern the green-blue-purple transitions with shades in between. Stunning.
We treated the rest of the day as a travel day to set us up for some things we wanted to do in the Central-South Iceland region. It was a long drive but we made the town of Vik (yes, that's it just "Vik") in the early evening. We had rain the entire way and we decided to get a hotel or hostel room for the night. Ah the best laid plans... There was not a room to be had in Vik. In fact one hotel woman said that they had been calling around for overbooked guests and there was not a room to be had in a 100 km radius of the town. Thank goodness I brought my tent. We found a camping area and settled in for the night. We had rain all night, sometimes coming down in great quantity, but my tent passed the deluge test and we made it through the night relatively dry.
Thursday August 9th. We arose and treated ourselves to a hotel breakfast and then headed off to the black sand beach. Yes, another beach for my collection. This one is dark black volcanic sand. I have another cool black sand beach in Bequia in my collection, but this one is even darker. We hit another beach site but the wind and rain made it difficult to spend much time appreciating the place. While I know there is no such thing as bad weather, just different kinds of good weather, this good weather was pretty cold and damp. We worked our way along the southern coastline and found yet another very cool waterfall called Seljalandsfoss which falls straight down 60 meters to crash and send spray whipping in the wind half way back up again. The raw power of this place is sometimes overwhelming.
After a couple of false starts, we eventually found the road up to one of the local glaciers. There are glaciers all over this part of the island, but they generally require four wheel drive to get to. The road we took up probably required a 4x4 as well, but our little trooper of a car made it up to the top. The mountain spirits gifted us with a lift in the rain and the cloud deck even rose a bit. This afforded us a chance to hike up to the glacier and even climb a bit on its leading edge. This mass of ice was as big as some of the ones I saw last summer in Alaska and there was no way were going to hike very much on the ice itself. We had neither the gear nor the expertise to do that sort of thing, but it was great to see the huge, beautiful glacial valley and enjoy this awesome natural phenomena. It's not looking like we're going to have too many of these ice sheets in our near future, so I feel privileged to have witnessed them in three different parts of the world (Alaska, New Zealand and now here).
Friday August 10th. We found a great little guest lodge west of Vik. When I say "we" I of course mean the excellent internet surfing skills of my travel partner Jen. She has been our accommodation wizard and I'm sure if I were here alone, I'd be sleeping in the tent a great deal more!
After a phenomenal Continental breakfast (they do a REAL European Continental breakfast here in Iceland) we headed back out. Today was our day to be tourists and we visited the three major stops on the "Golden Circle". First was Pingvellir National Park, the site where you can view the rift valley. This is the spot where the Mid-Atlantic ridge can be seen separating the North Atlantic plate from the European plate. For a science geek such as myself, this was a cool place to experience. The area was quite beautiful and again the rain paused long enough for us to get to see it. We spent about an hour walking around the rift and I really enjoyed seeing the unique rock formations.
Stop number two was at Geysir - the original thermal feature for which the English word "Geyser" comes from. It was here that I first really felt like a tourist. Geysir has a huge Visitors Center which is really just a giant gift shop. There were people everywhere and a constant stream of busses came in and out of the huge parking lot. We stood around the thermal pools with nearly a hundred people to see the bubbling water and one geyser shoot off. Frankly, Yellowstone is much more impressive and Rotorua in New Zealand much more so. Time to move on.
Our last stop of the day was also filled with huge crowds. However, this was a sight to behold. It was another waterfall, and the granddaddy of them all, Gullfoss. I don't have the words to describe how magnificent this huge mass of water is. There is so much water falling into the gorge below the lower falls that you cannot see the bottom for all the spray. I could feel the power of the water as a bass rumble against my chest. Amazing. Again you can get very close to this huge water feature without much in the way of safety. I suspect that if you tried to sue Iceland for hurting yourself for doing something stupid, you would be laughed at.
Tomorrow we are back in Reykjavik and Monday we leave for Boston. This has been an amazing, amazing vacation.
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