Myvatn: Lava, Sulfur and More Waterfalls

Are you sensing a theme to Iceland yet? Before we got here, we read advice telling us that if you stopped to take a photo of every waterfall in Iceland, in a week you'd only make it a few miles. It really is true...we have a whole lot of car window photos of different waterfalls, but we still stop at one or more every day.

Yesterday, we took another lazy morning, for two reasons: the first was that our hotel had the most impressive breakfast buffet (including good coffee) that we've seen yet in Iceland. The second is because we hadn't been able to enjoy this view yesterday, which we got to see both out of our window and out of the breakfast room's window.

Once we finally got going, the first order of business was to head to the biggest (by water volume) waterfall in Europe, Dettifoss. This was a pretty massive waterfall! I made Patrick drive the safe tarred road rather than the gravel road that the reviews complained about being terrifying, since we've driven a few gravel roads in Iceland that were more pothole than road and our nice little rental car looks like we've been taking it offroading through the mudpits already. (The heated seats and steering wheel still work fine, although the backup camera now just shows us a nice view of dried mud...so the priorities are all right!) We had to walk a ways to the waterfall, through this very barren landscape of weird black volcanic rock structures. Interesting looking, but a bit eerie. When we got there, it was to see a giant waterfall where we couldn't see the bottom of the water vapor.

From there, we kept going to the Lake Myvatn area. We drove through such a variety of landscapes on the way here, the most interesting of which was the mountains where the sulfur pits are. We didn't stop, as we heard a few too many horror stories of people whose shoes melted 10 minutes after walking into the parking lot because of someone who had carelessly tracked sulfur across the pavement, but the mountains were bright red with weird yellow and white splotches, and steaming continually. It was a cool sight!

The lake itself is surrounded with a huge variety of scenery, from more weird black rock columns and formations to miles of ground cover turning its beautiful fall colors (imagine a whole Minnesotan forest in October, but all those colors spread across ground cover 12 inches tall) to a little forest that we took a hike through that felt just like being at home, although when we got glimpses of the lake we could see beautiful blue-green water with some of the same cool lava formations sticking out. This lake is famous in summer for having little midge flies that continually buzz you and try to fly in your ears and eyes and nose - we were very happy to be here in mid-September, when they have died off and we didn't have to wear mosquito nets over our heads!

We made a few less impressive stops for short walks in Myvatn, before ending up at our hotel directly across from one of the very impressive waterfalls in Iceland, Godafoss. The water really is as blue - or more - than you see in the photo, even on a cloudy afternoon. It is definitely colder up here in northern Iceland, and as usual the sun went away later in the day, so we took our photos at Godafoss quickly before running back to the hotel for a warm dinner, including "Icelandic meat soup" and ice cream with toppings and a shot of a local liqueur set on fire - great ways to stay warm in spite of the wet and the wind!

Icebergs, Lobster and More Waterfalls

First of all, after reviewing the blog, Patrick would like to set the record straight: he would like you all to know that the Viking-themed hotel we stayed at in Reykjavik was in no way cheesy, it was awesome.

Today was a slightly lower key day (no twelve mile hike!), with a lot more driving. Our first stop was close, though - the iceberg lagoon, Jokulsarlon. This is a little inlet from the ocean where the glacier is frequently dropping icebergs, and it is beautiful! Another sunny day certainly contributed, bringing out the blues in the water, sky and icebergs. We also got to watch a couple of seals playing in the lagoon. We saw a small iceberg flip and heard a new one break off the glacier and splash into the lagoon, which sent the seals into a whole bunch of new backflips and racing around. As the tide was going out, when we stopped by the ocean side of the lagoon we saw some of the icebergs floating out to see. This site also had a black sand beach (and much nicer sand than the famous one in Vik!) and it was a beautiful contrast with the icebergs that had washed up.

Next, a quick stop for lunch (something we don't often do in Iceland - people weren't kidding about food being expensive). There was a restaurant on our way that is famous for their small lobsters (langoustine) and we stopped in. They were delicious, and a nice addition to a day of slow moving around as our muscles tried to unknot from the hike!

Finally, our last stop was just a bit away from our hotel for the night - another waterfall, called Hengifoss. This was a quick mile-and-a-half hike, which unfortunately was pretty much straight up and down. Our tired muscles made it, and it was an impressively tall waterfall to end the day! Best of all - our hotel has a hot tub waiting for us after all the hiking.

Iceland Hiking

Yesterday was the day we had planned for the most hiking of our trip - and I'm posting this morning rather than yesterday because it turns out that a 12 mile mountain hike isn't very conducive to staying awake past 10:30 pm! I spent a portion of yesterday really, really wishing we were close enough to visit the Blue Lagoon again - it would have been worth every penny after yesterday.

We started the day in Vik with the black sand beach, Reynisfjara. This was a quick stop but very pretty! We had a beautiful, sunny morning and the black sand stretched out to some beautiful rock fixtures. This is definitely not a swimming beach - you have to stay a long ways back from the water, as lots of people are killed here each year because the beach has "sneaker waves" every so often that will reach 20-30 feet further up the beach than normal waves and will drag people in. It's still a beautiful sight as long as you stay back, though! We saw a few, but people were aware and ran back in when one was coming.

From there we drove through some more amazing landscape. I think one of the fun things so far about driving through Iceland is that the landscape frequently changes drastically every 10-15 minutes driving. We went from mountains to wide open prairie fields to long fields of these cute green boulders (I fully expected to see one of those little round trolls from Frozen pop up) to wide open, black sand flats throughout the day.

Our first drive took us to one of the most beautiful things we've seen here yet, Fjardrarglufur. (And yes, one of our entertainments on this trip so far has been listening to Google Maps try to pronounce Icelandic. And listening to ourselves try to do the same.) This was a short little hike, but absolutely worth it, especially since our sunny day was continuing.

Finally, we drove to our last and longest hike, in Skaftafell National Park. We knew we wanted to come here for one of the most famous waterfalls, Svartifoss, which is surrounded by the same sort of rare rock fixture as Giant's Causeway. We chose to do the long (S3) hike instead of just the short one to the waterfall, though - and although every muscle in my legs is still very, very angry at me, and the hike ended up being 2 miles longer than we thought, it was incredible.

A little ways into the hike, we were able to see these incredible colored mountains - I'm very disappointed that we lost the sun by this point, because the photos here just can't capture the colors. They were multicolored and absolutely stunning.

A little bit further and we were able to see one side of the glacier in the park. Can you see the waterfall? It's freezing as it hits the ground, making the cool ice shape underneath it.

At this point we were finally mostly done with going up....although we got a whole lot higher on this hike than we expected to! As you can see, we had quite the incredible vista.

A little further in the hike and we were able to see the other side of the glacier, which was flowing down the valley. At about 8 miles in at this point, we took a break and stared at the glacier flowing, the striations and the tiny icebergs at the base. 

Throughout the hike, we were lucky to see beautiful fall colors across all the ground cover plants - still some green, particularly the moss, but tons of oranges and reds and yellows and even pinks in the grasses and shrubs.

All in, as I said, we hiked about 12 miles through the mountains. It was one of the most challenging hikes I've done physically in quite awhile, ranking right after Cradle Mountain in Tasmania, although there were no extremely hard portions of the trail, or chains to haul yourself up and down steep bits - just continual steep slopes, steps and some shifting rock fields. This wasn't a hike where I worried at any point I wasn't going to be able to make it past a portion of the trail - just one where by the end, all of my muscles were threatening to stop going. It was also up there with Cradle Mountain as one of the most beautiful and rewarding, as it's not every day you get to see a flowing glacier or a freezing waterfall or incredible mountains like those. So, although we could hardly walk to our table for dinner that night, and we both slept a solid 10 hours before waking up this morning, it was absolutely worth it! (It also didn't hurt to have the chocolate cake covered in the best ice cream I've ever eaten, native Icelandic berries and, oddly, pop rocks with not even a little bit of guilt.) Luckily today will be less hiking and more driving and sightseeing, but so far Iceland is astonishingly beautiful and fully living up to all its hype.

Northern Lights

When it comes to the northern lights, we were LUCKY.

We talked to a handful of people who have been here for 10-14 days, and hadn't yet had a clear day to see them. We not only had a clear night on our second night, but we happened to have booked a hotel about 20 minutes from the nearest town, so rather than driving 15-20 minutes and sitting in a cold car to try to see the lights, we sat in our warm beds and then wandered on outside and stood in the back yard of the hotel. When we first got back from dinner, we could see a tiny bit of the aurora on the horizon - enough to say we had seen it, but not enough to tell apart from city lights or clouds. We decided to go back in and come out in another hour or so. We came back out to a much bigger show - and I think we picked about the best 45 minutes we could have been out there, because we watched them go from relatively still to a very impressive show. They were colorless (the green is how the photo captures them) but flickering and dancing continually all across the sky. It looks like someone lit a candle over the sky and there's a light breeze - like clouds dancing in the wind like a fire. After or 45 minutes, the dancing had mostly stopped and they had receded - so we were very, very lucky in our timing!

But I know the photos are really the only important part here!

Starting our Driving Tour around Iceland

I don't think we could have asked for a better day to introduce ourselves to Iceland than today.

We slept like the dead after the Blue Lagoon, and when we finally dragged ourselves out of bed we got started on our tour of the Golden Circle and some other common stops near Reykjavik. We had a beautiful, sunny morning to start, and it lasted most of the day (with the occasional interruption of a 3 minute rain cloud, because it IS Iceland).

The drive was stunning. There's no good way to capture Iceland in a photo - the mountains dwarfing you, the wide open fields, the brilliant plant colors in a stark, wide open landscape. The ground really is this amazing spring green color, and we saw rainbows galore throughout the day.

The first waterfall we were planning on seeing, Bruarfoss, is on private property and the owners no longer allow access. That meant that when we came to our next stop, Geysir, we had time to do a bit more of a hike rather than just running to see the geyser explode. (We DID see the geyser explode a few times, though!) The whole area is a bit surreal - black and red dirt surrounded by brilliant green moss, smoking orange and turquoise pools and the occasional pool that is continually bubbling like a witch's cauldron. It was very cool!

From there, we started the tour of waterfalls. There are a LOT of waterfalls to see here, and we could have stopped at far more of them than we did. Today we stuck to the most famous (and touristy) ones, and every one was incredible. We also only made it to our hotel 10 minutes before the end of check in time, so we couldn't have fit much more in!

In the middle of our waterfall tour, we took a quick break to visit a natural hot springs in the mountains that, decades ago, someone built into a swimming pool. It's in an incredible location, surrounded by mountains and waterfalls, but it's been a bit overrun by tourists and has gotten a little gross. It was still an interesting experience and absolutely worth at least the hike in to see the beautiful scenery - but I can't recommend the pool as the peaceful, pure oasis that people raved about.

Finally, we got to see a sunset in Iceland, which isn't something we expected to see a lot of - and we just came in from a wonderful viewing of the northern lights. For a first full day in Iceland, I don't think you could beat today!

Off to Iceland!

We said goodbye to Ireland today (Tuesday), in what started out as a beautiful day but was raining again before we took off! No time to do anything this morning (except an early morning trip to the hotel hot tub for Patrick, who wakes up uncomfortably early), but we made it through car return, security, the VAT tax refund line and to our gate before boarding, so that was a successful morning. We had to bid a fond farewell to Bedsprings, and also to send Dani off to her next travels.

We got off in Iceland to a lovely 45 degrees and sun...although we learned that sun and rain can alternate every 10 minute easily here. We checked into our Viking-themed hotel, which I believe is a bit cheesy and Patrick absolutely adores, before heading off to tour Iceland's first and only whiskey distillery, Eimverk Distillery. (Iceland has now been producing whiskey, as they tell is, for a full 9 months!) The tour was a lot of fun, with a co-founder leading the tour and tasting. He obviously loved his job and loved talking to people, and we learned everything from the history of his distillery to why Iceland traditionally burns sheep poo. From there we ate a quick dinner at the also Viking themed restaurant at our hotel (which Patrick also loved) and headed off to the Blue Lagoon.

If the Viking bar and restaurant was Patrick's  happy place for the day, the Blue Lagoon was mine. It is an entire facility devoted to a hot tub through size of a small lake - what's not to like? The water was warm and beautiful and brilliant blue, and absolutely relaxing. I haven't downloaded the photos from the waterproof camera yet, but the huge billows of steam right below are definitely the Blue Lagoon, and you can see them from miles away!

We were there for about 3 hours, floating, enjoying and trying through mud masks. The Blue Lagoon is not a natural geothermic pool, as I used to believe - the water is heated due to a factory. The lagoon itself, though, is still considered a mineral baths and is warm, relaxing and left my skin soft and refreshed! We barely kept our eyes open for the drive home (there was terrible singing to keep ourselves awake) and we fell asleep before we even managed to dig our toothbrushes out of the bags. It was a great welcome to Iceland!

Driving Northern Ireland - Bushmills and Belfast

Today (although as I'm hitting the button to post this, Monday was a couple days ago) was our last full day in Ireland, and we had the day relatively free! Most of the things we had planned we either did the day before (Giant's Causeway, stopping by Dunlace Castle) or they were weather dependent (hiking Hare's Gap), and we had another day of steady rain. We took that as an excuse for a long, lazy morning - first finding breakfast in a little cafe and then heading to the Bushmills Old Distillery. We hadn't planned on the time for the Distillery, but it was fun to visit the oldest Irish distillery and enjoy a few tastings. All in all, though, we were more impressed with our tastes at the Jameson tour.

We followed that up by driving to Belfast, where we took a black cab tour (although our cab was maroon, not black). The tour took us through the divided parts of Belfast, including driving along the walls separating the Catholic and Protestant areas, and gave us a history lesson. While I wouldn't say it was enjoyable - it's a lot of very dark and tragic history - we learned a lot. The city center of Belfast is beautiful, well maintained and gives no hint of all the political issues - it's a very strange city to go through. Below is a section of the wall that still exists (and is locked nightly) between the Catholic and Protestant sides of the city - this section is called the peace wall and is dedicated to murals and messages to the city.

We ended the night a little less excitingly as we finished packing everything back up to hop our plane to Iceland tomorrow - on to the next leg!