South Iceland, Part Deux

With this post, I'll finally be catching up to real time after losing a day to that unfortunate incident at the Blue Lagoon.

We left Vik this morning for our first longish drive - three hours to our next stop. Along the way we had two attractions to see, but we found another one shortly after we left.

East of Vik, June 2016

Most tourists arrive in Reykjavik and venture as far east as Vik before turning around. This makes for a nice 4-6 day trip. As you move east of Vik, the crowds thin out seriously. As you can see from this shot of the Ring Road. It reminds me of driving across Montana

Anyway, as we were tooling along we passed yet another small parking area along the road (it seems like there's one every few miles) and something about this one caught my eye. There were half a dozen cars parked, and we wheeled in. We found this unnamed waterfall/rapids area that was just georgous.

We don't know it's name, June 2016

After leaving and driving for about 5 minutes, I realized I didn't have my sunglasses. Sally wisely suggested I make a U-turn and head back to the picture spot. Then she wisely encouraged me to keep looking after I was about to give up. And, as always, she was right - I found them on the ground in the parking area, dirty but unharmed. A good ending to an annoying situation(1).

From there we pushed on past lava fields, crossed countless rivers on one-lane bridges, saw little unremarked waterfalls spilling down from cliffs and isolated farms back from the road against towering cliffs. We finally arrived at Vatnajokull, the largest glacier in Europe(2) and the center of Vatnajokull National Park. Of course, from the road you can only see the small arms of the glacier as it creeps down out of the mountains. But at Skattafell, you can walk about a mile to the beginning of one of the arms. I decided to pass on that, and instead hiked a couple of miles up to see the Svartifoss waterfall.

Svartifoss & columns, June 2016

The whole island is made of basalt, and they happened to form a nice pipe organ-like formation around this waterfall.

Our next and last official stop for the day was the Glacier Lagoon. The glacial melt has formed a lagoon trapped behind piles of glacial moraine, and the icebergs that calf off float across the lagoon before rushing down a channel and out to the ocean to finally die. There's a big business in boat rides in the lagoon, either in a duck amphibian boat or zodiacs. We just walked along the shore a bit and thought it was better than bouncing and bobbing around in the cold air for 45 minutes. The icebergs are very cool (pardon the pun) and form all kinds of shapes.

Since they melt faster on the submerged side, they will periodically flip over after becoming top-heavy. I saw two of these, sadly Sally saw none.

Around 4:00 pm we finally arrived at our home for two nights, the Fosshotel Vatnajokull. We're just at the eastern most extent of the glacier here. The first room we got put into was tiny-tiny-tiny. And had what I thought was a mediocre view. Sally went and worked her magic and got us switched to a suite literally 2.5x as large, and for a truly nominal price. And here's the view out of our window now:

Room with a view, June 2016

The white stuff on the distant mountain is the glacier.

Thanks, Sally!

 

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(1) "Annoying" being a euphemism for "Bassman is cursing at himself under his breath and I can see his back about to spasm".

(2) Iceland is considered part of Europe. It's only 500 miles to Scotland. But only 180 miles to Geenland, which is part of North America. Go figure.

 

Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans