Adventures for the aged? Hardly, we plan on many vibrant activities this time: Howard's Diary

HI April 2017 Iceland

Apr 30 – Left home mid-afternoon and after a difficult train journey down from Blackheath arrived at the International Airport in good time. The difficulty with the train was that it was jammed full of tourists right from Blackheath, all returning to the city after a day in the mountains (photographing the autumn leaves!!). At each of the next few stops even more piled in. We were really lucky to get seats and to be able to breathe in the overheated atmosphere we were stuck in. There were moments of relaxation before boarding our first flight. Then followed 28 hours of challenge – 25 hours of flying time and about three in transit areas. Our first stop in Doha was very short and we only just managed to get our connecting flight. The Oslo transit was a little less stressful. We arrived in Reykjavik to discover that our baggage hadn’t made it onto the flight. I think we handled it very calmly. A sign in the airport said “step outside and breathe in the clean fresh Icelandic air”, but when we stepped outside the rain was bucketing down. Of course our raincoats were in the lost baggage.

After a night in a bit of a dump of a hotel on the edge of Reykjavik (but with a really nice breakfast), we set out to pick up the car from Hertz. We had a wonderful young person helping us. As we filled in paperwork, she took our itinerary and put all our hotel details into the GPS that came with the car. We also got some other goodies and set off for our first full day in Iceland. Irene did the driving, Howard the navigating. This set the pattern for the journey. It was a poor weather day, wet and windy, but we had no choice but to head south for Kleifarvatn Lake, set in a black volcanic rock mountain region. The wind was whipping up the water, and the rain made it impossible to do the walk around the edge of the lake. We headed on to Seltun, our first hot springs area, and a very first for Howard. It was wonderful to see pools of boiling water, mud pools coloured by minerals in the water, not so great to breathe the sulfurous air. Although it was still raining, we put on puffer jackets, braved the bitterly cold wind, and did the boardwalk around the various steaming pools.

We drove to the coast and headed west to the fishing town of Grindavik for a fish and chips lunch, then further west to explore a rugged rocky region at the southern tip of the Reykjanes Peninsular. It was here that we saw powerful plumes of steam pouring out for the rocks. In a number of places the steam was being captured and taken away in pipes, presumably for heating and electricity production.

Turning around we headed back east along the coast to our next overnight stop in a town called Hveragerdi. Along the way we passed through intriguing lava fields of distorted and upended black rock, often with thick green moss growing over it. It was a really unusual sight for us, and we couldn’t remember ever seeing anything like in Australia. Hveragerdi is a town built over a geothermal area, and there were many greenhouses utilising the heated ground and steam vents for vegetable, fruit and flower production. We had an excellent hotel for the night.

May3 – the day dawned cloudy but with no rain – Yippee!! We were promised sunshine and 17deg later in the day. Iceland sits on the junction of two tectonic plates, the Eurasian and American plates. These are moving away from each other at a rate of 1 to 2 centimetres a year, depending on which guide book you read. The shopping centre in Hveragerdi sits right on top of a rift in the ground (discovered after they started construction on the building), and this has been covered over by a thick glass plate so shoppers can look down into the rift, where there is a line of “fake” glowing lava along the bottom. We headed north towards the Thingvellir National Park, passing a long line of dark foreboding cliffs, then alongside Thingvellir Lake, and into the park. Here there is a long walk through part of the rift slowly being widened, and there is lots of evidence of strong geologic activity where the ground has been distorted by volcanic activity in the past. This is especially evident where a section of ground has subsided significantly, leaving sheer cliffs on either side. We also watched a powerful waterfall, not high, but discharging a huge amount of water over the edge.

Next on the list about 30 kms further north we visited a geyser called “Geysir”, one that used to shoot out a boiling spurt of steam to as much as 8o metres high. It has now gone very quiet, but the excitement has moved to a neighbour called Stokkur, which sends a 20 metre surge skywards every 5 or 10 minutes (the temperature of the steam reaches 125 degrees). This was quite an exciting sight, and we spent twenty minutes or so getting some good photos. The whole area is riddled with small steam vents spewing forth and the usual pools of water bubbling away. The final site for the day was a massive waterfall called Gullfoss, difficult to describe as it surges masses of water over a number of convoluted levels. Suitably impressed, we retired to the Gullfoss Hotel for a well-earned rest. We had a light meal as the cost of food in Iceland is exhorbitant, and it is quite difficult to self-cater, which we normally do. The sunshine broke out for last hour or two of daylight. Tomorrow was promising to be a good one.

A sunny morning at last. We headed south to join with the Ring Road which was to take us around the island. There will be a few place names mentioned that will look completely incomprehensible. In attempting to pronounce them, it helps to know that the letter j is spoken as “yuh”. However, in our depictions of some words we have had to leave out some Icelandic symbols that don’t exist in English. At the junction with the Ring Road we turned east and travelled across flat country (with hills and mountains in the distance on our left, ocean to the right) to our first tourist spot – the spectacular Seljalands waterfall (Seljalandsfoss). The drop is around 60 metres and copious spray is produced when the wind is blowing. We continued east, with large misshapen hills and mountains appearing close on the left side, although for a while the tops of these were obscured by a fog that moved in. Luckily it lifted as we were passing the Eyjafallajokull ice cap (pronounced Ay-uh-fyatluh-YOE-kuutl-uh) that was featured heavily in the wonderful Ben Stiller version of the Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Next was the massive Myrdalsjokull icecap. We could see a wide glacier extending out from the bulk of the mountain towards the road but didn’t drive in to have a closer look as we had done a glacier walk on a previous journey in Norway. Our next stop was a few kilometres off the main road at the end of a peninsular called Dyrholaey – a bird sanctuary, but also the site of large offshore basalt structures similar to the Twelve Apostles in South Australia. However, in this case the isolated rocks and arches are black basalt instead of yellowish/brown sandstone. In the distance we could see some impressive rock stacks out in the ocean, and this was to be our next stop. It is a place called Reynisfjara, and is a great place to be able to walk on black beach sand. When the sand is wet it takes on a very attractive glossy sheen. In fact the whole region has a black sand base, this being material washed out from beneath Myrdalsjokull during the massive Katla eruptions over the last 1000 years. We moved on through Vik, a small fishing/farming village and past there experienced 60 or so kilometres of amazing “post volcano” landscapes. Most of it consisted of either vast black sand desert or endless “oceans” of black boulders covered in thick green and grey moss called woolly fringe moss. One section, called the Alftaver Cones Region is now a National Monument, and consists of a large number of two or three metre high cones of lumps of totally twisted and contorted lava, each the size of a cricket ball. The weird shapes were most likely caused by the lava being forced up through water, although the scientific description of the process is very technical. It is really difficult to describe the material in these cones. All of this lengthy distance is the result of massive Katla eruptions over the years. After a most interesting and impressive day we arrived at our lodgings for the next two nights, Hunkubakker Guesthouse, about 5 kilometres out of Kirkjubaejklaustur, another tough one to pronounce that the locals shorten to Klauster. It actually breaks down to church farm cloister. Place names in Iceland nearly always relate back to the original usage of the land.

Friday April 5 – Although initially foggy, today turned out to be mostly sunny, although a weak sunshine that made some of our photos look a bit washed out. We were staying here for two nights, so had a leisurely morning without having to pack the car with all our worldly goods. At mid-morning we set off to do a canyon walk about 2 kilometres from our lodgings. The canyon has a fiendishly complicated name, the closest English spelling of which is Fjardrargljufur. A goat track pathway led up to the edge of the canyon and along its length, affording lots of views of this most spectacular canyon. It is right out of Lord of the Rings and has a very evocative atmosphere. We were able to walk right along to the very start point on a flat plain just beneath where we were walking. It was one of the best canyons we had seen for contorted sides and pools of swirling water. This visit set a high standard for the rest of the day. We returned to the car and drove into the main village. There we were able to do a climb up the side of a nearby waterfall, walk along the top for a couple of kilometres, then descend via a steep pathway, coming out at another local tourist spot we were keen to visit. It is a flat pad formed by the tops of around a hundred or so hexagonal volcanic columns rising from what used to be the sea floor but with the tops of the columns now being level with the ground we were on. They all fitted tightly together, and the feature is named the Church Floor, as that is exactly what it looks like, as if it had been man made, although it is completely natural. We did some shopping at the first decent little supermarket we had seen, then drove home via a detour through extensive fields of yet another two types of lava quite different to any we saw the previous day – one being assorted lumps of twisted lava on which moss had not yet been able to grow, the other being large mounds of material completely covered by grass. It had been a good day. As this is being written, it is 8.30pm and broad daylight outside – this will last until 10.30pm. Then it will be daylight again around 4am in the morning. They are very long days here at the moment, not surprising as we are in Arctic Circle territory.

Photos from the thingvellier area