I arrived in Iceland yesterday, picked my rental car up at the airport, and then drove into town to check in to my guesthouse (Snorri’s Guesthouse). Once I had settled a bit, I walked from there into town to get food somewhere. On the way, I stopped to check out Reykjavik’s famous church, Hallgrimskirkja. I actually came upon it from the back, and there was no one there. In the front, there were lots of people because most hotels are near the water and people walk up from there. It was so beautiful! And inside, there was a woman practicing organ which was really nice to pause and listen to, although I think I’d feel self-conscious if I had a whole whack of tourists sitting there listening to me play and make notes on my score.
The place I picked to eat was labelled on Google Maps as a “soup restaurant” which sounded like a glorious concept. They only had two things on their menu: meat soup, and vegetarian soup. I got the meat soup, and it was really yummy and came inside a bread!
After dinner, I walked down to the waterfront to check out the view. It was so beautiful! (Although, after what I saw today, this photo looks pretty low-key.) I also wandered around downtown a bit and went int oa few shops. A lot of them were VERY tourist-centric and had “souvenirs” like magnets and keychains and cheap t-shirts, which is not my thing at all. I found a great place that focussed on handmade goods and supplies though, and got myself two balls of wool for only $5 each which wasn’t too expensive compared to the Icelandic wool/Thai silk blend being sold for $20+/ball! After that, I was pretty tired and wanted to get an early start the next day, so I headed back to my guesthouse and went to bed.
This morning, I woke up earlier than planned – I think I’m still on Finnish time. The breakfast at the guesthouse was really lovely, and I stuffed myself so I wouldn’t be hungry right away. The trip I’m on is a pre-booked thing through a tour company, and you pick the route/duration from their options and they book your guesthouses and reserve your rental car, and then give you this huge booklet of suggestions of things to do each day based on your route, but all of it is completely up to you what you ACTUALLY do. I went to a lot of museums in Finland, and I decided that for Iceland I didn’t really want to do museums and instead just wanted to see nature things. The first thing on my list was to hike in to see Glymur, which is the second-highest waterfall in Iceland. On the way, there was another waterfall (Fossarrett) that I stopped to see. It was a little one and difficult to photograph, so I don’t have anything to show you from there. But along the road, I stopped at pretty much every pull-off point in order to take photos. There was no one on the road because it was still early (around 8:30am), and there were low-hanging clouds that made everything look really spooky and beautiful. I have been really struck so far by how vibrant the greens are in Iceland, especially in contrast with the stark colours of the rest of the landscape.
(I tried to take a few photos of myself with my tripod and remote, but it was so windy that the tripod kept tipping over and I had to lurk close to it in order to be ready to save it from peril.)
All along the coastal road, there were tons of sheeps just grazing everywhere! Some were very close to the road, or even on the highway, and I’m not sure if they are wild or belong in some vague sense to a farmer – I didn’t see any farms on my route, so I’m in the dark! They were so cute though; when I stopped to photograph the ones below, they turned to look at me very seriously as though I was invading their eating privacy.
The hiking trail into Glymur is very rough. It’s super rocky and very steep at times, and close to the beginning you have to cross over a river in order to get to the side of the river that the falls are visible from (you can hike back the other way, but you can’t see the falls so there’s no point going that way both times). There is a log placed over the river in the summer in order to allow people to get across, and there’s a guidewire to hold onto as well. The river level was quite high, so the half of the river without the log that would normally be crossable using rocks actually required you to go into the water to use those rocks since they were submerged. Luckily, I’d looked at the location tag on Instagram and seen someone post a video showing this, so I packed my waterproof hiking sandals in my bag and didn’t have too much trouble getting past that part, but some people turned back because they were nervous about going barefoot. A lot of other people did go barefoot though, so there was a good number of people hiking up to the falls (without it being crowded). Check out the people at the top right in the second photo for scale – otherwise the canyon doesn’t look as impressively big!
It was raining SO hard for a lot of the hike up to the falls, and I got pretty wet. Luckily my feet didn’t, because that’s actually the worst when your shoes get wet inside and your feet are squishing around. But everything else was, including my glasses and hair and the cuffs of my sweater where it was emerging from the raincoat a bit. On the way back down, the rain pretty much stopped which was a relief. I would’ve been in a grumpy mood if I got back to the car completely dripping and had to drape wet things everywhere. In the photo above the close-up of the river crossing, if you look VERY closely you can see a little black speck – that’s someone doing the river crossing way below where I was.
After leaving Glymur, I drove further up the coast to see Hraunfossar and Barnafoss, two waterfalls side-by-side. Hraunfossar is really a series of waterfalls, created by water streaming over lava fields into a river. There were a lot of people there because there is essentially zero hike into the falls, and the bugs were TERRIBLE. Some people were wearing bug nets on their face, but I don’t have one with me, so I actually ended up pulling my hair into my face to try to keep them away.
After leaving the falls, I was going to try to go to Þingvellir National Park before going to my next guesthouse, but I looked it up and realized the guesthouse was 2.5 hours away from my current location, so I decided to head there directly. I’m hoping maybe on the day I fly out that I’ll have time to get back to it, because it’s centred on a tectonic plate rift and I’m really interested to see that.
My guesthouse for tonight (Guesthouse Dalbaer) is in a farmland area and there are horses visible out the window! It also has a really baller bathtub, and I thought about taking a bath but it’s a communal bathroom and I am all for the long soaks, so I didn’t want to be an ass. My actual original plan after I decided to head straight to the guesthouse was that I’d go back out to Þingvellir and doing that after getting some food, but it got crazy foggy and I couldn’t even see the mountains that I knew were not far from the road, so I decided there was no point in forcing it.
Here’s a snapshot of where I went today, for anyone who’s curious! Tomorrow, I head into the highlands to Landmannalaugar, a place that everyone describes as looking like a lunar landscape!
