Return to Iceland - The Beginning

Back in June I was going through pictures from my previous travels and I came across the stuff I shot when I was in Iceland back in 2011. I was immediately overcome with a sadness and a longing—I desperately wanted to go back. I’d looked into going back to Iceland a few times, but I always thought about how many other places there were that I wanted to see and I had a hard time justifying not seeing something new. But this sense of longing was strong enough that a few days later I had bought a plane ticket. The rest eventually fell into place. I specifically wanted to go in the summer this time, since I went at the end of winter last time and my plans of driving the Ring Road that circumnavigates the country were dashed by weather that was getting the best of even the locals. Fast forward a few months and here I am, back in the land I fell in love with and a rental car—and this time it isn’t covered in snow.

And then I slept for 16 hours.

I didn’t land and immediately sleep for 16 hours. As usual I am incapable of sleeping when I travel so when I arrive in Iceland early yesterday I had to wait around for my room to be ready. Although the hotel got my room ready much earlier than they had to, I still had to drive and walk around for a few hours. It did give me a chance to see the south peninsula near the airport. It’s a pretty rural area with clusters of small towns that usually have little more than a school, a grocery store, and the infrastructure to support a bustling fishing industry. The highlight of the drowsy tour was a small park with a pair of lighthouses. And then I slept for 16 hours.

Which means I woke up at 4am.

After killing a couple hours, eating some food I picked up the day before at one of the small grocery store, the sun was finally coming up so I got an early start. My plan for the day was to take in a handful of the sights along what is called the Golden Circle. The Golden circle is a roughly 300km loop just outside of Reykjavik that has several very popular attractions, including Þingvellir National Park, the waterfall Gullfoss, a pair of geysers (one of which is Geysir, the origin of the term geyser), a volcanic crater, and a few other stops. I got to Þingvellir around 7:30 and within a few minutes the tour busses started rolling in, so I headed into the park to try and beat the rush.

Þingvellir is notable for two things; it’s the point at which the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet, and it’s the historical site of one of the world’s first democracies—the Althing. When you arrive you descend into the park through a rift, a footbridge taking you between jutting walls of rock and over a portion rift that opened up years ago. A gravel path winds through the park taking you past a small waterfall, down onto a plane with a small lake, and around to a small church, cottages, and the historical site of the Althing. The Althing was, and still is, the parliament setup to govern what was the various tribes that settled Iceland. It was created in 930 on the plains below the rift of the tectonic plates. At that time it was probably held in a longhouse, but today the site is a national park—the parliament having moved to Reykjavik. The tour bus crowds had caught up with me around the time I got to the site of the Althing and, having seen most of the park, I decided to get out before I started hating people. I try not to hate people on vacation.

My next stop was supposed to be the geysers Geysir and Strokkur, but half way there I saw a sign that I thought was for a waterfall. About 45 minutes later it turned out I had followed a sign to the town of Selfoss (foss means waterfall) in which there are no falls. Despite the hour wasted, and an hour to get back to Geysir I still intended to hit the stops along the Golden Circle. What I ended up doing was driving in the wrong direction as the map on my phone seemed to think I was driving in a different direction for about 45 minutes before it suddenly realized I was going the wrong way. At that point I didn’t feel like the lost time and the time to backtrack was really worth it. Instead I decided to leisurely continue along the Ring Road toward Svartifoss, my next point of interest.

Although I didn’t stop at any major attractions, I did stop a few dozen times. The Ring Road takes you through some of the most amazing geography I’ve ever seen. At times the plains and sudden jagged mountains reminds me of my time driving around Norway and Sweeden. At other times the mountains are strange fantastical monuments of striated and stepped lava rock covered in moss and lichen, seeming to rise up through massive piles of black dust. Some seem to rise up from the earth like massive gray molars and others seem sculpted and rendered for some fantasy game.

The plains go from gently undulating barren lava fields that look like a harsh alien landscape to bizarre vistas covered in piles of squashed globes of rock covered in dull looking moss that look like a completely different planet. Throughout the sci-fi and fantasy landscapes are mountains covered by glacial ice. At one point the glacier flows a small lake and breaks into icebergs that float away, presumably to the nearby sea. Because it’s summer, though the temperatures are only in the mid-50s F, the glacial melt runs off creating hundreds of waterfalls as it flows over the edges of those fantasy mountains and creates seasonal rivers that snake their way across the landscape.

Because I stopped so often I didn’t get to see Svatifoss today, but I’ve stopped for the night at a hotel in the nearby town of Hofn where I’ve paid too much for a room and for dinner. Tomorrow I’ll leave out early to see the waterfall. But now it’s late and I’m sleepy.