When I said I was going to get an early start, I hadn’t
really thought about the fact that I’d been up since 4am and it was 2am when I
called it a night. After some mental calculation I decided it wasn’t going to
be that early and set my alarm accordingly. Apparently the tour bus full of
people being loud as fuck at 7am hadn’t gotten the memo. How people can make
that much noise in a room with a limited number of loud, clanking things I’ll
never understand. I don’t know if they unpack their suitcases every single
night and then spent 30 minutes opening and closing drawers, slamming closet
doors, rolling their suitcases around the room a dozen laps…but people never
cease to manage to make a lot of noise. After about an hour of denial and loud
dad sighs that only I could hear I gave up and crankily made my way to the
hotel breakfast. It was a damn good breakfast and I made sure I got my overpaid
money’s worth out of it. I ended up not needing lunch so I think I succeeded. With
a glutton’s breakfast out of the way I packed up and hit the road to retrace
some of the route I had driven yesterday.
To avoid paying even more than I had already overpaid, I
ended up staying a little over an hour from Svartifoss, which I had passed on
the way to Hofn. I slightly underestimated just how much I ended up having to
retrace, but it saved me enough money I wasn’t too concerned with it (some of
the nearby hotel prices were insane). Nevertheless, I made it back to Vatnajökull
National Park where Svartifoss resides where it was a sunny, warm (60ish) day.
From the parking lot it’s roughly a mile of steep, uphill hiking that absolutely
kicked my ass. Stairs and hills are my nemesis, and this hike had plenty of
both. It’s a nice, beautiful hike that takes you past a smaller waterfall and
up above the tree line so that you can see the lava fields, winding glacial
rivers, and rocky beaches for miles until they hit the ocean. I paused to take in
those views very, very often—mostly as an excuse to catch my breath. What was
touted as a 45 minute hike easily took that long, and by the time I reached the
falls I was exhausted. Luckily it’s worth it. What makes Svartifoss (which
means Black Falls) special is that its water cascades down over a rock face of tall,
dark lava and basalt columns that are roughly hexagonal in shape before the
water pools at its base and winds down the valley. The hexagonal columns are
very similar to those of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. A hike that took at
least 45 minutes to go up only took a little more than 15 minutes to go down.
The hardest part of the return is slowing down so you don’t trip over the deep
drops of some of the wood and earthen steps. If you’re going to go, definitely
be prepared to sweat and bring some water with you.
After leaving Vatnajökull and Svartifoss I then untraced my
retraced steps, taking me back past Hofn and further down the Ring Road into
eastern Iceland. My next destination is Detifoss, another waterfall, but
because of all the time spent going back and forth I knew I wasn’t going to
make it there today. Instead I checked out the map and picked somewhere along
the way that wasn’t going to involve me driving late into the night. As it was
I’ve already spent more time in the car in the last 2 days than I’d hoped and I
don’t want to slip into old habits of blitzing across the country. Iceland is
too small to do that. Instead I kept a brisk pace, but didn’t hesitate to stop
if something caught my interest. So far there’s been no shortage of that—the
only thing stopping me from pulling over more often is the lack of safe places
to park. The roads in Iceland are relatively narrow and with little to no
shoulder to speak off. The sides of the road are either loose plains of
volcanic gravel that are tough for a small car to manage or they’re steep
slopes, glacial rivers, or soft and wet bog-like areas that aren’t suitable for
the shitty little Hyundai I’m driving.
As the Ring Road leave the South and heads into Eastern
Iceland (I don’t know if these are official designations, but all the maps and
searches I’ve done seem to divide the country into the cardinals) the coast
becomes more rugged and the road hugs high cliffs that sheer off into the
ocean. Coincidentally the weather also changed as I made my way around the
island. What was a warms day with few clouds turned into a brief hail storm and
dissipated into spotty rain, low clouds, and a drastic cool off. The alien
mountains are ever-present despite the change in the coast. If anything, they
become harsher looking and full of more drastic sheers and angled striations.
My mind began to see them more as ancient structures or ships from a long
forgotten race that were left to sink into the volcanic landscape and less as
naturally occurring. At one point my GPS decided I needed to take a short-cut,
which admittedly cut about 45 minutes off the trip, but it was on roads that
were intimidating to say the least.
For the most part the Ring Road around Iceland is paved. It’s
not always smooth and it’s almost always just a wee bit too narrow for comfort
when busses and tractor trailers pass you, but it’s decently maintained.
Occasionally it gets into hard-packed gravel or a weird gravely asphalt, but
that’s mostly in areas where they’re building new bridges. I should mention
that most bridges are one lane and involve pulling to one side while the
oncoming traffic crosses. For the most part it works. The jackasses driving the
tour busses tend to strong arm their way into crossing, because how is a tiny
hatchback supposed to argue? The tourists who haven’t seemed to catch on to the
system despite being hundreds of miles away from Reykjavik are the real danger,
as they’ll start crossing a bridge that a column off on-coming traffic is
already halfway across. They also do a lot of other stupid stuff, like stop in
the middle of the road if there’s no good place to pull over. Some throw on
their caution lights, but I’ll be damned if I know how that’s supposed to
negate the fact they are stopped in the middle of a road where people are doing
70mph.
Anyway, back to the shortcut. The GPS directed me to leave
the safety of the Ring Road and turn onto an even narrower road of dirt and
gravel that wound sharply up and around things as it climbed up the side of one
of the alien mountains all while raining sporadically. The initial ascent was a
bit of a white knuckled ride, especially in a severely underpowered piece of
shit that often struggled to climb some of the steep inclines. The occasional
RV that had no business being on the road didn’t help, nor did the pickup
trucks that would pass you on those suicidal roads doing 50 or 60mph in a steep
turn with no way of knowing what was coming the other way. However, once I got
up to a point where the road wasn’t kamikaze’ing up the mountain I was actually
able to appreciate just how beautiful, and yet more differently alien it was
driving through and on top of those things that may or may not be ancient spaceships.
The thought that kept crossing my mind was “This is what Mordor would look like
if it were pretty.” It’s just as sharp
and angular as things look from down below, but it’s less pronounced once you’re
on top and it’s all softened by really short shrubs and lichen that grow all
over the place. It’s also littered with babbling little brooks that run in
narrow channels carved out of the rock that have weird angular arches of rock
and jutting rock growths, also softened around the edges by a cloak of pale
green. I kept expecting to see hobbits traipsing along one of the ridges on
their way back from defeating Sauron. And then suddenly you’re gently
descending and the road becomes paved again and you’ve left Middle Earth behind
and re-entered Iceland. And then I was in the little town of Egilsstaðir and my
lodging for the night (which I booked on my phone a few hours before while
buying snacks in a gas station) was only a short 10 minutes ride away.
The room for tonight isn’t much to write about, but it’s
about 1/3 of the price of the one the night before. It’s clean, there’s a bed,
and the doors lock…don’t need much more. The owner recommended a restaurant
back in Egilsstaðir called Café Nielsen. It’s about as expensive as any other
prepared meal in Iceland (which is very) but it was actually mostly worth the
price. I had lobster soup (with lobster caught off the shores of Hofn where I
was yesterday), reindeer steak (which I’ve never had and it was delicious), a
weird but good baked potato, and skyr cake for dessert. For those of you who
weren’t along for the ride last time I was in Iceland, skyr is akin to Greek yogurt
but made differently and tastes way better. Skyr cake is more or less a
cheesecake made with skyr. It was phenomenal. Even though my wallet shrieked a
bit when I paid, I was more than happy to part with the money.
Tomorrow it’s off to Detifoss and to explore the Lake Myvatn
area. There are supposed to be quite a few geothermal thingies there—I don’t
know if that means baths, geysers, power plants, or all the above. It’s about 2
hours away and depending on how much time I spend there, I might just stay the
night in nearby Reykjahlíð. As usual I’ll just play it by ear.
No comments:
Post a Comment