Iceland Adventures

After a splendid London reunion with my '03 track buddies and a wonderful visit with my cousins, I headed towards home... but first a stop in Iceland with Mally and Kristin, another great friend from college. At first I feared my growing anticipation for returning home would prevent me from fully appreciating our Iceland experience, but in the end the exquisite beauty of the country captivated me as fully as my previous travels.

We arrived in Iceland late in the afternoon on Thursday and stayed in a hostel right next door to a thermally heated pool and spa complex (Perfect!). The next day, we rented a car and set off on the golden circle tour to visit the "must sees" of Iceland. First stop on our cd audio guided car tour: Kerid crater, an extict volcanic crater hole deep in the ground that is filled with a small, crystal clear lake in the bottom. Next stop: Laxifoss. These falls would have been easy to miss were it not for our personal golden circle audio guide and our spotting of Iceland's small unobtrusive road sign. Any other country would have posted road signs and advertisements for miles to see falls like this, but Iceland is so inundated with beautiful waterfalls, that they don't bother highlighting them. Third stop on our high-tech audio tour: Geysir geothermal area. This park contained pools and streams of hot bubbling water and gurgling mudpots. A few of the bubbling water holes were active geisers. Geysir, the largest of its kind in the world, activates very infrequently and did not choose to go off while we were there. However, Strokkur - a 30 m. geysir (third behind Geysir and Old Faithful) goes off every 5-10 minutes. First the water begins to bulge and pulsate up and down until finally a thunderous roar comes from under the ground and huge cascades of water shoot up into the air - Fantastic! Fourth Stop: Gullfoss or "the golden waterfall". The falls are known to be Iceland's best and may have been the most magnificent of the whole trip (although it is hard to compare). These falls included a wide wall of water falling down to yet another magnificent fall at a catty-cornered angle below which then led into a river winding its way through a deeply cut out gorge. To top off the magnificent scene, a perfectly formed rainbow arched over the falls. I could have stayed there all night admiring the beauty of Gullfoss, but we continued on to our final stop of the night: Thingvellir National Park.

The next morning... its hard to say when the night ended and the morning began since the darkness never comes... but the next morning (according to my trusty watch) we loaded up the car and set off for Skogar to begin a day walk . En route, we saw a waterfall along the side of the road and pulled up for a closer view... the waterfall burst off a tall cliff at powerful speeds with great gushes of water. A small path wound its way up a bit of the mountainside, behind the fall, and back down to the other side so we took in the beautiful view from all angles. After seeing the falls and getting a bit of a stretch in, we loaded back in the car and drove the rest of the way to Skogar where another beautiful waterfall - Skogarfoss - awaited our arrival. This fall formed a thick, wide blanket of rushing white water. We began our walk climbing up alongside the fall and continued to follow its source river upstream into the hills of Iceland. The highlights of our walk were grand rock structures of the winding gorge along the way and the assortment of breathtaking waterfalls - there must have been around 20 different falls in our 8km walk up the mountain. The mountain scenery also provided tremendously powerful views. The walk was not a lush, green environment like New Zealand and Australia... it wasn't even a forest landscape like the Alps. It had its own unique landscape of greenish grey moss covered lava rocks. Quite a barren looking environment at first glance, but upon close inspection little wildflowers begin to pop out, trickling streams meander their way to the river, and distant sheep can be seen feeding on the little bit of grassy vegetation that exists - truly magnificent in its own way.

When we reached our first peak, with grey fog moving in and temperatures beginning to fall, we decided to turn around and make our way back to the car along the same rushing river and gushing falls we followed on the way up. Since the day was still young according to the brightly lit sky, we took an excursion to the town of Vik to find some dinner and see its black sands beach which was rated as one of the 10 most beautiful beaches in the world. We grabbed some food at a convenient store (since eating out in Iceland puts quite a dent in the bank account) and ate our dinner in front of the unique ocean view - a shore of black sands with craggy rock formations jutting out of the waters. Then, seeing as how it was still quite light out, we stopped at the Eyjafjallajokull glacier (that's really how it's spelled) for an evening stroll before making our way back to Skogar for the night. This was the fourth glacier I have seen up close on this trip (and the fourth in my lifetime) and definitely my favorite. While being small compared to other glaciers around iceland, its vast expanse was the largest I've seen, but the contrast provided by the white snow and black lava landscape was what made this scene truly spectacular. We finally headed back to Skogar to set up camp in front of the grand Skorgarfoss falls and go to sleep despite the appearance of day and the surrounding noise of young Icelanders partying.

The next morning we headed back towards Reykjavik for an afternoon in the Blue Lagoon: a natural spa tucked into Iceland's lava rocks and filled with warm blue colored waters. Along our journey, Mally practiced driving stick on an empty road, we stopped at a geothermal area on the side of our route with all sorts of bubbling mud pots, we helped pushed a car out of a rut on the side of the road, and we passed one beautiful Icelandic landscape after the next - we had quite an enjoyable trip. By lunchtime we arrived at the Blue Lagoon where I turned down $25 hamburgers and instead ate a $5 hot dog. Then we soaked in the blue lagoon for hours... wandering around the large pondlike spa to different areas of warm and hot water, making rejuvinating face masks out of the white silica sands, and sitting back and relaxing in a little cave-like fort. It would be great to have a place like this in my back yard!

That marked the end of our Icelandic tour. We spent the evening wandering around Reykjavik and catching up on lost time and then prepared our gear to leave on our journey home the next day. The thought of going home seemed unreal - could our trip finally come to an end? Yet, I bursted with excitement at the idea of reuniting with friends and family.