Heyyyy travellers!
So I’ve put together the last part of our Icelandic adventure! I still have to translate the previous ones, which takes me forever, haha:)
Anyways, the first place we visited in West Fjords was the Dynjandi waterfall. We had to get through this 50-km long gravel road, on which you can’t drive faster than 30 km/h. Also, we were stopping every five seconds to take pictures, so when we got to the waterfall it was the afternoon already.
The waterfall Dynjandi is special by actually not being just a waterfall, but a complex of waterfalls. That’s probably why it doesn’t have the famous “foss” at the end. The waterfalls are accessible from the parking lot and there is about 2-km long circuit, nothing difficult:)
Something really unbeliavable happened here. I was standing right in front of the waterfall and a bunch of girls came to me and asked me in Czech if my name wasn’t Eliska. I was really surprised to hear Czech, so I couldn’t say a word. I finally found out that the girls work here for the summer and they follow me on Facebook and Instagram. I was so moved and it really made my day! After an hour of talking, we said good-bye and I started to think about the probability of meeting a bunch of Czech girls, that know my blog, hahaha:) By that time, we’ve met like 5 groups of Czechs, so I don’t get it.
When we had enough of that waterfall, we got going towards the sea and the place where we planned to sleep that night. These pictures were taken somewhere on the way there. It looks like we’re in Greece or something hahaha:) I didn’t edit the water color, I swear it’s real!
We managed to be at this ship wreck by the sunset. There was one sentence about it in the guide, so I guess it’s quite normal here, hahah 🙂
We slept on one of the beaches, which we wanted to explore the next day.
The next day we woke up really early, so we could be the first ones on the trek along the cliffs. Actually the main reason why we went all the way to West Fjords, were the puffins, which everybody wanted to see. They’re local “parrots”, that don’t live anywhere else except Iceland. And on Iceland you can see them on just a few specific places and islands, so most of the times, people have to take a boat cruise to see them. I think West Fjords is the only place, where they live on the “mainland”.
We walked about four hours along the cliffs, watched the sea down there, and looked for the puffins, which were nesting in the cliff holes and flying above our heads.
When we were on our way back, there were hundreds of tourists with huge telescopic lenses rushing to spot some puffins as well, so we were really glad that we slept close to this place and were the first ones to be here.
After the walk, we had lunch and got going further. We just crossed the fjord to the other side and we couldn’t believe what we saw. There were white beaches right in front of us, which reminded me of Whitehaven Beach in Australia. How could possibly this be Iceland?!
After seeing this place, I couldn’t think of a place that Iceland wouldn’t have. There is everything here – volcanoes, glaciers, mountains and beaches as well. This place was perfect for taking off our clothes and jumping right into the water.
But that didn’t happen, because the outside temperature was around 10°C. According to the pictures, one would say that it’s really hot, right? Well we were glad that we had our beanies and gloves, haha:)
We parked the car by a local café and walked towards the sea. We were looking for a red-sand beach called Rauðisandur, which we saw on Instagram. We got to a beach and the color of the sand wasn’t definitely red. It’s true, that people can’t always believe everything they see on a picture, because half of them are photoshopped. However we didn’t think that someone would make up the sand’s color. We kept walking on the sand and when we saw a dune, we agreed that if there is nothing behind this dune, we’re going back to the car and label that guy on Instagram as a liar.
When we got on the dune, we saw a huge beach with red sand, exactly as the one on the picture. It looked like it’s not even supposed to be there. The sand’s color suddenly changed and instead of the white one there was the red one. A small river went flew in the sand, creating weird shapes.
We were the only ones on the beach, so we had real fun:) Eventually it got quite warm, but it was still too cold for a swim in the North Sea, haha 🙂
We got going in the late afternoon, after a few hours of walking on the beach and enjoying the great atmosphere. The target for that day was Stykkisholmur, a big town for Iceland, where we managed to buy some groceries and fuel. In the evening we drove just a few kilometers away from the city and pitched the tent. We were so worn out after that day!
We came back to the town in the morning and explored it a little bit more, but since there it’s inhabited with only about 1200 people, you can imagine how quickly we walked through the whole city.
We set out in the Snæfellsnes National Park and were getting closer and closer to Reykjavík. Right at the entrance to the park we stopped by the Kirkjufellsfoss waterfall, which is displayed as the icon of Iceland on many postcards and guide books. I have also read, that it’s over-rated a lot and the waterfall looks good only from one point of view when the cone-shaped mountain is right behind the waterfall.
Try to google Kirkjufellsfoss and you’ll see incredible photos of this waterfall, but notice that all the pictures look good only because they’re shot during sunset. Now you can see how the place really looks like without using Photoshop, haha:) Nothing special, right?! 🙂
We were leaving the waterfall a bit disappointed and hoped that it was not a sign of leaving Iceland soon.
Actually it was really hard to amaze us at this moment, because we’ve already seen the best of Iceland.
We stopped by Djúpalónssandur, but it wasn’t anything special either, but like I said, we were quite pampered now. It was a place on the coast with some rock formations. The legend says that all the ships sailed out from here and everyone who wanted to work on a ship had to lift 5 different stones to prove that is strong enough. These 5 stones are still on that beach and every single one of us tried to lift them up all. Well, I definitely couldn’t work on a ship because the heaviest one weighted 153 kg!
Right after lunch we started our last hike of our roadtrip. It went all the way to the Snæfellsjökull glacier. This “jökull” is one of the youngest ones in Iceland and was described in several stories by Jules Verne.
The thing is, that this trek is probably not touristy, so after about an hour of walking, we got totally lost. The path was probably buried by snow, because we lost it in the snow area, underneath which the glacier was. So we just walked the way we thought was right, but we had no idea where were going. We even got onto the actual glacier with river flowing under our feet. I was scared as hell because you never know where the ice can break through and you can be dead just like that. After walking on the necessary part of the glacier, we stood out of it’s way, so we made a huge detour. Everyone was stressed because I was telling the stories about how people died in the claws of the glaciers because they didn’t have a guide.
When we finally got off the ice, a bigger problem came. Since we didn’t follow the path, we got to a steep slope, which we had to either defeat or go back.
We decided for the first option and after about three meters we figured, that it wasn’t the best choice at all. It look doable from above, but now it looked like we were going to die there, haha:) Our feet were sliding at every step and we couldn’t even stand on one place, because the rocks were sliding all the time. The gravel was dragging us down and I was really scared of a rock avalanche. The rocks above us could tore off every second and bury us, so we were not stopping and were sliding down the slope as fast as we could.
As we got back to the car, the super-cool sunset was about the start. But there was another problem. Suddenly the car-doors wouldn’t close. We were trying to fix it for about an hour and searched the possible causes. We managed to fix the door, but missed the beautiful sunset, which we wanted to spend on Kirkjufellsfoss, since we didn’t have a good picture of it earlier that day. I shot a few pics when the sunset was reflecting on the glacier, from which we just got back and made it pink:)
We found a website that showed all the unknown hot springs in Iceland. Most of the hot springs we’ve visited before were crowded, so we skipped them. We were thinking of a little pool, about which no one knew and where we would be alone.
Finally we found the one, we were dreaming of. It was close to the national park, where we were hiking the glacier yesterday. We slept right at it, so we would make sure that we would be the first ones there in case it was as crowded as the previous ones.
We were really the first ones there and at the first time, we didn’t even want to go in, because it was freaking cold, but finally we made it. The water was quite hot, around 40°C, so we had to get off every ten minutes and cool down for a second. Thanks to the sulphur smell we were quite dizzy sometimes, so after half an hour we were done bathing.
The fun thing was, that Sona didn’t go with us and she was so cold the whole day and we felt so warm after that bath!
After the bath, we started heading towards Glymur. That was the last trek, that went through a huge canyon all the way to a waterfall. We walked really slowly and enjoyed the view, because we were really close to Reykjavík and were sure that we would make it till the departure.
Honestly, we were worn out from the endless traveling and hiking somewhere. After about 3 hours we got to the tallest waterfall in Iceland and it took us 2 hours to get back to the car.
And this is the end of our travels around Iceland! After Gjáin we came to Reykjavík, which we explored carefully as well. I actually remembered where everything was, so I was a kind of a guide.
We saw the Hallgrímskirkja church, drove up to Perlan, or stopped by the lighthouse on the headland. We spent most of the time in the local opera house called Harpa, which I didn’t see from inside five years ago, and finally found out what I’d missed. It’s architecture was absolutely stunning, so we managed to leave the building after almost 3 hours.
We did the sightseeing first, and then started shopping. I wanted to buy a wool sweater, but when I found out how much they are, I almost started to cry 🙁
The second day we sat down in a café, went through the pictures and bought some last souvenirs.
So this is the end of the two-week roadtrip around Iceland <3 I came back home with several gigabytes of photos, which I’m editing till now, not speaking about the videos!
There will be a short movie as usually, but since I haven’t done the movie from Slovenia yet, it’ll take me a few days :))
In case you have any questions, don’t hesitate to put them in the comments, I’ll answer them all! Also you can write there, which place you guys liked the most just by the pictures! 🙂
Love,
E.