This was a crazy busy day. I assembled a video entitled ‘The Water Features of Iceland,’ and more than half of what is shown there comes from this one day. So I’ll keep referring to this video as I describe the day in sequential order.
The day started in Reykjavik where I was picked up at my hotel at 8AM by Gunnar, the driver and guide. I was his first stop, and for the next half hour or so we made several more stops to fill our 19-seat van to capacity. Then we headed out of town toward Þingvellir National Park. Here’s the thing: Þing is pronounced ‘thing,’ and everybody knows that a ‘thing’ is a governing assembly. Starting in the year 930AD, the leaders from all around Iceland would gather in the ‘thing field’ or Þingvellir and do their thing.
The thing is … this is also a place where you can walk into the ever-widening rift that marks the boundary between the North American and the Eurasian Tectonic plates. And that gives you something to see and take a picture of, since an 1100-year-old gathering of people is kind of hard to notice.
I only had 50 minutes here to walk around. We were on a tight schedule so as to fit in all the other sights on the itinerary. There was a waterfall dropping into the rift that I didn’t get to see except from afar. No worries. The day was full of much more spectacular waterfalls. And, in fact, one of the most popular and spectacular of these, Gullfoss, or the Golden Falls was next.
Now, the Icelandic language is full of bizarre letters and diacritical marks but none of them appear in the word Gullfoss, so we English speakers get a break. Right? Wrong, muffin-breath! The word Gull in Icelandic is about as close to unpronounceable as words go to the English speaker. It sounds something like “K(l)hytkhl” where the t is half-way to a ‘ch’ sound and the final ‘h’ is a strong expulsion of air and the ‘l’s’ are spoken without the use of vocal chords. And that’s only a crude approximation. Like I said, unpronounceable.
Anyhow, Gullfoss is one of the falls featured early in the video. It’s the third waterfall shown (the first two are from later in the tour), and comes just before the geyser that was our next stop.
Geysir is the name of the place. And yes, the English word ‘geyser’ is taken from this place, which was the first such spouting hot water phenomenon known to Europeans. The actual geyser we saw erupting is the reliable Strokkur geyser, which comes to life every six to ten minutes. I saw 8 or 9 eruptions while we were there on our supposed lunch break. No time to eat–too many trails to hike!
By comparison, our fourth stop was more-or-less of an anticlimax. Yet it is supposedly the ‘waterfall’ with the greatest volume of water of any in Iceland. It’s called Urriðafoss, and here’s a short video clip:
We were only there for ten minutes before moving on to my favorite waterfall of all time – Seljalandsfoss.
I have this ‘thing’ about being able to walk behind a waterfall. I had a chance to do it in Svalbard at Ny London:
But this was the granddaddy of all such falls. Look for a handful of water-spotted shots in the video.
Right next to Seljalandsfoss, falling down off the same cliff, is a true hidden gem of a fall. It is literally hidden inside a grotto, and you have to wade up the stream to get to its base. It’s called Gljúfrabúi, or ‘one who dwells in the canyon’
Look for that in the video too. It reminded me of the much higher slot-canyon-style cataract I visited in Switzerland a year ago – Trümmelbach Falls in the stunning Lauterbrunnen Valley.
It was raining during the time we visited these waterfalls. Hard to tell, though. And it hardly mattered! The spray from the falls was much more of a presence on this hike (and the cause of most of the blurry spots in the photos).
The seventh feature, and the last waterfall of the day, was the popular Skógafoss, one of the biggest, purest cascades in Iceland, or anywhere.
This is featured in the video with three shots – two of them were taken from the perch above the falls seen in the upper right. Getting there was a lot of stair-climbing after an already long day with many hikes.
Fortunately the last stops of the day were beach walks. The famous Reynisfjara black sand beach with its ‘frozen trolls’ rock formations (see also the featured photo up top). This scene has been the backdrop of a number of movies, including the 2014 film ‘Noah’ where it featured as the place where the arc made landfall after the flood.
As I walked the sand, I noticed another little troll who had been caught out walking in the daylight:
Turning around and looking the other direction up the beach, it was a pretty epic view too.
We stopped at the town of Vik, where we could see the Trolls rock formation, the Reynisdrangar, from the opposite side:
Yet there was still another hour of driving. Finally, at 7:35PM we arrived at the Adventure Hotel Geirland and I crashed in my room with no more than a Pepsi and some cheese for supper. Tomorrow was going to be another long and wonderfully eventful day, and we’d even be graced with some sunshine! Stay tuned.