This is the next in the continuing saga of my ‘Around the Top of the World’ travels: Days 20 and 21. But we’ll start with a shot from the morning of Day 19 at the waterfall and canyon at Fjaðrárgljúfur.
Early on during this Ring Road tour, I had made fast friends with this pair of fun-loving gals, Paula (front) and Christine–physical therapists from ‘Lawn Guy Land’. During our various walks and outings we had started joking around and ‘photo-bombing’ each other’s selfies and so-on. Well, on Day 20 we visited the fabled 16-mile-long, deep, murky lake in Iceland’s East Fjords region called Lagarfljót.
Pretty place, no? Along the road we started seeing signs with this logo:
Then we stopped at a rest stop beside the lake and found this:
WTF? As we walked down to the beach beside the lake, our guide Gunnar starts explaining to us about the famous monster – or Worm – specifically, according to legend, a Heath Snake, which was placed by a schoolgirl in a box along with a gold ring. The worm had quickly grown huge. The frightened girl threw the box in the lake where the creature continued to grow and began terrorizing the population.
Christine and Paula wanted to get a selfie on the beach. Just then I heard a terrible swooshing sound. I pointed … tried to warn them.
“No, no, Christine! Look behind you!”
It was about to crawl out of the water onto the beach behind them. Its very breath is said to be poison!
What I saw behind Christine’s head was identical to the creature captured in video in 2012.
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The creature had been spotted many times over the centuries, dating back to at least 1345. In 2012 an “Iceland Truth Commission” organized a contest, offering 500,000 Icelandic Kroner to anyone who could prove the existence of the Worm. In response, local farmer Hjörtur Kjerúlf submitted the video he had taken, and after two years of further searching, study, and deliberation, the Truth Commission voted 7-6 in favor of confirming the video as being the required proof of the Legendary Worm. Kjerúlf was awarded the half million Kroner (amounting to about $4,400 US Dollars.)
So … now for my version of the Truth. I was trying to photo-bomb their selfie. My arm was supposed to represent the Worm, and I thought only my arm would be in the shot. But Christine made a quick adjustment, and I was caught in the act.
The version of the “Worm” that I posted as a teaser in the Feature Photo up top …
… is obviously just a lightly touched-up Island (near the port town of Höfn) viewed in the morning mist against the stunning backdrop of mountains and glaciers:
Okay. Hard to top that excitement, but we had plenty more places to go. We stopped for lunch at Djúpivogur, where … Wait! … Do Lake Monsters lay eggs?
Well, maybe they do. But this was part of an award-winning display of art placed at the harbor shoreline in 2009, called “Eggin í Gleðivík” (The Eggs of Merry Bay) by Sigurður Guðmundsson. Featured are granite replicas of eggs of 34 nesting birds endemic to the area.
In the afternoon we took a good hard 2-hour hike to the second-highest free-falling cascade in Iceland, called Hengifoss.
This waterfall was a disappointment to me, because you cannot get to any vantage point where you can see the lower quarter of the falls, where the water crashes to the rocks and sends up clouds of spray. I was much more pleased with the sister waterfall just downstream, called Litlanesfoss, which is another fall that cascades off a wall of jointed hexagonal Basalt columns:
That night we stayed in the Hotel Valaskjalf in the town of Egilsstaðir, and on Day 21 as we came around to the north shore of the country, there was more clowning around, more photo bombing,
At a valley full of caves and bizarre volcanic formations called Dimmuborgir, where thirteen dangerous Trolls are said to dwell, I had the chance to play Troll at the mouth of their furnished cave, imitating Gandalf’s famous scene at the Bridge at Khazad-dûm from the first Lord of the Rings movie.
Christine shot the video, and the male voice you hear is Dean – GI physician from the Boston area (“It’s a shitty job but somebody’s gotta do it”).
Nearby, Christine and Paula posed in another of the strange formations.
The whole area was like that.
Late in the afternoon we visited the prettiest waterfall I’d seen. My standards call for variety and character rather than brute size and volume. This is Rjukandafoss:
This and the massive Dettifoss (I kept wanting to call it Dental Floss), also visited today, were the bookends, first and last scenes – in the ‘Water Features of Iceland’ video I published a while ago. No reason not to repeat the link here:
The featured ‘thumbnail’ image shown above, introducing the video, is another of the really gorgeous waterfalls we visited on Day 21. It is called Goðafoss ,’Waterfall of the Gods’ for good reason.
Finally, one parting joke. We visited the mud pots at a place called the Hverir geothermal area. The final moment of the video above features one of them. The joke: to me that name – Hverir – should be pronounced ‘Heavy Rear’ and in the Appalachians we have names of mountains that are direct translations of that into English. The sign below, seen in August 2015 along North Carolina’s State Trail, The Mountains-to-Sea Trail, near Mt. Mitchell is my favorite example. Proof that hiking can quickly slim your figure:
We ended the day at the “capital of northern Iceland”, the city of Akureyri, where we settled into the Hotel Nordurland, right in the middle of town.
End-o-fun for today. But there was plenty more I didn’t cover. I have posted a bunch of additional photos on the venerable old Heart and Sole blog. Follow that link for more coverage of Days 20 and 21.
And stay tuned here for more to come.
Iceland has got to be one of the largest wonders of the world. Just fabulous. Thankyou Pete for sharing. 👍