A trip to the south: Day 1

Last week my housemate Marja told me she was going to go with her boyfriend, Juho, and a friend's boyfriend, Jere, on a trip to the south of Iceland and offered me space in the car. I decided not to go because I've already been to the south several times. However, after a few days without lectures and nothing to do I started to get incredibly bored and realised how boring my week would be if I was in the house doing nothing with most of my housemates away. So I decided to join their trip and I think I made a very good decision.

Both Marja and I have seen large parts of the south of Iceland but it was fun to show the guys our favourite places as well as discover lots of new places we'd never been to before. First stop was Seljalandsfoss, the waterfall which you can walk behind. I've now been here several times and the last two times it's been so icy it's not possible to walk behind. However, we discovered Gljúfurárfoss, a waterfall which is only a few minutes walk away and, despite being more impressive than the main waterfall, most people don't know it's there. We walked through a narrow icy gap to enter a cave where the waterfall almost came down on top of us.

We also visited Skógarfoss, another waterfall I've seen several times, except this time there was a huge rainbow in front of it.

It had already been a day of seeing partly-new things but our next stop was completely new to all of us. We drove to a valley between the volcanoes and mountains and went for a short walk to an abandoned swimming pool, Seljavallalaug. The pool was built in the 1920s as a place to teach people how to swim. It hasn't been in use for a long time and only gets cleaned once a year, so as you can imagine, the water was pretty filthy! Apparently some of the dirt in the pool is the result of Eyjafjallajökull's eruption which filled it with ash. It was a beautiful place to swim though, although a little bit cold!

The landscape surrounding the pool

Next, we went back to the sight of the plane wreck and it was up to me to do the nerve-wracking driving along the black sand beach again. However, I felt a lot more confident this time having done it before and because I was driving in much better weather conditions. The plane wreck site was not quite so atmospheric this time but the sun gave us a good view of the mountains behind it.

Our final stop of the day was the black sand beach of Vík. I've seen the beach and its rock formations from a distance but have never seen it up close due to a lack of time or bad weather. On Monday, the weather went from being beautifully sunny to gloomy and windy in the evening when we got to the beach. As we got out the car the wind was blowing pebbles into our faces and the waves were pretty vicious but we walked over to see the basalt columns.

We knew that around the corner from here was a cave but the waves were coming up so high it wasn't possible to walk along. So I admit we did something a bit stupid and maybe a bit dangerous (sorry Mum). As one wave went out we ran along the beach as fast as we could to get to the cave.

However, whilst in the cave, the waves were coming up higher and higher making it harder for us to run back. And then came 'the big wave'. I took this picture of Jere just before I realised how big it was and started frantically shouting for him to get back from the sea.

The wave almost completely filled the cave and as it left we had no choice but to sprint back across the wet sand to avoid the next big wave. Me and the two guys narrowly avoided getting hit by the first wave but Marja was not so lucky. I'm very glad that we were all OK and safe so we can laugh at this. As I ran round the corner, I said to Marja 'Oh my god, did you see that huge wave?' to which I got the stoney-faced reply 'I was IN the wave'. She had tried to run back whilst we had ran to the back of the cave and she'd been soaked from the neck down. Luckily she had avoided being completely covered by water by climbing onto one of the small basalt columns and clinging on. We were also lucky that we were only a twenty minute drive from our hostel so she didn't have to stay wet for long. Although it was an incident we laughed about a lot later, it did make me realise how dangerous the weather and the nature can be here. I don't want to over-dramatacise this but people have been swept away at Vík beach and I can understand why; I think if we hadn't run back whilst we had the chance, the whole cave would have been filled with water and it could have been a different story.

Finally we made it back to our hostel and spent the evening cooking, playing card games (I lost every single game, every time; the Finns are clearly good at cards...) and trying to dry Marja's shoes and jeans.