The Trip to Nupur

This morning I left Reykjavik to come to a three week language course in the Westfjords. Getting here involved a nine and a half hour journey but it was worth it due to the beautiful scenery. These slightly fuzzy pictures taken from a moving bus don't do it justice!

The roads wind all the way around the fjords and at times it was quite nerve-wracking. We received warnings such as ‘Fasten your seat belts because we’re about to enter a wind tunnel’ and ‘We have a very... special road ahead’. There was a bit of panic from everyone on the bus whenever we came to a hairpin bend, and especially when we met oncoming traffic at the top of the mountain. At one point the bus had to reverse round a bend down a mountain for a speeding quad bike, but it didn’t seem to phase the driver! About half an hour before we reached our destination the bus came to a sudden stop and the driver’s assistant shouted ‘we’re on fire’. I think she was trying to scare us but the bus had overheated and smoke was coming out from the back!

Winding roads

We had a few stops along the way. At one point we stopped to climb a hill and see a waterfall.

I'm staying in an old boarding school in a village called Nupur. I say village, it's more like a collection of five or six houses plus a church. The nearest town is Ísafjörður which is half an hour away and has a population of 2,600. So as you can imagine, it's pretty remote! The hotel is owned by two brothers who attended school here when they were younger. One of them went to live in the US for five years and when he came back he found that the school was no longer being used so he decided to buy it and turn it into a hotel.

I was going to add a few more photos but the internet here is so slow! I probably won't update this too much but I'll try and write something when I get the chance.

Tomorrow I start three intense weeks of learning Icelandic. It looks like a challenge but I think it will be pretty fun!