A visit from Leeds: Reykjavik, The Golden Circle (again), and a Hot River

Whilst my visitors were here, we also took the chance to explore Reykjavik. 

I took them to Nautholsvik beach for a bit of Icelandic sea swimming. The water wasn’t the coldest it can be but probably around 2 degrees. At first, the idea of jumping into icy water seemed thoroughly unappealing but it soon became a challenge and we tried to spend longer in the water every time we went in.

Jumping into the sea was balanced out by sitting in this lovely warm hotpot.

I let my friends do most of the exploring themselves, but of course took them to some important places such as the amazing frozen yoghurt place down the road, Yo Yo, and to the best pick and mix place in Reykjavik for half price sweets on Saturday. We also had a lovely meal out and of course I had to show them the Reykjavik night life.

During this week, I also had a visit from my friend Ava from secondary school, as well as her parents and boyfriend, who were visiting Iceland just for the weekend. It was really lovely to meet them and catch up. It was also one of the strangest days of my life spending time with my friend from secondary school, my friends from Leeds and my friends from all over Europe, whilst in Iceland!

On the day before my Leeds friends flew home, they planned to see the Golden Circle. If you’ve read any of this blog before, you will know that I have seen the Golden Circle more than enough times so I thought I’d send them off by themselves. However, I felt sad not to spend their final day with them so agreed to go along and be a tour guide for my fifth Golden Circle trip. Yep, fifth and final time. I could definitely be paid to give tours by now.

I thought we should do something a bit different on the way home so we went to Hveragerdi and hiked to the hot river of Reykjadalur. It was a fun hike and, apart from a few snowy and muddy patches, reasonably easy. 

My friends left early the next morning and it was sad to say goodbye. However, it was great to have them visit and it made me feel excited to go back to Leeds in a few months knowing that I have great friends waiting there for me.

A visit from Leeds: Snaefellsness

Three weeks ago I had a visit from five of my closest friends from university in Leeds. I’ve always spent so much time with them, and have even lived with two of them, so it’s been hard not seeing them every day and of course I was very excited for us to be reunited. 

My first challenge was to pick them all up from Keflavik airport in our hire car. We’d hired a car big enough for six people and, for someone who is used to driving nothing bigger than a Skoda Fabia, the idea of driving a people carrier by myself on the wrong side of the road was a bit daunting. When I got to the car rental office they told me that we’d actually been upgraded and I was shown a huge, four wheel drive SUV. I had a moment of mild panic then realised I had no time to worry so started driving. I think it took about two minutes before I was totally in love and wondering if I would ever be able to afford to buy a Nissan Pathfinder for myself. My friends were very excited too and I think it would be fair to say that we talked an abnormal amount about the Pathfinder for the whole holiday (excellent fuel consumption, beautiful to drive, lots of space for luggage, etc. Yes, geeks.).

'The Beast'

Anyway, enough about the car… I’ll try not to mention it again. On the first day I drove my friends round Reykjanes peninsula, showing them the moon-like landscape and stopping at the Bridge Between Two Continents. We spent the afternoon in the Blue Lagoon which I think they deserved after a very early morning flight. Then it was back to Reykjavik to prepare for our trip the next day.

On Wednesday, we woke up early and left Reykjavik to visit Snaefellsnes Peninsula (but, because my friends found this difficult to say, it also became known as ‘Schnorklemorkle’. I know which name I prefer.). I’ve been before but only for a day trip so it seemed like a great place to show my friends but also to see some new things myself. The weather was awful at first but soon cleared up. It was slightly annoying considering I’d repeatedly emphasised how bitterly cold the wind could be and how important it was that they brought a LOT of layers. They probably thought I was massively overreacting.

Our first stop was my favourite church in Iceland, the black church at Búdir.

Next up was a coastal walk by the village at Arnarstapi. The coast here is beautiful and the best things to see are the shapes formed by the crazy basalt columns. 

We scrambled over rocks to look down this hole into the sea. 

It was quite exciting as the waves were coming higher and higher and flying through the gap. We stood and watched but weren’t quite prepared for the moment the water came up so high we were in the firing line. I say we… my friends seem to have bad luck with the Icelandic sea whilst I manage to stay dry. The others were hit by water and poor Lois got soaked. 

Sorry, Lois!

We travelled further around the coast and visited Djúpalónssandur beach which holds the remains of a shipwreck as well as some ‘lifting stones’. The stones were used to measure the strength of fishermen and weighed up to 154kg. Let’s just say none of us are cut out to be fishermen. It was also on this beach that Lois and Chris got soaked another time as the tide came in very quickly. Very bad luck.

We stopped at the village of Ólafsvík where we saw this church and waterfall.

Then it was on to Grundarfjörður where we stayed for the night. We stayed in a lovely hostel and this was the view from our window.

My friends had brought a lot of duty free alcohol from Manchester and it made sense to have a drink or two at the end of a long day. Somehow this turned into a bottle or two but luckily we all woke up hangover-free the next day. 

A nice start to the morning.

Our first stop was to visit ‘The Shark Man’ which had been recommended to us by some Americans we met the night before. 

The Shark Man runs a museum in Bjarnarhöfn and as we turned up he proudly unveiled a freshly caught dead shark under a tarpaulin in his front garden. He seemed to get great pleasure by seeing how disgusted we all were by it and even made Lois stand on it. 

He spoke almost no English but showed us round his little museum. He realised that I understood a little Icelandic and told me about his family, his Grandfather’s fishing boat and a complicated story (during which I got a little bit lost) about British people travelling to Greenland. It was very frustrating to realise I could understand most of what he said but could only say a few sentences back to him.

He showed us where he hangs up the rotten shark and of course we got the opportunity to try some. I’ve already eaten rotten shark and, although I said I wasn’t hungover, my stomach was maybe slightly more delicate than usual, but I managed to eat some anyway.

Our new best friend.

Next stop was Stykkishólmur, a lovely little town where we walked up to a very tiny lighthouse. It also snowed heavily but only for a few minutes.

Then on to Gerðuberg, a wall of basalt columns, with a bit of a scramble over mud and rocks to reach them. I won’t mention which one of my friends repeatedly fell over.

On the way back from Snaefellsness, I took my friends to see the two waterfalls Hraunfossar and Barnafoss.

Then it was time to go back to Reykjavik. As we drove back, Adam treated us to Dolly Parton’s greatest hits, as well as a series of fun facts about the great woman herself (did you know she once entered a Dolly Parton lookalike contest and lost?).

It was a great two days and I felt like I gave my friends a real taste of the Icelandic countryside.

Northern Lights over Reykjavik

Tonight I was lucky enough to see amazing red and green Northern Lights, by far the best I've ever seen. I saw something about them being outside online and went and told my housemate Tobias. We realised they were getting strong very quickly so he drove us to the lighthouse right at the end of the peninsula Reykjavik is on, where it is much darker than the rest of the city. We got there just in time as they quickly became incredibly strong and then got much weaker again.

I finally managed to get some reasonably good photos but with my poor photographic knowledge, and only a rock to use as a tripod they've come out too blurry and grainy. It's also not possible to take a photo which shows just how much they filled the whole sky. What an amazing sight!

Is it a ghost to the left? No, it's Tobias.

A trip to the south: Day 2

After a huge breakfast in our hostel, we started to drive further east. We made a short stop in the village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur to see a natural pavement made of basalt. It was partly covered in snow and ice, but great to see anyway.

Next up, we drove to Skaftafell national park to hike to Svartifoss, a waterfall nestled amongst basalt columns (a lot of basalt in the south, as you may have gathered by now). However, there was a sign at the visitor's centre saying that the path was very icy so I asked the man at the desk if it would be OK and he quite simply told me not to go. I'll never know if the path really was that icy or if he took one look at me and decided I was too much of a liability, but I was quite glad he gave us a definite answer. I know we would have been stubborn otherwise and would have spent several hours risking breaking our necks on the ice just to prove we could do it. Instead, he suggested we take an easier route to the edge of the glacier, Skaftafellsjökull. The walk was easy but windy, and as we got close the wind was blowing sand into our eyes. The guys carried on but me and Marja decided it wasn't worth it. However, we still managed to get reasonably close and it was very beautiful.

Our final stop was Jökulsárlón, the glacier lake. It's one of the best things to see in Iceland and, although I've seen it before, it's still really beautiful to see. The ice is always moving so it looked different to the last time I saw it, and the best part was the huge number of seals swimming round!

After this, it was a very long, windy drive home. The trip was so much fun, but I'm no hurry to do that drive again. However, as we drove back past Vík we saw this sunset and it was the perfect conclusion to our trip.

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.

Réttir: The annual sheep round-up

This feels strange to write about something which happened in the middle of September but up until recently I haven't had the photos to post here. As I'm sure I've mentioned in one of my many rants about my broken technology (my iPod broke recently too, just to add to the list), my camera's memory card broke during my visit to see the sheep round-up but luckily I had most of my lost photos recovered over the Christmas break.

Réttir happens once a year and is a big event in which the farmers gather all the sheep from the mountains and then divide the sheep up according to which farm they come from. At the event I went to, the sheep are put into one huge central pen, the farmers check their tags and then put them through little doors into separate pens for the different farms. All of the farmers and their families help out and the event turns into a bit of a countryside party. The only sad thing is that there are now almost as many tourists as locals, but considering I added to this problem I don't think I can complain too much.

An event which revolves around sheep doesn't sound that exciting but it was really fun to see the locals working together and watching the sheep who can jump their own height as they run into their pens!

Help from all the family

Jumping as he escapes