
Monday dawned gray & wet…the view from our room, which yesterday was like a travel magazine photo of a glacier and the mountains, now looked as though someone had used a giant eraser on all that spectacular scenery.
Fortunately, today was a travel day…roughly 500 km from Skaftafell to Reykjahlid. Addy the Nordic Tour Organizing Goddess had plotted us a course snaking along the eastern coastal fjords, but given the weather and anticipated slow going on some of the gravel roads your loyal travellers decided to tweak the route, opting for a shorter inland road (939). Before leaving the coast we stopped for lunch in Djupivagur, a quaint fishing village; a nice lunch but when it comes to quaint fishing villages, Nova Scotia and Maine have nothing to fear.
Our new route featured switchbacks, waterfalls, steep grades, a total lack of guardrails and a vertical change of 1,760 feet in ~ 15 minutes. Breathtaking is an understatement.
The difference in the scenery was dramatic. The black volcanic terrain shifted quickly into brown and gray sedimentary rock with enormous slopes of fine broken rock and gravel. Much of the landscape was covered in moss and short grass and despite the absence of any sign of habitation, sheep could still be seen just about everywhere.
As the day progressed it became increasingly obvious we had made a good decision. The weather improved the further we moved inland, and by mid-afternoon it was sunny and the temperature hit a trip high of 18 degrees. The scenery continued to amaze as we worked our way up a valley between two enormous ridges of glacial sediment with waterfalls spilling over them.
An hour later, another dramatic change; we had entered the area of the highlands that has been likened to a lunar landscape, and with good reason. Black, barren sand and rock and yet every so often clumps of pine or spruce trees and other vegetation…bizarre and yet beautiful in its own very unique way.
As we neared our destination of Reykjahlid we passed another area of high geothermal activity; this is one of the regions in Iceland where the tectonic plates are separating, thus the geothermal activity and the ominous formations in the lava fields that seem to be everywhere.
Despite the starkness of the surroundings, Reykjahlid is located on a very pretty lake, Myvatn; our hotel was on the edge of town and we arrived ~ 5:30 so we checked in quickly and then headed off for another adventure while we still had daylight. About 20 minutes outside of town is Hverfell, a bowl-shaped volcanic crater. A 20-minute hike up a steep trail on the side of the crater took us to the lip where we could look down into the crater and see the lava dome inside. The wind which had been gusting fiercely all day, almost knocked us off our feet and made our mouths feel like we had been gargling with pumice.
That was enough for us to beat a hasty retreat to the hotel to shake out the grit and reward ourselves with some beers (are you noticing a pattern to our evening activities???) and a great dinner of arctic char.
Tuesday will be a day of hiking, and our 2nd night at the hotel in ????.
P.S. Your intrepid travellers cum bloggers love your comments to our posts, so feel free to chip in (you too Steve & Leah!).