When in Iceland, do as the sheep do... (#1)

Wear wool!

Started the trip out at the Orlando airport thinking of our destination with Arctic water!  Closer examination revealed misleading labeling, as we just had good ol' Florida spring water in our possession.

We promptly refilled the bottle with true arctic waters once we made it to Reykjavik and throughout the trip!

*Disclaimer: I will not be using any accents or special letters in the Icelandic words throughout.  I will otherwise try to spell words correctly, but apologize in advance for any misspellings (Icelandic words are hard)! 

 

 

 Iceland is known for its hotdogs.  We found that we weren't impressed with the gas station pylsur (as shown in this photo), as they were wrapped in sub-par bacon.  But towards the end of the trip we discovered what the hotdogs were really all about - little pylsur stands in Selfoss and Reykjavik served up delicious dogs with "everything:" raw onion, fried onion, ketchup, mustard, and remoulade.  (No bacon).  

Beautiful cemetery, Holavallagardur, across the street from our first Airbnb.  Very peaceful place to walk around and enjoy the trees, flowers, and birds (redwings and white wagtails).  

Leaving the iconic church, Hallgrimskirkja, in Reykjavik, we walked through a little sculpture garden that may have been part of a museum.  It included this interesting sculpture, which I thought could be entitled: Efficiency in milking, or efficiency in disease transmission.

A friendly cat greeted us along the street and solicited pets.

 

We had really wonderful weather throughout the first half to two-thirds of our trip.  Quite a bit of sunshine and relatively warm temperatures (it doesn't really ever get warm in Iceland!) made for great walking in town and hiking and camping further afield.  

 

Lake Tjornin mallards.

 

 

Icelandic horses across the fence from our first campsite at Olafsvik.  The horses were quiet company, compared to the noisy gulls nesting on the cliffs above.  We found that with 24 hours of daylight, the birds don't go to bed, they just keep up a ruckus at all times of night!

Our first night at Olafsvik we took a drive into the northern part of Snaefellsjokull National Park.  We did several mini-hikes throughout the evening.  It was weird getting used to the fact that we didn't need to worry about getting stuck out on the trail in the dark or needing to bring a headlamp (something in retrospect I did not need to pack); we could keep hiking as long as we wanted into the night.  First we stopped at Gufuskalar to see the fish-drying huts (above). 

 

 Next we stopped at Skardsvik, where we saw the site of a viking grave (the remains from which we saw in the National Museum in Reykjavik), examined the sand, and put a hand into the cold Atlantic waters.

 

The we moved on to Gardar Beruvik and a hike through a lava field with Snaefellsjokull in the distance and what appeared to be a possible explosion crater off to one side (but we didn't actually hike up to it, so we're not certain).  The fissures and rock formations were incredible.  The diversity of mosses, lichens, tiny flowers, and grasses growing on the rocks was even more incredible.  Here we also saw a ptarmigan and golden plover!

 

 

Our last stop of the evening was at Ondverdarnes.  There was a colorful lighthouse here.  We encountered our first eiders of the trip - a flock of males flew over as we were admiring the scenery.

 

There was also a magical well here that the settlers had discovered and built a walled ramp leading down to.  The fresh water is said to be holy.

 

Back at camp, we had dinner around 10:30 pm!

Goodbye to Olafsvik and Snaefellsjokull.  Our first close encounter with Icelandic sheep on the side of the road.  There are sheep everywhere in this country, the only real exception being the streets of Reykjavik, but I wouldn't put it past them to have some festival and parade sheep in!  The ewes had scraggly wool skirts on their butts, and the lambs were so adorably fluffy that I wanted to smuggle them home with me!  

We only wished we had had more time to explore this national park and peninsula.  Another trip will have to happen!  The road was placed precariously between ocean and mountains.  Unlike in the US, roads on the side of a mountain with a steep drop off usually do not have any kind of barricades or guard rails...makes for fun driving.  Granted the speed limit is never fast in Iceland; fastest allowed speed is 90 kph, which translates to about 55 mph.  We had people pass us, but they couldn't have been doing more than 100-110 kph on the straight stretches.

 

We left the Snaefellsnes peninsula with a stop to climb Helgafell, a little hill of a mountain surrounded by private land (sheep/horse farms) and overlooking the Breidafjordur Bay.  You are supposed to climb the mountain without speaking or looking back, and you may make three wishes while facing east.  There was an interesting sundial-appearing thing on top of the mountain, which we discovered was a directional guide pointing out the landmarks all around (these turned out to be placed at many overlooks in Iceland).

 

Our next campsite was in the town of Skagastrond.  The benefit of a semi-unplanned trip is discovering places off the beaten track, just like this.  Below our campsite were the bird cliffs, Spakonufellhofdi, and above our campsite was the mountain, Spakonufell.  We first attempted an evening hike of the mountain, but after following an unmarked footpath behind the campsite that wasn't looking promising, decided we could not find the trailhead on foot and that we would drive to it instead.  The directions in the little town hiking guide led us to a dead end at the back of a neighborhood, quite far from the mountain.  Turned out we were at the bird cliffs! 

  So we hiked there instead, which was great.  They had signs along the path describing different bird species that nest on the cliffs.  We enjoyed watching a large group of arctic terns chase away a gull from their grassy nesting knoll.  There were lots of gulls resting on rock shelves on the cliffs, common eiders with so many fuzzy ducklings in the shallow, protected waters, and oystercatchers here and there.

 

 

 In the morning, we found the trailhead to Spakonufell.  Finding the trail itself was more challenging.  There was a faint 2-wheel track going uphill, vaguely towards the mountain, so we followed that until it petered out.

There were no obvious cairns or trail markers in sight, so we decided to just head towards the mountain.  The great thing about Iceland is that there are no trees to obscure the view, so you can say "well, we need to get to that peak, so lets walk that way" or "well, we need to get down to the ocean, so lets walk that way" (as we also lost the trail again on the way back down to the car).  Along the way we stumbled upon a boneyard with multiple horse skulls, vertebrae, ribs, and leg bones.  Not sure what that was doing there... 

 

Our "bushwhacking" then led us through a marshy bog, where we disturbed a pair of black-tailed godwits.  

The trail we got onto after the marsh yielded a whole fleece, no sign of the poor chilly sheep who lost her wool.

We did eventually manage to find the trail, only after multiple erroneous forays on well-defined sheep trails (we were sharing the mountain with a handful of sheep who kept a wary distance from us).  We figured out that when we ended up on a well-rutted track, it was the wrong trail.  The human trail was a barely visible, faint disturbance of vegetation, marked with rebar stakes about a foot high wrapped in faded yellow plastic (not exactly highly visible against a backdrop of green/brown/yellowish shades of mosses and rock).

 

It was cold and windy on top of the mountain.  The top is a wide plateau, covered in spongy mosses.  Grand views of the ocean in one direction and mountains in the other, all shrouded in a fine mist.

A sampling of arctic, alpine wildflowers.  Hiking in Iceland was wonderful in part because even if you had to look at your feet, the view was so pretty.

 

The view from our Airbnb on the other side of the fjord from Akureyri.  We had a nice respite from camping, with the best shower of my life (not exaggerating), laundry, delicious breakfast and coffee, and the friendly company of our host Gudfinna.  It was neat finally getting to really talk to an Icelander and learn about the country, the language, the sheep (Gudfinna and her husband have a small flock of sheep who were up on the mountain summer range), etc.

 We went to the botanical garden in Akureyri, the northern-most botanical garden in the world.  We found some of the plants we'd been seeing while hiking.  We also found this funny Dr. Seuss-like plant!  It was a well-done garden and was lovely to walk around.  It also happened to be Independence Day in Iceland (June 17) so there was a festival with lots of kids attending, not deterred by the rainy weather.  We ducked out of the rain into the garden cafe for kaffi and te.  It proceeded to hail, but nothing too serious. 

*I am skipping ahead in time here, past our next two days camping at Lake Myvatn.  I am going to come back to that in a 2nd post, because it was so cool it deserves more time. 

 After camping at Lake Myvatn for two nights, we moved on to the east (reindeer country, although we didn't see any, and we actually didn't see any on the menus throughout our stay (although we didn't eat out that much)).  Our break from camping was another Airbnb on Lagarfljot (a long narrow lake that is home to the worm monster, a sort of Icelandic loch ness monster).  We walked the lake shore looking for the monster.  We didn't see it, but we did find lots of polished stones - red, green, white.

 After dinner, we drove to Seydisfjordur, a quaint fishing town.  Supposedly the town is something to see, but we were way more impressed with the drive between Egilsstadir and Seydisfjordur.  We did encounter Harlequin ducks and a pretty church in town (constructed with corrugated metal siding - lots of this in Iceland). 

 

Waterfalls abound in Iceland, and this drive was no exception.  There were narrow falls streaming down the sides of the mountains towards Seydisfjordur from the snow melting above.  There was also a large waterfall - Gufufoss.

 

Although we had been around small snow fields on our way up Spakonufell, Andy had yet to actually touch snow, so his chance came at the pass between Egilsstadir and Seydisfjordur.  It was cold up there!

 It's nice to interact with friendly pets while away from home.  There was a super friendly cat at the Airbnb who snuck in through the kitchen window.  There was also a super friendly dog, but no picture!

*Stay tuned for Myvatn adventures, Iceland's forest, the South, and the end of the trip.