iceland.trip

swamps - whales

From the hostel you could see the coast. A young german traveller told us it was only a 30 minute walk. "However, there is no path. And the grass is a bit wet."  I didn't any discount factor to 1) the possible mistranslations of certain words or 2) the proud shrug of her youth. It was a solid hour of slogging through calf deep marsh before there was any sight of dry beach. There were two rivers to cross and only one proper bridge (I gave a shout out to Jimmy Cliff). On the route back I was misdirected into the swamp's deeper parts numerous times by sheep seemingly balanced on dry land. They were, in fact, levitating a la David Blaine just above the water's surface. 

The redemption at the beach end of the walk was seeing a whale's skeleton.

vatnajokull - snowmobiles - narrow roads

Larger than all the other glaciers in Europe combined. Not sure how tough it was to win that contest, but this ice patch covers almost 10% of the island. Given that it's August, the icing of snow that normally covers Vatnajokull has long melted off. Big crevasses are exposed making snowmobiling a more nuanced sport.

We took a monster truck up to base camp. An extreme road, very thin and patchy. Our Icelandic viking driver took it at a cool 35 to 40 mph, only accellerating on the corners.

There is, of course, no way to give you a sense of scale, but Chris is at least pointing out (with outstretched arms) that it is bigger than 'this wide'.

Some deep crevasses.

road trip - prisons - lobster - thai

Our trip back along Route 1 took most of the day. This is the last view of the glacier.

Color and sky and weather were mixed. At Selfoss (their dairy capital pop.~3,000), we decided to poke around a few local restaurants. We passed the only prison (see below) which was smaller than a Motel 6. We also hit a semi-famous lobster place and tried their Bisque. I spilled my water and it miraculously formed an almost perfect silhouette of Iceland.

We ended the evening at a Thai restaurant in Selfoss. The first and last $25 Pad Seiw I ever expect to see. There was a middle class family of six setting next to us. I can only imagine they had to sell the family cow to cover dinner.

> Next (Wednesday)