Tag Archives: holiday

Day 6 – Hallo, Turf*

Leave a Reply

Sunday 4th July 2021. Happy Independence Day, people in the USA!

The usual obsessing about the weather attended our waking, and actually the day looked to be just, you know, ordinary – no sun, but then again no rain, which put us ahead of the game, in our view. And here’s our view of the hotel, to give you an idea of the weather today.

The day promised to be a mixed bag, with a variety of cultural experiences on the schedule. Our first stop was to gawp at a rock formation near the hotel called Hvitserkur, but described to us as a “drinking dragon”.  It took us a little while to see it….

…but actually, if you think of the left hand end as the head, it becomes clearer.  Jane swears it’s more like a drinking donkey with a load on its back, and I’m remaining neutral on the rock naming issue.  The scenery around this point is quite appealing

but it is clear that we’ve left the Westfjords area with its air of being a rock-and-moss-strewn Wild And Lonely Place.  Generally, this, the northern region, has a much less savage landscape.

Our day would take us over 200km through north-western region and into the north-eastern region, ending up at the regional capital of Akureyri. But we had several aspects of Icelandic culture to experience en route, not the least of which being a record haul of unusual churches, which seem to be a bit of A Thing in Iceland.  We started  this collection at Þingeyrakirkja (pronounced “Thingeyrakirkjya”, but I want you to know that I’ve mastered the knack of getting Icelandic characters into my blog posts).

Construction of the church took 13 years and required transporting stone from Nesbjörg, a scene of historical battles against the Vikings, throughout the winter of 1864-65, by sled over the ice-covered lake Hóp on an 8-km journey. It’s slightly unusual, being a Roman Catholic church in a land whose church is officially Lutheran.  Being Roman Catholic it has, of course, got some fancy artefacts in it.  The church itself was locked, which meant peering through the window into a gloomy church with the interior backlit by the windows opposite.

However, with the combined miracles of modern digital camera sensors and intelligent software, it became clearer what we were looking at.

There was also a gallery visible through a different window.  The processing results were less impressive, but still gave a fair idea of what was inside.

Thank you Nikon and DxO.  Oh, and Jane, for helping me deal with the worst of reflections in the window glass.

A church would be the subject of our next stop, but on the way there we got a reminder that we were in horse country.

Iceland has a unique genetic strain of horses and the authorities go to extreme lengths to keep it pure; Icelandic horses (never “ponies” in polite Icelandic company, despite the fact that they’re all smaller than 15.2 hands) are famous in riding circles for having a unique gait, halfway between walk and trot, called “tölt”.

So: next church: this one is Blönduóskirkja – so-called because it’s in a town called Blönduós  – and features another eccentric design.

Today being Sunday, we thought it might be open.  Like so many churches around the island, it wasn’t.

The next stop was also a church and the start of our brush with Icelandic turf constructions. It is called Víðimýrarkirkja, and is part of the Skagafjörður Heritage Museum (Skagafjörður is the name of the county it’s in). It’s small but beautifully formed.

and the inside is a delight both to look at

and to smell – it has a wonderful, woody, scent.

One of the other parts of the Heritage Museum is at Glaumbær, and also heavily features turf.

It looks like several turf houses

but this is an illusion.  If you step in the main entrance above and explore, it becomes clear that it goes back a long way

and there are different rooms off this passageway, such as this kitchen.

In fact, the whole construction is one house, constructed in sections up to 1879, which would have belonged to a wealthy person (a bishop, actually) and where some 24 people would have lived.  The timbers in the house give away the fact that this was a wealthy man’s house, as timber is a scarce resource in Iceland because the original settlers chopped down all the trees. A more typical example would have much less timber and of much coarser quality.  There are around a dozen turf houses left in Iceland, all examples of dwellings of wealthy people, and some were even inhabited as late as the 1960s.  The buildings look great now, but life in them would not have been too wonderful – two dozen people crammed into such a space would not have been that pleasant, and it’s too easy to romanticise life back then.

I’ve got a load more photos of the other rooms and the outer sections – toolsheds, etc – but don’t want to bore you more than I’m already doing, so I’ll move on, as we in fact did.

Dagur next took us on a tour of his native town, Skagafjörður, before we stopped off at Hofsos, a pretty village with a lovely harbour.

We then spent some time with Dagur’s mother, father, younger brother and niece, who have a summer house nearby; it was a very pleasant interlude, and they are a charming and hospitable family.

Our final brush with Icelandic culture was to visit Siglufjörður, which was a centre of a huge herring processing industry in Iceland, and is now home to the Herring Era Museum.  The town itself is quite handsome.

It would have been even more so had the fog not obscured the mountains, but it’s an appealing place.  To the left in the picture above is the Sigló Hótel, an imposing and attractive building, which is a strong candidate for a stay when we come back to Iceland in the future.

The Herring Museum itself (visible on the far quayside in the picture above) is very interesting as it gives a superb insight into the extraordinary size, scope and complexity of the herring industry which was so important to Iceland (still is, in fact, but it’s much more industrialised now).  Again, I have dozens of photos but will just show you a couple here.

The museum is actually five buildings of which three contain exhibits.  The biggest one is the boathouse.

As well as boats, it has examples of fishing equipment of all sorts, and a couple of idiosyncratic wooden figures of people from that era: a fishwife;

and an old salt, clearly out to try something on with passing people.

The next building is the fish oil factory, which shows the sort of huge machinery used to process herring into oil and fishmeal.

Upstairs is a gallery which gives a lot of information about the history and size of the industry and the importance of its products.

One gets a powerful impression of how tough the life must have been – hard labour in unremittingly unpleasant conditions. The third building covers the salting process and also contains the lodging for the “herring girls” who worked there in the summers.

As Jane pointed out, most ships have a bridge in them, but this is ridiculous.

Shortly after this visit, we arrived in Akureyri and checked into our room, so far towards the furthest reaches of the hotel that the WiFi reached only intermittently), at the Kea Hotel (comfortable enough, but so cramped that if one person is sitting at the desk, another can’t get round to the window) before heading out for a decent meal at a nearby restaurant called Strikið. We’ll explore the town more tomorrow and I’ll report back, so stay tuned for the gen on this, the capital of the northern region, and more waterfalls.

 

*  The title of this post is after an idea proposed by my wife. I just thought you ought to know this.

Day 5 – What the fox that?

2 Replies

Saturday 3rd July, 2021.  One gets to be obsessed with the weather while on holiday in Iceland.  It’s not a conversation-easer like in England; here, it really matters.  The forecast for the day was hopeful.

but the reality was much better.

Ísafjörður looked lovely in the sunshine; and Jane pointed out that it also has an unusual-looking church. It seems to be a thing here.

We set off into the sunshine with a song in our hearts and a long day’s driving ahead.

Then we ran into the fog.

However, Dagur Had A Plan, and so took us up into the hills, where we could get some good views looking down on the clouds, which is always nice.

Today, we learned the proper Icelandic word for the “Valley Fog” that we’d first noticed yesterday. It’s called “dalalæða”; “dala” means valley, if my knowledge of Swedish is anything to go by.  This is a form of sea mist, but it’s pretty much unique to Iceland, as far as I can make out. Every so often for the rest of the day we entered a bank of mist, or it figured as part of the view.  So, for example, we stopped at an outdoor maritime museum at Bolungarvik, and could barely make it out through the mist.

But the mist also provided a lovely backdrop to a photo of Ísafjörður.

Our next stop was at a museum dedicated to the Icelandic Arctic Fox.  Officially, this is the same as arctic foxes found elsewhere; but an interesting information film gave the impression that actually the genetic makeup of most of the Iceland population is diverging from those elsewhere. It’s an appealing place

with coffee and cake if you want it, and several (stuffed) examples of foxes, such as this, which we judged to be the finest specimen on display.

Both Jane and I were under the impression that arctic foxes had a winter (white) coat, which changed into a summer (dark) coat.  It turns out that we were wrong; there are two “morphs”, white and blue, and while their coats may change a little in colour, it’s not the transformation that we’d previously thought.

And outside, in a large caged-off area, they have a real, live, fox.

Arctic fox cub

It’s just a pup; a Bambi fox, because apparently it’s parents were shot. It’s not known what its future holds, but for now, it is supremely cute.

Further cuteness was on display a short while later, as Dagur suddenly braked, turned round and went back along the road we’d come along.  It turned out that he’d spotted a lone seal on a rock, and so stopped and took some photos.

There is an “official” place to view seals a little further around the coast, so we stopped there; but one really needed binoculars to see the seals; my general-purpose lens could barely pick them out.

and my phone couldn’t do the scene justice, either.

(though, once again, this image is a tribute to the imaging power of modern phone cameras.  I could barely distinguish between seals and stones with the naked eye).

Shortly after this, we had a scenery stop at Rjukandi, where there’s a pretty cascade. But this is Iceland, so it’s not a real waterfall.  We did venture off-piste to try for a photo of three others.

I particularly wanted to capture this as a wonderful demonstration, suitable for any geography/geology lesson, of water’s power of erosion.

It was time for lunch, and serendipity stepped in at this point, as we were near a place where we could see a round of Vestfjarðavíkingurinn 2021, the Icelandic Strongest Man competition.

It was slightly surreal to see these large chaps congregating

and I was lucky enough to get a little video footage of a couple of the contestants

after which they came into the restaurant for lunch.

The commentator is a very big name in Iceland – Magnus Ver Magnusson, who won the World’s Strongest Man competition four times.

After this unusual lunch stop, we next visited Saltverk, a small factory producing some of Iceland’s (apparently) famous sea salt in a 100% sustainable fashion, based on a geothermal source at Sudureyri.

This heat is used to evaporate salt water taken from the sea from its normal salinity of around 3.5%, in stages, to around 28%, where the salt starts to separate out in its tanks and sink to the bottom, where it can be collected.

and then put into drying racks before being packaged up.

The salt is mixed with other ingredients such as thyme, or smoked, or sold untouched by further processing.

The rest of the day consisted of simply getting to our hotel, and thus completing a journey of over 350km.  The scarcity of towns and villages as we travelled underlines how isolated these parts of Iceland are, and goes some way to explaining why some places are struggling – the distances are too large for any kind of convenience in living.

We passed a couple of noteworthy buildings on our route to the hotel:  a house that looks more like a small castle (unoccupied definitely, and abandoned, it would seem);

and another for our informal collection of unusual church buildings – this one at Holmavik with rainbow steps.

And so here we are at our hotel, at Laugarbakki – a modern and quite imposing edifice, with, as we’ve now come to expect, very good food in the restaurant.  Jane had a salad which included unusual-coloured pea pods:

She didn’t eat it, of course, as she’s not a Purple Peapod Eater.

So here we are at the end of a varied day. We have a similarly mixed programme of things to look forward to tomorrow, so I’d be very glad if you were to come back and Read All About It then. For now, good night!

 

Day 4 – Crossing the mountains with a Fjord Escort

2 Replies

Friday 2nd July 2021. At last! A chance for me to foist upon you my joke about travels among Nordic mountains. Sorry, though – Long Read Alert Again!

The weather forecast according to the Met. Office app was for unbroken sunshine all day. No, really:

This was the reality as we headed for breakfast.

In the event, we had little direct sunshine, but no rain and almost no wind, so a good day for relentless tourism, which we proceeded to embark upon.

The first stop was Tálknafjörður, which Dagur described as “a bit of a sad town”, but which looked pleasant enough.  I guess that, like many Icelandic towns, it’s struggling to survive and thrive in modern times, with Reykjavik and parts foreign proving attractive to young people. Anyway, that aside, its USP is a very unusual church.  Not the bonkers architecture seen in Stykkishólmur (go and look at the blog post for Day 2) or Reykjavik (arrival day), but nonetheless striking.

It overlooked a pleasant view, too. Lots of lupins, of course.

Our onward journey took us up into the mountains as we crossed the knuckle of the peninsula towards Bíldudalur and thence from paved to unpaved road for a bumpy, 25 km, half-hour ride, which, according to Google Maps, took us out to sea.

This was a map-reality disconnect, luckily…  Anyway, we bumped along, heading for the outdoor art museum of Samuel Jonsson, who, it seemed to us, Wanted To Be Alone whilst he made his art from driftwood and anything else to hand, as he lived a great distance from what we might regard as civilisation.  The museum is charming.

To the left is a church he built, which has a lovely interior, today used as part of exhibiting pictures and other information about him and his art.

The most striking thing in here is his model of the St. Peter’s Church in Vatican City.

The building to the right of the church is a gallery (not currently in use) and dead ahead is the (rebuilt) house he lived in.  There are various artworks gathered outside.

The statue is a recreation of that of Leifur Erikson, which is outside the  Hallgrímskirkja church in Reykjavik; the circle of lions is his recreation of an original from the Alhambra. It’s a working statue, after a fashion, in that it needs manual charging with water.

The place seemed awfully remote to us, and we wondered how on earth one could sustain a life so far from the nearest town.  But the lady in charge of the exhibition pointed out that things have changed in the nearly 100 years since Jonsson first lived there.  For a start, Bíldudalur was a much larger town then, and had a variety of shops; also Jonsson lived among a community of some 200 souls, with another one of 100 people not far away; and, of course, there was much more reliance upon supplies being brought in by boat. So life wasn’t as tough as we might have thought when viewing it through 21st-century eyes.

After bumping our way back to today’s version of civilisation, we headed again into the mountains. En route, we did stop to see something quite uniquely Icelandic – an outdoor, public, hot spring bathing pool.

One can just change in the little hut and bathe in the hot water – it’s a public facility.

The paved road then gave way to another ungraded surface which took us up into the mountains where we actually saw some residual snow. This remains even during the summer, in those shady parts where the sun can’t reach.

The next stop was a treat, as it was a visit to the biggest waterfall in the Westfjords – the Dynjandi waterfalls.

There are seven waterfalls, each of which has an individual name, and there’s a path one can climb to pass them all on the way to the big one – Dynjandi itself.

It really is a great place to visit, a very impressive sight and well-organised.

We lunched there on sandwiches bought earlier and then headed round to the next peninsula in the Westfjords, to a place called Hrafnseyri, where there’s a museum which features a replica of a turf-roofed house

and a rebuilt version of an old church.

After this visit, we headed – again across the knuckle of a peninsula finger – towards Þingeyri. As ever, this mountain road gave us some impressive views. We were lucky enough to witness a phenomenon which is not uncommon in Iceland, but is not the sort of thing you often stumble across in the UK – valley fog.  Clouds appear to be spilling out of the fjords into the sea, and it’s a striking sight.

There were, of course, other impressive views over the fjords.

and, as we neared Þingeyri, Dagur suggested we could try an interesting track across a hill (the one in the centre in the above picture, actually) which offered some fine views.  So, off we went. But only so far, as it turned out to be such an arduous climb that Dagur wasn’t sure that even a modern Land Rover Defender could handle it without risk. So it ended up with Dagur and me scrambling up the rest of the path to the top. I just thought you might be interested in a the vital signs of a photographer as he ascends a climb taking photos on the way, wanders about taking photos at the top and them comes down again:

But it was worth the climb for some fantastic views.

(Note the vast extent of the lupins in the last of these photos.)

After a very careful descent, we visited Þingeyri and then travelled around to the next finger of the peninsula towards Flateyri.  En route was a uniquely Icelandic scene.

A perfectly pointy mountain above some houses and swathes of lupins.  I’m so glad we came whilst these were in flower.

The final stop of the day was to marvel at the size of the earthworks they’ve built above Flateyri to protect against avalanche. Here are pictures of the right-hand wall and the overall sight from the harbour, but it’s difficult to convey how huge the endeavour is to build this.

We then headed to our final stop for the night, Ísafjörður. We checked in to the eponymous hotel, had a very fine dinner, which featured wolffish, and took a brief stroll around the town…

and thence to bed.

I’m promised that tomorrow will be spent mainly driving and so there really, really should be fewer photographs and drivel from me.  Thank you for reading this far, and I hope you’ll check in on tomorrow’s exploits.