Tag Archives: holiday

Day 3 – Flipping birds!

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Thursday 1st July 2021. Another Long Read Alert – lots of pictures again!

For a holiday such as this, where sightseeing and photography are basically the whole point of the exercise, the weather is anything from important to critical.  This makes Iceland a place of great uncertainty, since it’s basically impossible to have any confidence in what the weather gods will bring.  So, the morning ritual of opening the blinds to peep out at the weather is a time of heightened tension.  This morning?

Not too bad, it would seem.  Not that this is a guarantee, or anything, but at least we know it’s not hurling it down for the moment.

After breakfast we set off for various destinations around the area, the southernmost bit of the West Fjords.

Off we went, and it soon became clear that the promise of a sunny day was an empty one.

I mean, it’s a nice view and all, but suddenly the horizon’s gone.  Near this spot is a bizarre statue.

It is of Julius Oskar Þorðarson, who was apparently the boss in charge of the gang who built the road it stands on, back in 1947.

A few kilometres on the scene cleared a bit, so we got a good view of the road to Patreksfjörður. Slightly to the side of that was an appealing optical illusion.

The trees look like a pine forest until you realise that the blue patches are the ubiquitous lupins, at which point it becomes clear that the trees are less than 2 metres tall. (There are very few tall trees in Iceland because of the paucity of much of the soil and the relentless strength of the wind; the only ones you’ll see  are imported and sufficiently short that wind doesn’t tear them to shreds. Hence the local joke: what do you do if you are lost in a forest in Iceland? Stand up…)

Patreksfjörður is an appealing town, which, like so many in this area, is located on crammed into a thin strip of land between the sea and a thundering great mountain.

The locals are building a wall to keep out the avalanches which are a constant possible threat. You might be able to make out the earthworks in the centre of the picture, above the buildings.

The town centre has some handsome buildings

and it’s generally an agreeable place.

We then moved on towards the hotel where we were to stay the night, the Hotel Latrabjarg. En route we passed a rather bizarre sight.

This is the not-so-good ship Garðar, billed as the oldest steel ship in Iceland, built in 1912 and now abandoned here to rot. No, me neither.

However, just by the wreck was the rare occurrence of a stretch of water unruffled by wind, which gave me the opportunity to indulge my favourite sort of landscape photo, a reflection.

There was uncertainty about whether our overnight hotel would be able to offer us dinner*. In the end, we decided to eat somewhat down the road and so planned lunch in Breidavik, with a further plan to return there for a sufficiently early dinner to allow for an activity which was best planned for the evening.

Before lunch, we went to the beach.  Of course we did.

On the southern extremes of this peninsula is an area called Rauðisandur, “Red Sands”.  It’s not really red, but actually, well, sand-coloured.  But nonetheless it felt extremely out of keeping with a holiday among glaciers and mountains, to go to a vast expanse of sand.

So, the mountains stop and the sand starts.

and the “beach” is actually a sand spit with water inland of it.  But it still feels like you’re on the beach.

Dagur, in chasing a particular photographic angle, did his Cnut act

and was just as successful, ending up with boots full of seawater.  I don’t know if he got his shot or not, actually.

The water inland of the sand gives an opportunity for some interesting shots

and in places you can see that the sand is not all sand-coloured.

One has to walk a short distance to get from the car park to the sand, and the walk, and an episode on the way to lunch, gave me slight pause.  As you head towards the sand, you pass a really lovely view.

 

I couldn’t walk past that without stopping to admire it, and of course take a photo. Dagur walked past it without a glance.  Shortly after we left the sands, we asked him to stop so we could take photos of no fewer than three waterfalls visible from the same spot.

Dagur, again, hadn’t really thought about stopping for it.  He’s so used to the fantastic sights that you can see in Iceland that he doesn’t see small fry like these scenes, whereas to us Brits, they’re fascinating and lovely.

After lunch we drove to the other end of the sand spit for a walk around.  It turned out that the walk took us past the nesting grounds of some Arctic Terns, who were not best pleased to see us, and so started dive bombing us.  They’re very agile flyers, and so it’s disconcerting to have them head straight for you, only to veer away at the last instant (or even peck at your head en passant, apparently).  From several dozen attempts, I managed to get a couple of halfway decent pictures of a tern in flight.

There was a lot of bird activity.  In a little stream nearby was a little chap we think is a Dipper (though not a big one).

and the skies were filled with the sights and sounds of dozens of different types of birds coming and going.

Near where we parked for this walk was a cute little black church

with Oyster Catchers on the surrounding wall.

They got rather agitated as we approached and we think they probably had a nest in the wall.  So we left them to it and headed to our hotel. We had a chance for a refreshing cuppa before heading out to an early dinner.

The reason for eating betimes was that we wanted to get to the Latrabjarg cliffs to see

the puffins, which are nesting at this time of year and which come out in the evening after a day in their burrows.

It’s a popular spot with photographers

and, to be fair, it’s a rewarding time to be out chasing photos.  The puffins are very cute and don’t seem at all fazed by having people thrusting long lenses at them.  It’s quite easy to get good photos, and I even managed some video.

We actually made two visits to the Latrabjarg cliffs, with the later one being fractionally more satisfying.  In between times, Dagur whisked us off to an area called Keflavik (same name as the airport, rather different scenery).

It’s actually past the end of of the sands where we birdwalked, and down a very rough road (as you can see above).  You get a nice view, though, and it’s so difficult to get to that very few people will have seen it from this viewpoint.

It’s a Wild And Lonely Place (WALP Factor 8).

and Dagur also took us to see a monument to an extraordinary rescue attempt by Icelandic farmers of English sailors who were shipwrecked nearby, back in 1947. The farmers had to carry loads of gear out to this WALP and haul sailors up the cliff in very difficult circumstances – a major effort to save a dozen lives.

(I think the weather’s always foggy here, which is probably why the ship was wrecked.)

The day today had featured a lot of avian activity with some very satisfying results.  I think that tomorrow will involve longer periods in the car spent travelling around, so maybe tomorrow’s enthralling episode will be shorter.  There’s only one way to find out, so see you then, I hope.

 

* In this part of Iceland, towns are small and far apart, and often only accessible by unsurfaced roads. Generally speaking, it’s a Wild And Lonely Place, so you can’t make any assumptions about whether anything is still open or offering what one might think of as a normal service. On entering the Latrabjarg peninsula, for example, there’s a sign informing you that there are no fuel stations in that part of the island.  As it happened, the Latrabjarg hotel could provide food, but not early enough for our purposes.

Day 2 – Raining in our expectations

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Wednesday 30th June. Long Read alert – lots of pictures!

We needed a prompt start, as we had a ferry to catch as well as a load of relentless tourism to undertake. Hoping against hope that we would have nice weather, we lifted the blinds and peeped out…

Oh, well…..the only thing to be seen were some sheep which had drifted up overnight by the hotel.

We got up, breakfasted and checked out – I studiously avoided any mental calculation of the awful truth about our bar bill – in time for a 9am start. Our first photo call was the Black Church just a short way away, which would have had a lovely backdrop of the Snæfalljökull glacier, had the driving fog and drizzle not obscured it. It left rather a desolate scene, to be honest.

This was to be a hallmark of the morning – wind all the time, rain quite often and temperatures around 11 or 12C. Despite this, Dagur found us some interesting things to see and photograph.

For example, the dismal weather couldn’t detract from this viewpoint on the road towards a fishing village called Arnarstapi,

And the village itself features some enormous basalt columns

among which nestles a very photogenic cottage – one of the most famous in Iceland, Dagur said, because of its location.

This visit gave us the first example of one of the other hallmarks of the day – cliffs lashed by the sea and crowded with nesting seabirds (guillemots, kittiwakes and various sorts of gull).

A seal was playing around in the harbour and popped up to take a look at us.

Just down the road could be found a giant troll statue, of Bárður Snæfellsás – the Mythical Protector of the Snæfellsnes Peninsula in West-Iceland

It is said that it is lucky to go through the tunnel underneath, so Jane immediately went through whilst I decided to take the risk of bad luck instead; it would have been very undignified for me to get stuck, which seemed a distinct probability to me.

Basalt cliffs with seabird colonies are two a penny around these parts of Iceland, but this one, near old Bárður, is pretty striking – you can see seabirds flying in and out of the cave which forms part of this stretch.


Another good viewing location is near a large orange lighthouse called Svörtuloft

(which, by the way, has a baby brother just down the road)

It’s a good location to show the waves lashing in.

Generally speaking, this part of Iceland, the Snæfellsjökull National Park, is a pretty desolate landscape, consisting largely of black lava and yellow moss

Because this is just lava, it’s not fertile enough to sustain the growth of grass or other plants – volcanic ash makes for fertile earth, but lava doesn’t.  Only moss can grow, and the land can’t be used for anything agricultural at all.

The cliffs occasionally have an unusual feature such as this, which tremulous locals once thought was a troll.

but otherwise the landscape was bare, apart from a visitor’s centre, which actually showed a picture of the Snæfellsjökull glacier.  So, even though we couldn’t see it, we had some idea of what it might look like if the fog lifted.

Our next port of call was a fishing village, Öndverðarnesviti, which featured some extraordinary building art.

We carried on around the peninsula and, very gradually, the fog started to lift and the sun to peep through.  Eventually, we could even see the glacier which the fog had hidden so completely that morning.  We thought that Dagur had driven past the point where we could actually see the glacier, but he turned off and took us past the official viewpoint car park and along a very bumpy track

past a waterfall

and eventually, there we were, with a prime view of the Snæfellsjökull glacier!

As you can see, the sun was beginning to shine.  It was still very windy and there were still occasional bursts of horizontal drizzle, but fundamentally the weather had changed for the better.  It even enabled some shots of a church near Hellisandur, which in itself was quite photogenic, but it also gave a further opportunity to show the ubiquity of the lupins.

We had two final stops before a ferry journey towards our hotel for the night.  We struck really lucky for the first one.  The local mountain, Kirkufell, had been shrouded in fog, but this lifted, the sun came out and so it was a really worthwhile stop to capture a classic photo of it. (Apparently, single mountains are rare in Iceland, so this is a fairly unique sight.)

The waterfall is called Kirkjufellsfoss, and although this is a picture taken a million times by a million photographers I was very glad to get such a clear shot in such good conditions.

The final photo was taken in some haste as we made our way to the ferry at Stykkishólm.  Although the town has a perfectly normal small church, for some reason “an architect fuelled by cocaine”, in Dagur’s words has somehow got permission to build Stykkishólmskirkja, which was, erm, dramatic.

Unsurprisingly, opinion is deeply divided about whether this is a good addition to the town or not.  I quite like its arresting style, personally.

After this, we simply made our way to the ferry, a two-and-a-half hour journey to Brjánslækur, itself just a short drive from the hotel in which I sit writing this, the Hótel Flókalundur.

We had a swift drink and then a simple (but delicious) dinner in a dining room which to start with was full of an Icelandic care home coach outing, including one old guy who was wandering around being extremely genial because extremely drunk and taking swigs from a bottle of neat spirits of some kind.  He was eventually bundled into the coach and quietness returned to the dining room whilst we finished our meal.

If you’ve stayed with this post thus far, then well done!  We covered a lot of miles and sights today.  Tomorrow promises to be the same; I have no idea what the weather will be, but I’m sure Dagur will dig out the best sights for us to take in and pictures of.  So please come back tomorrow, when I hope I’ll have more photos to share with you.

 

 

The first day – a step into the unknown

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Tuesday 29th June – Bloody hell, where to begin?  It’s been a day full of new sights and cultural experiences, which arrived in relentless stream; it’s difficult to know where to start. So let’s start with a stream – or, more accurately, a river.

Having met Dagur, our guide for the next fortnight, at out hotel, we left Reykjavik and headed away from the city. The stark nature of some of Iceland’s scenery soon began to make itself felt, and I tried a couple of quick grab shots from the car as we went along.

Dagur offered us the choice of sticking to the main road or taking the more scenic Road Less Travelled, so of course we opted for the latter, so soon  it was time for our first stop of the day

and time to take the first Proper Photos of the holiday with the Big Camera.  The scene was a stream, where a couple of people were fishing.

In the foreground are the famous (no, really) Icelandic Lupins.  These can be found in astonishing profusion all over the place, but started as an experiment to stop the black sand beaches from being washed and/or blown away.  Alaskan lupins are, it would seem, the only plant that can grow in black sand, so they were imported and planted on the sands, and have been successful in controlling the erosion.  The trouble is, they rather exceeded their brief and can now be found everywhere.  When we planned the trip, I had sort of imagined a dedicated excursion to see the Special Icelandic Lupins, but frankly it’s difficult to get away from them.  So I used them for an attempt at an arty shot.

and then turned my attention to the stream the folks were fishing in, which, it has to be said, was pretty scenic.

We then stopped at a viewpoint by the sound, looking back over an island

and at a very scenic spot where they used to gather sheep (you can still see the outlines of the walls). Please note that at this point the sun came out and the weather became extremely lovely.

After that, we stopped to gawp at a geothermal spring at Krauma, where the water comes out literally at boiling point and has to be cooled before it can be passed on to be used for heating.

En route to the next stop, I took the opportunity to take some shots of the lupins to give some idea of just how ubiquitous they are, taking over great areas of fields

and growing in roadside verges. They’re jolly pretty whilst in flower, but that’s only for one month of the year.

Our final port of call before lunch was to Reykholt, the historical home of one Snorri Sturluson, so-called “Homer of the North” and writer of many of Iceland’s medieval works of literature, including the sagas. The site has a modern church and museum (with associated gift shop, of course), to the left in the picture below, and, behind it, the old church.

There was more to the site, but there was still much to see, so we pressed on. The next stop was at a series of waterfalls called Hraunfossar and Barnafoss (“Child’s Waterfall).  I’m pretty sure that we’ll see loads more waterfalls before the fortnight’s out, but these were pretty spectacular.

Then it was time for lunch and, when we resumed, it became clear that the weather was closing in.

and when we got to the next stop, Ytri Tunga, the wind and drizzle were such that I declined to take my camera along as we trudged into the wind to see if we could see some seals.  With rain-lashed spectacles, I found it rather difficult, but Jane and Dagur could make out some dim shapes in the distance.

and it’s a great tribute to modern phone camera technology that I could capture these images, but I’d rather lost interest by this stage, and so was delighted when we reached our hotel for the night, Hotel Búðir, on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula. There was talk of midnight sun photography of the Black Church, but, frankly, since you could barely see the thing, I was grateful that we called it a day so I could retire to the bar.

The hotel is a destination location in Iceland, very well-run and featuring an excellent restaurant.  After getting embroiled in the bar in conversation with some other guests, we ended up sharing a table with an American lady called Sherry as well as Dagur.  Having drunk too much we therefore ate too much of the lovely food before retiring to bed and wondering what the next day would bring.  Perhaps you’d like to read the next entry to see what we discovered?