Tag Archives: Tourism

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?

 

Cry Freedom! And let’s slip into Reykjavik

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Monday 28th June 2021, evening. We spent some three and a half hours acquainting ourselves with our hotel room whilst we anxiously awaited the outcome of our Covid tests.  In the distance, we could hear the tinkling of a piano.  Well, it as more a crashing than a tinkling.  I wondered if it was someone practising, Jane thought it was just rubbish. But it gave us something to get slightly distracted by whilst we waited……

At 8pm, the all-clear came in the rather prosaic and anti-climactic form of an SMS text saying “Screening could not detect COVID-19”.  No fanfare, no chorus of angels, just the beep of an incoming message.  But good news, nonetheless, as we were both getting a bit sharp set.

So we decided it was time to go out and explore our surroundings somewhat, not least because, against all odds, the sun was shining – not something we felt we had any right to expect.  We took an interim stop in the hotel bar, which was useful in several respects: firstly, getting to know Viking beer, a decent local lager; secondly getting a steer from the barman as to somewhere to eat (see later); and thirdly, to meet, briefly, Chris Foster, a friend of Jane’s from her folk-singing days. I would say “dim and distant” but if she reads that, she’ll slap me. The cost of spirits being what it is in parts Nordic, we’d brought a decent scotch and thus were able to present it to him.  We plan to meet him again when we return to Reykjavik en route home.

The Sand Hotel is set in Laugavegur, one of Reykjavik’s centralised, largely pedestrianised, streets, and very charming it is, too.  You can see at a stroke the quirky nature of this street, as well as the ubiquity of the electric scooters which make life as a pedestrian more tense than is strictly necessary.

As I took this photo, it became clear where the piano “music” was coming from. Up the street was a piano player who had extraordinary technique but could only muster appalling results.

We pottered in the direction that the barman said contained a good burger bar, noting the artworks adorning many of the street’s buildings

and spotting, in the distance, the hint of an impressive spire.

We eventually found the burger joint that our barman recommended

and it’s entirely in keeping with the quirky nature of the neighbourhood.  The burgers are OK, but the chips are stellar!  Walking back to the hotel, we detoured to explore the spire, and found it belonged to a quite remarkable building.

It’s called Hallgrímskirkja, locally referred to as the “Space Shuttle” and can be visited during the day; perhaps we will get a chance to look inside on our return to the city.

By this stage, it was getting a bit late and cool, so we wended our weary way back to the hotel and so to bed.  The day was a disconcerting mix of strange and familiar, and we felt the need of getting some sleep to help us be ready for whatever tomorrow might bring, and who knows what that might be?  Come back and find out!