Iceland: Day Two

Day two was our first full day in Iceland (well, after accidentally sleeping in until 10am, anyway…jet lag, anyone?)! We continued our journey along Highway One following it along the southern coast of Iceland. Before leaving our little camp-out spot at Seljalandsfoss,  we hiked up a hill to check out a cave, and then we kept going up to the very top to see the view.

The further we drove, the more we realized that Iceland is truly the land of waterfalls!!! They are everywhere! Both Adam and I agreed that Iceland has more waterfalls than Hawaii does, and that totally shocked us. We decided that Iceland is pretty much a mixture of Ireland and Hawaii. Oh, and a glacier thrown in here and there. However, in Hawaii, it doesn’t typically get so windy that the waterfalls don’t fall straight….

The first stop of the day was Seljavellir, a small geothermal pool that is tucked in between a valley and a river. I had seen pictures of it scattered around the internet, and directions were sparse and lacking detail, so we were a little unsure of what we were going. The only directions I had said vague things like, “After you cross the river, you just keep walking for 15 minutes.” Being in a brand new country, and surrounded by fog on this still cold and rainy day, I wasn’t sure I could ‘just keep walking’ until I happened to stumble upon a pool of water.

But that’s exactly what we did. And now I can give you better directions for the next time you’re in Iceland and you want to go swimming! 🙂

1) Drive south on the Ring Road/Highway 1. Continue past Seljalandsfoss. Go past the Point of Interest stop for Eyjafjallajokull – a volcano that erupted in 2010, and prevented thousands of people from flying in or out of Iceland. It was so cloudy/foggy today that we couldn’t see the volcano from where we were, but we did get to see it on a later day.

A few miles later, you will see signs for Hotel Lambafell and Edinberg (see photo below). Follow this sign and turn left at the next road.

 

As you drive down this little dirt road, you will see a turn off for Hotel Lambafell. Do not turn here – like we did, the first time around – or else you will see the river and think, “There is no way anyone can cross that son of a gun.” No, no, instead you keep driving straight until you come to a small parking lot in front of a newer, empty pool.

 

There is a small creek to cross, but there are plenty of rocks to step on and jump on to get over it easily. There is a trail to follow, but it goes up the hill really high, and it is much easier if you just stay low and follow the creek straight back into the valley.

 

And then, out of nowhere, the little white and green building just pops up!

Just go ahead and ignore my outfit, here. This was mostly to show you that the dressing rooms are a little bit nasty. I would suggest bringing flip-flops and also a plastic bag to put your wet stuff in afterwards.

I’m gonna be honest. This pool is definitely NOT hot. And when it’s windier than a hurricane machine and about 50 degrees outside, the last thing I wanted to do was get in it. Then, add to that the fact that the bottom of the pool is as slippery as the inside of a banana peel from all the moss growing on it…..well, let’s just say that I didn’t stay in there for too long.

In the far left corner is the pipe where the hot water fills the pool. This is the warmest place in the pool. Now that water was hot! If you can just sit under that the whole time, then you’ll be fine. But we did have a few other people there at the same time as us so we didn’t want to hog the good spot the whole time.

I read so many blogs trying to find good directions to this pool, and I remembered reading a comment on one of them that said they had a black dog lead them the whole way to the pool. Well, guess who showed up on our way back from the pool? This famous little pup! He really was the sweetest!

 

Our next stop was another famous waterfall – Skogafoss. It was only about 20 minutes past Seljavellir.

 

To me, this stop was just one of the things we did to “check it off the list.” I wasn’t overly excited about it, and we didn’t hang around here for very long (though it had started pouring by this point, so that didn’t help matters). I was mostly just excited to carry on and get to Vik, which was my number-one “Must See” in Iceland. Vik is a popular little town in the South of Iceland known for its black sand beaches and eery, black rocks sticking up out of the water. We took a little side road down onto a peninsula just before we got to Vik – the 218.  Just a side note here, I really loved how the roads were numbered in Iceland. It made it so easy to read maps and figure out where you’re going. The main highway – also called the Ring Road – that goes all the way around the country is Highway One. Pretty basic. Then, starting from the east side of the island and working clockwise around the island, the little side roads that branch off of Highway One start at 200 and make their way all the way up to the 900’s, back on the northeastern side of the country. – Anyhow, we drove down the 218 and found ourselves at Dyrholaey, one of the many black sand beaches on the south coast.

However, as you can see, it was so dang foggy that we could hardly tell what was going on. Passing through Vik was such a disappointment. You couldn’t even see the water from the main road, even though the beach was within walking distance from the road, let alone any of the rocks that are characteristic of Vik. We decided to keep driving past Vik without stopping and cross our fingers for better weather on the way back (as we would be re-tracing our steps in two days). As we got past Vik, and the road went just a little bit north of the coastline, we started encountering completely different terrain than what we had seen so far.

This little lumpy, mossy green stuff! I kept picturing these lumps as the heads of little trolls and was hopeful that one of them would pop up and start singing “Fixer-Upper” from Frozen.

 

At one point, we passed a side road, and both Adam and I did a double-take as we passed it. It looked like such a gorgeous place to take a walk, we just had to go back. So we turned around, parked our car, and went exploring. It was so bizarre seeing what looked like “normal” pine trees seated on top of this mossy ground, following a river along to a small waterfall.

 

When we got back in the car, I remembered that there was a canyon along our route that I had wanted to see. So I quickly turned on our Wifi (such a life-saver!) and found that the road that leads to the canyon was actually the road we had just stopped and walked around on! So once again we turned our car around and headed back down that side road. I also read online that this canyon had been voted the World’s Most Beautiful Canyon!

This is Fjaðrárgljúfur Canyon, and my photos do nothing for its beauty. I absolutely recommend anyone driving on the Southern rim of Iceland to stop in and see this. The weather was positively brutal at this point, with fog and rain just descending on us like crazy, but I like to think it made this ginormous canyon more mysterious and whimsical. I liked what the fog did to the cliffs deep within the canyon. If the weather hadn’t turned so nasty so quickly, I would have liked to hike along the top rim. I would definitely suggest seeing this in the summer vs. the winter simply because the roads to get there will probably be difficult to pass in the winter with the ice and snow that comes. The canyon is otherwise easy to get to – it’s just one left turn off the Ring Road, and about an hour past Vik.

 

After our quick stop at the canyon, and realizing that the weather was getting worse instead of better, we decided to get as far as we could as fast as we could. We made it to Skaftafell by evening, which is a National Park situated at one end of the Skaftafellsjökull glacier. Again, if we had had better weather and more time, we would have loved to hike the three miles to Svartifoss, a waterfall surrounded by tall basalt columns. Instead, we stopped in at the Visitor Center and learned about the major flooding that occurs when a volcano erupts and causes the glacier to melt, forcing the rivers to rise. We drove just a few kilometers passed the Visitor Center to a Point of Interest stop that was far off the road and tucked behind a tree. We cooked a pre-packaged bag of spaghetti but couldn’t understand the directions and had nothing to measure the water with, even if we had been able to understand Icelandic directions. But it was hot food and it filled our bellies so we didn’t seem to mind. We camped peacefully in the wind and the rain this night, having gotten completely used to it by this point. In the morning, we had a date with a glacier!