Advertisement
The wind started picking up again during the night, so much so that I got paranoid and woke Dennis up at 0300 so we could move downstairs from our soft sided pop top before it ripped. The wind did blow out the clouds and we were greeted with blue skies in the morning.
Our first stop was at Stokkness, a seaside Viking village built as a movie set near the ruins of an old farm. It was a small collection of deteriorating wooden structures distinctly Norse in architecture, mired in damp, muddy grass and partially enclosed by driftwood battlements. Besides the friendly herd of beautiful horses grazing nearby we had the place largely to ourselves. Stokkness also has black beaches, more picturesque in my opinion than the famous ones to the south because these have small dunes topped with tuffs of yellow dune grass.
I neglected to mention the reindeer we saw roadside the previous day, and as we rounded into the area considered the “eastfjords”on the eastern side of the country, the reindeer became a commonplace sight along the highway. Reindeer aren’t native to Iceland, the arctic fox is the only mammal that is. The reindeer were introduced
here from Norway in the 18th century and their numbers have started to recover after periods of decline during harsh winter and volcanic eruptions destroying their graze lands.
The eastfjords are the area where you leave most of the tourists behind, and drive for sometimes an hour without seeing another car on winding roads following the shores of steep fjords and glacier topped peaks. We stopped at a hidden roadside hotpot “Djúpavogskörin” along the ocean. It was nothing more than a metal tub with a hose running from a hot spring, but it was heavenly and very hot!
We spent the night in Seydisfjörður, a small fishing village located in a steep fjord considered one of the prettiest towns in Iceland. This is due to the architecture being brightly colored uniform kit houses shipped from Norway and the famous brightly colored rainbow street leading to the main church in town. Surprisingly the architecture of Iceland in general isn’t very impressive by Nordic standards, and mainly consists of a hodge podge of styles, so towns like this stand out. We left early the next morning due to more wind and snow in the forecast and we wanted to clear
the high mountain pass that was already socked in with dense fog, before another storm rolled in. With that being said we were quickly learning any thoughts of doing a wintertime Northern lights trip here would be pretty sketchy and severely limited due to unpredictable driving conditions, a fact conveniently left out in tourism ad campaigns.
The following day was filled with snow capped peaks and more waterfalls as we rounded our way from the east into the north. We tried to head to another hot pot, only to find out the road was closed heading out to it. We stopped and hiked to the massive Dettifoss and Selfoss falls before finishing our day in the Lake Mynatv region. Dennis cooked up some delicious langoustine scampi for dinner. We have been really making the most out of our little camper kitchen and whipping up some delicious meals. Iceland is painfully expensive for food, drink or anything really, and Dennis just loves to cook. For example to buy fuel is $9/gal, a gas station hotdog is over $10, or a $20 bottle of alcohol at home is $80 here. However, to be fair Iceland is renowned for their hotdogs and
we are already working on our second package for the trip. They are made with lamb, beef and pork and are thinner and have a snappy skin, definitely more of a sausage then what one would think of as a hot dog. We have no intention on trying any of the local delights such as horse, puffin, reindeer or the fermented Greenland shark, but did buy a delicious bag of the hardfiskur, a dried fish jerky (that smells like ammonia) that you eat smeared with butter.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.084s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 33; dbt: 0.0585s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.1mb
RENanDREW
Ren & Andrew
WoW!
I enjoyed your most recent blog so much that I had to read the others too. This view is just magic! On the other hand, I'm far less excited about the dried fish jerky that smells like ammonia :)