Icelandic road trip - part III

The last part of our trip: last days, last wonderful views and discoveries.

We passed through amazing roads and mountains, with steam over the little lakes and some glaciers behind the clouds. We arrived in the biggest open pit of Icelandic spavin of the world, that is, basically, one side of a mountain full of rocks, because the most of the spavin has already been collected.

But the place there was amazing and a lot of unpleasant sheeps stared us, so unpolite!

This is Petra's house. Petra was an amazing woman that collected a huge number of precious rocks and minerals during her life. So her house became a proper museum, a stunning museum!

That nigth we slept in a deconsecrated church, that's the blue and white building in the first picture below. It's an amazing "guest house" for maximum 5 persons in a local that gave hospitality to a luteran church some years ago. We passed here a very pleasant night with a german family and a anglo-french family, in the mean time, out, a windy storm happened.

The day after we went forward with our trip and arrived to Hofn where we joined the hot spring and a very nice lunch with a lot of crayfishes and prawns.

From the Hofn's arbor (that's funny, because Hofn means arbor in Icelandic) the view is amazing and pretty calm. We were there for a while, chilling out and joining the beauty around us.

Finally, Jökulsárlón. It's certainly my favourite icelandic place ever. It's simply magical and while I was there it seemed me to be on another planet. A planet made by white and blue, ice and water.

In the Skaftafell national park, we found Svartifoss, one of the most popular falls in Iceland. Its peculiar contest makes it unforgettable. It's surrounded by hexagonal dark lava columns, in a tight valley.

On the edge of the park, we could admire some amazing sandur (desert region of mud, black sand and little streams of water) as well.

On the road to Vik, we met the weird Kirkjubæjarklaustur, that means litterally "church farm cloister". It's a basalt formation that really seems the floor of a church.

Vik is a big black beach in the south of Iceland. It was very windy and that night was terrible inside our tent. I dreamt to be carried up to the water by the wind. Terrible.

The day after we moved to Skogafoss, another popular fall, that's one of my favourite too.

At the eastern side of the waterfall, a hiking and trekking trail leads up to the pass Fimmvörðuháls between the glaciers Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull. It goes down to Þórsmörk on the other side and continues as the famous Laugavegur to Landmannalaugar. Exactly there we went, after the waterfall!

And it was amazing!

Going around Þórsmörk, we found an amazing canyon to discover.

The second day in Þórsmörk we went on the edge of the panoramic trekking trail, the Valahnukur.

The view is simply stunning and we really got to be exactly between two of the biggest glaciers of Iceland: Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull.

Last days in Iceland means Golden Circle: the national park Þingvellir, the waterfall Gullfoss ("golden falls"), and the geothermally active valley of Haukadalur, which contains the geysers Geysir and Strokkur. Though Geysir has been inactive for a long time, Strokkur, on the other hand, continues to erupt at every 5–10 minutes interval.

Around the Golden circle there are a lot of interesting places to visit. We found another geothermal area in the Reykjanes peninsula, Seltun. The colors are amazing!

After that we made a lunch break in a little nice place in the arbor and we ate a wonderful fish soup.

We visited also the bridge between continents. The lava-scarred Reykjanes peninsula lies on one of the world's major plate boundaries, the Mid Atlantic Ridge. According to the continental drift theory the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates are continuously drifting apart with great forces under the gaping rifts. So the bridge was built as a symbol for the connection between Europe and North America.

Then we moved to the coast to see far away the Eldey island, on the reefs.

Reykjavík is our last destination, to conclude the circle.

I'm realizing that we visited a huge number of places around Iceland, but the most of Iceland is still to visit, damn. There are wonders and wild places to be discovered yet.

But I also realize we have loads of places to see in the world, so, for now, I could settle for what I saw and learnt in Iceland.

Cheers