Road Trip Iceland

Oh how quickly the tables can turn. As soon as David got back from his trip south, the remaining members of Team Midge (Bre, Jamin, and I, along with Kyle and his girlfriend Suhani) took the car on a bit of vacation ourselves. Last Saturday, in order to be able to be caught up on enough work to get away we worked a marathon day at a frantic pace. Jamin and I braved the elements to collect lake samples. It was very cold (4C), and windy, which makes for less than ideal conditions to be on a small boat leaning over the sides, pulling our traps. But we got through. At the same time Bre and David collected our Mývatn transect samples. Not only that, we counted all our samples and even did dishes! It was a quite impressive day, if I do say so myself. After various delays in leaving (seriously, the fates were conspiring against us) we finally were in the car and on our way to the town of Seyðisfjörður where we were planning on seeing a concert with a few of our favorite Icelandic bands, Hjaltalin and Bloodgroup being among them. We approached the town, which sits at the apex of a beautiful fjord on the east coast of the country and saw the lights of an outdoor stage, as well as hundreds of young Icelanders just hanging out. The only unfortunate thing was that it was raining, the stage was outside and we were camping. I will tell you that it didn't stop us from having an amazing time. We made new friends, saw a great show from Bloodgroup (they put on one of the best live shows ever). Also included in our ticket price was a dance after the main concert by another great Icelandic band Hjálmar, who plays a mix of reggae and ska. I would bet that the five of us were just about the only non-Icelanders present at this music festival. There were lots of sweaters, as usual, and as usual we wore ours in an attempt to fit in. Overall it was a great time. We saw some familiar faces, debauched a bit and witnessed some debauchery by others.

As an aside, we finally made it to Egilsstaðir. (everyone is going there, and some will even pay ISK 10,000 to go to Akureyri instead)

The following day, after a much needed late start we began our drive to the south, and one of our main destinations, Skaftafell National Park. But first we took the long route through the beautiful East Fjords. We made it through two fjords before the fog became so thick that we couldn’t actually see anything and we were just wasting time.

Anyway, that evening we did make it to Skaftafell that night, which is the home of the giant glacier Vatnajökull, and the sometimes-home of our friend Oli who lives in Reykjavik when he’s not in the field doing science. One of the main goals of the trip was to pay Oli a surprise visit.

Once we got to Skaftafell, we gave Oli a call, but alas, he had returned home to Reykjavik the previous day, sooner than we had realized he was leaving. We bedded down for the night after seeing the utterly amazing Jökulsárlón, or Glacial lagoon. This lake, which is about half the size of Mývatn, where we work but this lake is squeezed between a giant glacier and the sea. As such, the glacier is constantly calving gigantic icebergs into the lagoon, which then flow out to sea. It is really an unreal sight, I cannot even come close to describing it, and few pictures really do justice, but I will include here a few that I took.

The following day, we went to the beautiful Svartifoss, which is the most-photographed waterfall in Iceland, and although beautiful, I have to say that it is a bit underwhelming after seeing the striking Aldeyjarfoss. Here are a few pictures of Svartifoss as well.

(Ok one picture of Svartifoss)

We continued on our journey and hit the town of Kirkjubæjarklauster (hahahaha good luck pronouncing that one), where the striking, but somewhat inauspicious Kirkjugólf lies. This basaltic formation confused the original Viking settlers, and they thought that Irish monks who had been in the area previously had built a church, and this was the ruins of the floor (Kirkjugólf means “Church floor”).

As we continued on we hit a few more waterfalls, all of which were impressive, and then on the ring road, we hit a large swath of gravel, and as we looked to our right we saw “THE VOLCANO.” It was a cloudy day, so the pictures aren’t fantastic, but we could see where the eruption had taken place, and up on the glacier a large column of steam was still billowing up. The large swath of gravel is where the volcano Eyjafjallajökull (Yes, I can pronounce it now) had melted the glacier sitting above it, which had then flooded the plain below it and washed out the road. It was quite special to be in the place where the eruption had taken place, although it was not happening at the time.

We continued driving around the Ring Road, Highway 1, and as we moved further and further and further west, we had a decision to make. Would we continue all the way around to complete the circle, or would we retrace our route and try to see the fjords we missed due to fog? We decided to return the way we had come, a much longer journey, but we also decided that the fjords were likely worth seeing. At the same time, we decided to test the limits of our trusty Pajero and venture into the interior of the country to a park called Landmannalaugar to camp for the night, and then return to the ring road by another road through the interior. These two decisions turned out to be the best ones of the trip. The interior of the country is a vast, rocky desert-like area with roads that are not paved at all, and are only accessible for about 3 months per year in the summer. Basically these roads are volcanic tephra that a bulldozer of some sort has come and just moved the large boulders from. There are no lanes, no bridges and no gas stations. Basically if you are on a road that few travel and your car dies, you are out of luck. You may not be picked up for days. We took one of these roads (although it was fairly well traveled for an interior road) toward the campsite. The area was quite something.

On the way out, we took another interior road toward the coast, and I drove this leg of the journey. It was quite a fun drive, on unpaved roads with probably 15 or so river crossings. We also stopped at Eldgjá or “Fire Fissure,” the longest volcanic canyon in the world. There was another beautiful waterfall here.

Finally we made it back to the ring road, and headed home back through the fjords, which were spectacular. We all agreed that we made the right decision by retracing our steps.

It was a fantastic few days, and a few thousand kilometers under our belts, it was right back to work. I could not have asked for a better way to spend a few days off, and now I have seen much of the country that I would have never seen had we just stayed in Mývatn.