Liquid and solid water

Lots more water! The past two nights we stayed at 2 separate hostels in small towns (>100 people) in the middle of nowhere with lots of gravel roads in between.


Yesterday we ended up seeing the top 3 waterfalls in Iceland. The first was the mighty Gulfoss, the largest waterfall in the county. Tourism is Iceland's 2nd biggest money maker, but everywhere we go there are just a few people. Its great to explore these natural wonders in peace, rather than a lot of US national parks that are crowded with roads, cars and tourists.


From there we drove to Icantrememberthenamefoss. There was a trail that you could take to walk all the way around the falls. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, you can get very wet. I thought my raincoat would be enough, so I got under it so Eric could take a photo and ended up getting my pants and boots soaked. And he pretty much missed the shot.


Next up was Skogafoss. Our hostel was just few hundred feet from where I took the photo, so we ate our meals looking out at this view. This is the tallest waterfall in Iceland. After hiking to the top, we found a ladder over the barbed wire fence (there are sheep everywhere out here) and followed the trail. We weren't really planning to hike, but it was too tempting. Turns out there are a bunch of smaller falls that lead to this one. Far off in the distance are snow covered volcanoes. There are no trees out here, so the trail became hard to follow and eventually disappeared, but we kept going to get to the peak of a hill before turning back. At the top of the hill, we saw a patch of ice that didn't seem too far away. Since we'd been in ICEland for several days without touching ice, we decided we had to keep going. Well, it turns out it was a a lot farther away then it looked. After 1/3 of the way there, we stopped seeing sheep hoof prints, because they probably couldn't make it up some of the slopes we had to climb. The landscape alternates between large rocks and really squishy grass and lichen. FINALLY we made it to the ice, and I won our first Icelandic snowball fight.

After getting back late from the hike, we ate dinner, and then drove to the coastal town of Vik. Vik is famous for black sand beaches, arctic turns nesting on the cliffs, and rock formations out at sea which are supposed to be petrified trolls. Speaking of which, 8 out of 10 Icelanders believe in elves and trolls. Sometimes the roads here take weird turns in areas they don't need to. This is because construction workers were afraid of messing with piles of rocks where elves are believed to live. Supposedly after blowing up some of the rocks to make room for a road, they came back the next day and all their construction equipment was broken, so they blamed the elves.

I really like these traditional sod houses. Since there are so few trees and conventional construction materials, the vikings built their houses, barns etc largely out of stone, dirt and grass. What little wood they had was used for doors, windows etc. A lot of the farms out here still use similar earth bermed structures for sheep shelters, storage barns etc.

Today we woke up early and went on a glacier hike/ice climb with a couple from the hostel we stayed with. It was nice because it was just 4 of us and a guide, so we got to do more extreme stuff than a large tour group wold have. After strapping on our cramp-ons and ice axes, we made our way up the glacier. The guide actually hadn't been up this glacier in a year, so we just figured out a safe path as we went. We walked inches from very deep crevaces with rushing water, saw boulders that had emerged from the ice and finished at a huge ice cave. This glacier has retreated 2km in the past 10 years.

After the glacier hike, we headed back to Reykjavik to return the rental car, stopping at a few coastal villages along the way. Gas here is about $8 a gallon here by the way, so quit your bitching about $4 gas and start planning for a future where energy is a lot more expensive. Tonight we're staying in a really nice Hostel in Reykjavik, which is eco-certified since it's all geothermally powered, and has recycling (even compost) for everything. I never knew you could recycle tetra-paks... I wonder if anywhere in the US does that. They also play nature documentaries at night. Eric bough some random fish called "Snæfiskur" for dinner. We're pretty sure it wasn't actually fish, but google won't tell us what it is, and the people at the front desk didn't even know! I had pasta and salad.