Having already nailed waterfalls (small), volcanic beaches, DC-3 wreck and raw reindeer on day 1, today we managed to add:
Glacial Icebergs
Glaciers
Awe-inspiring driving
Stunning late evening coastal scenes
Massive shards of crystalline ice on the beach
Zodiacs
Quaint fishing villages
Not sure what tomorrow holds – but I believe geothermally heated lakes may feature, and I think they score on the bingo card too!
I don’t really see the point of putting jam in donuts.
Lauren Bruce, 2016.
The itinerary promised, and the itinerary delivered.
If you picture Iceland as a clock, the capital Reykjavik is at about 8 o’clock. Hella, where we stayed last night is about 7 o’clock. Our destination for today is at about 5 o’clocak, and is the delightfully unpronounceable Kirkjubaejarklaustur – which even the locals apparently just call Klauster to keep it real.
First stop on the road today was the Seljalandfoss waterfall. This is apparently the most visited waterfall in the country, and given that you can see it for miles and it’s nearly 1/2 a km off the main ring road, it’s not hard to see why.
Our personalised tour guide suggested an even better waterfall was the much less visited Gljufrabui, being about 800m further off the ring road. They were right. I’ve seen quite a few waterfalls, and its a geological feature that I am rather partial to, but Gljufrabui is now my favourite ever fall. You have to walk though a small canyon, carefully hopping from stone to stone to a small grotto which is, maybe, 10m by 8m. From above a multitude of cascades fan down into the base, where they envelope the space in mist and then pour out as the stream through the entry. It’s truly spectacular, and when the tour guide says they suggest wearing a waterproof jacket, they mean it!
Having sated our needs for waterfalls at the first stop – and also having had a kick of the footy, we headed off down the ring road to find some lunch. A small café provided soup, hamburgers and hot dogs, giving us fortitude for what was to come.
As we researched this trip, one image I often saw was of a plane wreck on a black sand desert, which I was led to believe was in the area we traversed today. At one point we saw a bunch of cars parked on the side of the road and people walking off into the distance across a dead flat volcanic scree field near the base of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano (pronounced eh-ya-fyat-la-yo-kut-l, if you want to give it a go, and this is the one that erupted in 2010 and disrupted just about every flight in Europe for 6 weeks).
After a little hesitation, we did a U-turn and went back. I confidently predicted it was “10 minutes to walk there, a few mins to take some photos, and 10 mins back”. Well, it was ultimately an 8km round trip which took nearly two hours, but who’s counting? Other than everyone? Luckily, the thing was actually worth seeing when Aidan and I finally got there, and for good measure we got buzzed by a light plane doing a few runs at no more than about 30 feet, which was kind of fun too.
We trudged back to the car in light drizzle, which thankfully didn’t turn into anything more serious, as there was precisely zero shelter.
From there, we headed another few minutes to the famous black volcanic beach at Reynisfjara. It was packed, but every single person other than us huddled in a mass near the basalt stacks and headland – leaving the other 3km of black pebbly beach to us. Very kind of them, and I suspect we might have ended up with the better view.
Apparently, at that point in Iceland if you head due south, the next landfall you make is Antarctica, which is a pretty cool thought.
A quiet drive for another hour or so took us past Vik (at 6 o’clock on the Iceland clock) and brought us to Klaustur. Just in time for the Euro ’16 final between Portugal and France. Iceland had made the quarter finals, and there was a jovial crowd packing the hotel bar, mostly supporting France. Aidan sat in with them for most of it, and I gather was the only one happy when Portugal won it with a goal right at the end of extra time.
Dinner was also kind of cool. I had reindeer tartar – which I expected to be a bit strong, but was in fact light and tasty and excellent – and langoustine soup, which was rich and delicious. Happy days.
Tomorrow is all about glaciers apparently. We pass by Europe’s largest glacier (‘jokull’ in the local lingo), and have a boat tour booked on a glacial lagoon at 1pm. That’s pretty much the itinerary – before we wind up at what is promised to be a picturesque fishing village at Djupivogur (at about 9 o’clock, for those still following the story!).
Just hoving into our thoroughly unpronounceable place of repose for tonight – Kirkjubæjarklauster.
Seems nice.
Apparently even the Icelanders just call it “Klaustur”!
We’ve been in Iceland now for about 6 hours, and we are not going to see full darkness again until we get to London in 10 days time.
The great thing is that the place doesn’t remind me of anywhere – how good is that? Driving out of the airport and heading east and then south-east to Hella for our first ‘night’, my best description would be what I anticipate the moon would look like if lightly grassed and populated.
Our first impressions are that this is going to be pretty good! We actually skipped the Day 1 itinerary due to the time taken to get into the country (not much) and to acquire the hire car (a lot). In the end though we have personalised maps, GPS, a local phone and generally a whole heap of stuff to think about seeing and doing – way more than we can possibly fit in.
We were a bit worried about fitting the five of us plus luggage into a car for a week – but the car is brand new and fits people and luggage with ease, and it looks like it will be perfect. Justine did the first stint of driving on the right – something she’s pretty adept at – and hopefully I’ll pick up the hang of it again soon enough!
We also weren’t quite sure what to expect from the “comfort” standard accommodation, but if tonight is anything to go by we won’t be too badly off. The Stracta Hotel is very comfortable, clean and feels new. The architectural style is pretty basic, but the insides are very tidy and well-appointed, and the food in the restaurant was pricey, but tastier and not quite as extortionate as we’d been led to expect.
We didn’t eat until 8.30, after we’d had a chance to kick the footy to unwind and stretch out the muscles. When you think about it, a three and a bit hour drive through continuous rain from Grantown-on-Spey to Glasgow, followed be a similar length plane flight and then a couple of hours drive to the hotel is a pretty long day.
Luckily, our apartment has a private outdoor hot bath, and so Aidan, Lauren and I raced back from dinner to partake. It’s a pretty fair way to end a long day by lying back in the 38 degree water with the ambient temp a more mild 7 degrees, watching biplanes loop around from the nearby airfield disgorging parachutists. It’s now well after 11pm, and I can still hear them flying around out there now! This is gonna be GOOD!!
We’re at about 30,000 feet somewhere over the North Atlantic. I’ve written quite a few blog posts over the years from a place like this – but never before been able to post them live with onboard wifi.
It’s just a shame that nothing much has happened since I last put anything up, which kind of ruins the effect. It rained the whole way from the house to Glasgow airport, though luckily it stopped just as we arrived – allowing us to make it into the terminal dry and on time to meet mum and check in. It all worked smoothly, perhaps too smoothly, as while it kept the stress levels pleasingly low, it doesn’t really make for much of a story. On balance, comparing it to our massively stressful departure from Oslo five years ago, I’ll take today every time.
Now, as I sit here staring out at the blazingly white clouds below and scanning through Iceland docos on the inflight entertainment system, my mind jumps forward to what will fill our week. It looks spectacular, and I’m hoping that it will be sufficiently free of people (in parts at least) to see and photograph it the way I’m imagining it!
Beyond that, it’s a bit of a mystery. We have no currency, not even an idea of the exchange rate. We know they drive on the right, but because our hire car comes with a GPS and because the offline system I usually use doesn’t have coverage there, we don’t have the sorts of maps and plans we normally would either. We know we are staying at the Stracta Hótel in Hella tonight, so I guess we just have to find that! Given that it never reaches full dark, that should help…
Cliches are cliches for a reason, and usually because they contain a kernel of truth.
In the same way you can’t love without loss, neither can you look forward to something without the knowledge that it will remorselessly slide from the future, to the present and into the past. This trip, and this week with the Wolfes / Blebys / Franklins here in Grantown-on-Spey has long hung around our future, all-too-briefly lit up our present, and must now be burnished into our past.
It’s been good.
Actually, it’s been much more than good. This has been the 6th instalment of these trips – taking us to NZ, the Blue Mountains, Austria, Kangaroo Island and Mauritius before now. Each of them comes with a multitude of memories, but for me it’s the group photo that tells the story best. Three of the members of this year’s trip didn’t even exist for the first one. All of us have changed, grown, evolved as characters and as visages. Funnily though, when we are together it doesn’t really feel like anything has changed. Precious are the times like these, that they punctuate our lives with their power to become memorable waypoints on this journey of ours. I have to look up the older photos when we get back, and see just what has changed.
So, Scotland, what of Scotland? What a cracking place. My first observation was just how friendly and genuine the people were, and that will be my abiding memory (assuming no disasters getting out of the joint tomorrow morning!). From start to finish the Scots have been an absolute joy. Friendly, personable, genuine, confident and welcoming. They have given the indication of being proud and keen to host us, assured and relaxed, with no need for bravado or patronising “tourist experiences”so much as a humour and knowing feel for how to display their culture to visitors. I expected the inspiring landscapes, but didn’t anticipate the human warmth I’ve experienced. To be frank, it’s been sadly lacking in a lot of the world recently, and it’s educative that it seems so apparent after the current feel of Australia.
We just heard that mum has arrived at Glasgow, where we meet her tomorrow to hop a flight to Reykjavik. It’s only the thought of what’s to come that makes me ok with the sadness of this first week finishing. I do try to keep a ‘glass-half-full’ approach to life as much as possible, but the glass really does feel half full tonight, and not just because we have to eat and drink the kitchen down to bare bones in the next 12 hours.
Not sure how often the blog will get updated as we travel round Iceland. I know we have internet access for the last weekend in Reykjavik, but I’m not sure what it will be like in the little places we stay on our circumnavigation. I guess time will do it’s thing, and by this time next week we will all know the answer to that.
Oh yes, and the cliche was wanting to use the word ‘bittersweet’.
Pretty enjoyable day today, and a precursor of what is to come. Early start, as we needed to get from Grantown-on-Spey out to Fort William on the west coast in time to catch a 10.15 historic train. It’s a 2 hour drive, which necessitated a particularly hearty high-protein, low carb brekkie.
The Jocobite Train was probably historic enough already, for all the stuff that made it historic – but it has an on-board souvenir shop and that shop sells wands, which should give you a fair hint about why it was hard to get tickets. In some movie about a boy wizard or some such nonsense, the boy has to catch a train and the train goes over a wonderfully sweeping viaduct.
It’s actually a very nice viaduct, and I can see why they chose it.
Steam trains also smell fantastic and sound great, so it was no particular inconvenience at all do do this. Mallaig, where the train ends, seems to be a dual-economy sort of place. For most of the time it is a functional, possibly sleepy, little fishing village. Between 12.05 and 14.10 it is a tourist town providing lunch. Might not be a bad job if you can get it, but we really didn’t have time to discuss that with any of the locals while we got lunch and ran back to the train station!
One other thing about historic trains is that you can really see how the technology has improved over the years.
Today was one of those days that can go either way. Trekking across the Cairngorm plateau had the potential to be the chance to see the dramatic Scottish highland landscape that was one of my main anticipations for this trip. However, the downside was the likelihood of torrential rain at some point, and questions about health and fitness for such an endeavour.
We were picked up about 8.30 by our guide, Simon, his wife and pack-dog, and driven out to the ski facility that was our stepping off point. From there we climbed up to 1,200m up glacial carries and across scree fields and ridges. The scenery was spectacular, the weather the best we have had, and the climbs and distance were superbly managed by Simon to ensure we felt challenged, but never overextended. Our packs had plenty of snacks and sandwiches, and we were able to fill our filtering water bottles from the multitude of crystal clear and drop dead gorgeous creeks.
Simon had ambitions of getting further, but alas there were just too many photo opportunities… Aidan did a great job covering the ground, running up the early hills and enjoying the fact that the guides had taken seriously Justine’s comment that “he likes chocolate” when they put his snack pack together!
Tomorrow is another early start, as we head off to Fort William on the East Coast to catch the historic Jocobite steam train to Mallaig, near the southern tip of Skye. Sounds a lot like there could be more photos to come there too!
one thing that holidays are supposed to be, but often are not, is relaxing and rejuvenating. Today redressed that balance a bit, with nothing too dramatic happening. Lauren hitched a lift on a voyage to circumnavigate Loch Ness, while Justine and I did a lap up to Elgin to buy historically significant wool products and visit the magestic remains of the Elgin Cathedral.
From there we looped up to the north facing coast east of Inverness, travelling through a sequence of little coastal fishing towns which were quaint, but almost abandoned in their feel. It was slightly odd, but the impressive Bow Fiddle Rock Justified our efforts. On the way back we stopped at Balvanie Castle, a more modest ruin near Dufftown, but where we could climb to the second floor of the partially
eroded remaining building. I love those sorts of ruins, so it was great to find one we could walk around in.
In truth, much of today has been spent mentally and physically preparing for tomorrow, which is a 15km hike intending to summit the second highest peak in Great Britain. I’m thinking that the last 14.5km are likely to be the hardest, and I may have created a situation where I will lose face if I don’t gaily skip the last 100m to the summit, so it remains to be seen how much of a good idea this is. I guess if there are no updates after this, you can either draw your own conclusion, or just wait for the coroners report.
Anyway, in the meantime, here are some images from today and around the area. All things going well, there should be some good ones to follow!
Everything in one place 