iceland, day 3 - june 27th, 2014
I woke up at 4:10 in the morning, and proceeded to talk to my friend on my phone until 5. I woke up my family, and after about three hours of sitting around we headed out to Hagkaup, to buy some lunch for later.
We then drove to our first stop, that being Seljalandsfoss. Before we got there, it was really foggy and you couldn't really see much of the landscape, to the point where my parents thought they were driving on the wrong road cause they didn't recognise it. By the time we got to Seljalandsfoss, it had cleared up somewhat but not completely, but to be honest it looked nothing like the pictures I had seen of it. For about ten seconds, I was convinced it wasn't even Seljalandsfoss. We parked and got out, and I walked behind the waterfall, taking pictures as I went. By the time I had gone around the waterfall, I was soaked and so was my camera. (oops...) So much for having my hair look nice for the rest of the day.
After Seljalandsfoss we continued on to Skógafoss, which was pretty recognisable from the road. The clouds were finally almost completely gone, but there was still a big fog cloud on the top of Skógafoss. There weren't too many people at the waterfall so my pictures looked pretty nice. After running around in the volcanic ash for a while and getting my shoes nice and dirty, I went up the cliff to the top of the waterfall. That was longer than I expected it to be, and by the time I got to the top, I was really wishing that I had brought water for the day. I then saw that there was a ladder that went over a fence towards the river, so naturally I climbed over it to explore. At this point I was literally inside the cloud that was resting on Skógafoss, and it gave the river and the landscape around it a quite surreal look. I went over a ridge and was surprised to find an entire new waterfall that I had never seen or heard of before, which was really exciting. Afterwards I climbed down the cliff and ate some lunch, despite the lack of water.
The next stop we planned to make was the abandoned navy plane on the south shore. Earlier we had stopped in Hella to obtain wifi, so that I could get the gps coordinates on a map. My gps on my phone was being kind of finicky, and by the time we stopped and my dad, younger sister, and I got off the road to walk towards what we hoped was the right direction, the location on my phone had mysteriously disappeared. I disregarded this potential issue, however, and continued to walk towards what I hoped would be the plane. After about 30 minutes of walking we ran into many clumps of grass (which had animal nests in them), and a stream that my dad deemed uncrossable. The birds started to get agitated, though at this point I still thought that they looked pretty friendly. I was wrong. As soon as we got near the stream (we could see the plane from this point), they started swooping down, making loud noises, and divebombing us. We ran for it. My sister started crying. After 10 minutes of running, we got too close to another nest and an angrier bird made me dive for the ground a couple times so that I wouldn't have my hair pecked out. After 20 more minutes we arrived safely at car.
My younger sister looked pretty done with trying to find the plane, but I was not defeated. Finding another path that cars seemed to be going on, we walked for a good 45 minutes (on the other side of the stream, away from the birds) to the plane. At the plane there were some nice people from Croatia who were also taking pictures of the plane, but they had arrived with a car. After five minutes, they left and I was there basically alone, taking as many pictures as I possibly could. After heading back and walking for half an hour or so, we saw the car with the Croatian people coming our way. They asked if we wanted a ride, so we hopped in and got back to our car safely. The entire thing was worth the trip.
We continued on to Vík, where we found the beach and church that I had seen so many pictures of. I got out and took a bunch of photos of the beach, and ran along the water, collecting rocks as I went.
We went home and then went out to dinner at Café Loki, a traditional Icelandic restaurant. The food was really good, and I had mashed fish, rye bread, some meat that I couldn't identify, dried fish, and fermented shark. The shark was better than I thought it would be.
I then went down to the pond and walked around Reykjavík for an hour, which concluded my extremely tiring but eventful day.
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