Travel blog

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Thank you, Iceland.. You have been wonderful and have left us with many amazing and warm memories for life.

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After sliding through the hills and icy slopes we witnessed this beautiful sunset, which filled our heads with warm memories of Iceland and its’ nature..

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Well, I’m not a pro at skiing, but Kirill definitely won some time sliding down the hills and slopes like this. 

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Another option on how to come down from Mt. Esja in wintertime

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The slide.. Basically this is how you save time in winter coming down from Mt. Esja

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The fall... In order to save time and energy we started sliding down from Mt. Esja, but it’s well known that things don’t always go as planned...

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We made it as close to the top as we could, before the snow and ice started breaking under pur feet and we started sliding downwards. During the climb, we felt as if we were conquering the world and fighting the wind. Even though the mountain isn’t that high, it feels amazing to sit on the top and watch over the patch you’ve struggled through to get this far. And the view.. well it’s just magnificent. 

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We made it to point 5 on Mt. Esja. At first we thought that this would be our final stop, but the peak was just too tempting to not try and climb it.. 

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Our adventures on Mt. Esja continue.. I think you can actually manage this hiking trail in 4 hours, but we just couldn’t resist stopping and taking pictures of these surroundings..

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Tackling these snowy hiking roads..

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 will now post series of my abslutely favourite hike to Mt. Esja. It’s located just 20 minutes drive outside of Reykjavik and is one of the most visited hiking trails by locals. The mountain offers various hiking trails (some vary from 1 hour to 5 hours) and we chose the hardest path that was supposed to take about 5 hours. Even though we didn’t have any special gear on us, I’d say we managed pretty well. 

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So here we have the famous Reykjavik Harpa concert hall. I really recommend going inside, especially if you’re visiting Reykjavik on a cold and windy day as we did. They have a really cute suvenire shop with awesome books and music.  Following, is a really cute restaurant Tapas Barinn. We were searching for a place to try whale meat and even thoug there is  one place next to the harbour where you can get a huge whale steak, it’s often packed and if you’re hungry as we were I recommend visiting this cute restaurant. There you can order couple of small plates to taste the foods you want. We tasted foal, on the first picture; whale meat , on the second picture; lobster tails, on the third picture ; grilled prawns, on the fourth picture. To my astonishment the most delicious one of these four was foal meat, which was cooked tenderly and was full of flavour. The last pictures are of famous Icelandic hot-dogs, which were so-so-so good! You can see these little booths everywhere on the streets, so go and grab a hot dog and I’m sure it will be one of the best ones you’ve tasted in your life. 

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So one of the days in Reykjavik we walked around the town and looked inside shop windows, wandered around the cold streets and ate the traditional Thorri plate. All I can say is that I will never ever eat that kind of stuff again and I still get goosebumps when thinking about fermented shark or lamb testicles..

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After spending the night in Selfoss we started driving back towards Reykjavik. Before that we stopped in a small town where we wanted to find Smoky Valley (steamy hot river) but understood that with this weather it’s nearly impossible to walk the hiking trail towards the Smoky Valley. So instead we watched an exhibition on earthquake, stood between the two continents and walked another hiking trail in massive wind. There we saw how Icelandic people use geothermal energy for electricity and heat. The drive towards Reykjavik was extremely hard because of the wind, so when we finally arrived, we visited the Hallgrimskirkja in order to warm up and see this beautiful architecture. 

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I fell in love with this place. Even though it was a bit cold, even though it started getting dark and we had to run back to our car. The place was still so peaceful and extraordinary..

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When we arrived after a beautiful hike in between the mountains and snowy hills, there was no-one at the pool, which was just perfect. Being in the middle of the Iceland in some secrete pool, only two of us...

That little house is the place where you can quickly change your clothes and hop into the pool and swim towards the pipe with hot water splashing inside.

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