Day 3: Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Here's the church in the morning, as we were waiting for a ride to pick us up and take us to get our rental car.

After a long wait at the car rental office, we got a vehicle and headed out of the city, passing a hydrogen fueling station along the way! Iceland has a goal of converting the entire country to a hydrogen car fleet. So far Reykjavík has three hydrogen fuel cell buses.

After leaving town, we headed toward Snæfellsnes, which literally means "snow-mountain-penninsula" in Icelandic. Most of the places in Iceland are named according to the geography there, which was pretty handy as we learned more and more geographical terms. Reykjavík, for example, is "smoky-bay". This is the Ring Road, route 1, which is the main road in Iceland, and loops all the way around the country.

Here's a photo of the city from from afar.

Notice the church sticking WAY out above everything else.

Here's a typical Icelandic scene:

It's a hay-baler.

We crossed Hvalfjörður ("whale-fjord") through this 5.7 km tunnel, with a Isk. 1,000 toll ($14). All that distance underwater, and lo and behold no falling ceiling tiles.

Here's the fjord we crossed. Yipes!

At this point we thought it might be a nice idea to drive all the way to the head of the fjord (effectively defeating the purpose of taking the tunnel) to check out Iceland's highest waterfall, Glymur. Here's a view of the fjord.

And the road we came along

And Liz

The guidebook said Glymur was an hour walk from the parking lot, so we thought it wouldn't be a big deal. The most obviously marked trail appeared to go off in the wrong direction, so we followed a different one for a while, which went into a grove of Icelandic "trees" (Iceland's trees are really more like big shrubs, never really more than 2 or 3 meters tall).

Here's the view looking out toward the fjord and back out to sea.

Beacause we were disoriented, hungry, and didn't have much water, we temporarily gave up on Glymur and decided to come back to see more of this later (we realized that we'd be here again in a few days, staying just down the road).

The next town we came to was Borgarnes, a "large" town with a population of 1,770 people. We thought about stopping for lunch, but before we knew it, within a few seconds, we'd passed through the entire town! We decided not to take the time to turn back; little did we realize the next food was over an hour drive away!

A little picnic area

More typical Icelandic landscape

A tiny farm in the distance

Most of the farms were baling hay the entire time we were there.

By now we were on Snæfellsnes, and making our way west to the tip. Somewhere near here we found a gas station grill to eat lunch at.

In the summertime, the sheep are left to roam free. There are fences along most of the road to keep them from getting run over, but inevitably plenty of them find their way into the roads. Every day we had to slow down and honk numerous times.

Here's some centuries-old lava from the now-extinct volcano under Snæfellsjökull, the small glacier at the tip of Snæfellsnes (which is the starting point for Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth).

Finally, we came to Hellnar, a village with a year-round population of... wait for it... eight, where we were to stay for the next two nights. Here's a nice view of Snæfellsjökull.

I really loved Hótel Hellnar. It's certified by Green Globe 21, which certifies sustainable and environmentally friendly travel-related businesses. The hotel was really comfortable, clean, and peaceful, with a great restaurant. For dinner we ate plokkfish—one of the two really good Icelandic meals of the entire trip—here at the hotel. It was a white fish mixed with potatoes and cheese, and then baked. There were some inspirational cards "from the heart of the glacier" on our pillows; they read "I have a WONDERFUL partner in my life" and "I open my HEART and welcome LOVE into my life" (the capitalization is not mine). As a free souveneir, they left us an entire deck of 52 of these cards.

These next two photos are some of the view from our room!

And this is the driveway to the hotel. Wow.

On the advice of the woman at the front desk, we spent the couple hours before dinner taking a walk along the cliffs, through the lava fields, to Arnarstapi, the next town over. It was about one of the most relaxing and beautiful walks I've taken in my life.

Here's the view back toward Hellnar from the edge of the lava field.

Near the coast there are all sorts of crazy rock formations.

I dropped a rock off the cliff and listened for it... the stone took 4 seconds to hit the ground, so the cliffs are about 80 m, or 260 feet!

Liz was sitting down while she took this photo, thankfully.

This river came all the way from the glacier, and then off the cliff into the ocean.

We'll come back to this later...

First we went to look at the horses. Liz was determined to do a horse trek on the trip, and the woman at the hotel desk also offered to call a local farm and arrange one for us the next day.

Okay, so back to the weird stone structure.

Apparently it was a monument to a famous figure from the Icelandic Sagas. This character is the guardian spirit of the penninsula, I guess.

Liz's photographic talent is macro shots of flowers. These came out quite nicely.

Here's the whole town of Hellnar. Hótel Hellnar is the brownish building near the center

At the foot of the lava flow was a statue of Mary. Apparantly someone had a vision here and people are encouraged to drink the water and make a wish. Most Icelandic water is very good to drink, but this particular pool looked a little stagnant. Still, we drank a few sips from where it flowed through and came back out of some rocks (somewhat filtered?). It tasted better than the water out of my tap at home, and we didn't get sick at all.