Day 7: Sunday, August 20, 2006

The view out the window of Hotel Anna, as seen in the mirror of some of its antique furniture

We looked out the window as we were getting ready to leave, and saw hundreds of horses being herded past the farms.

Hotel Anna is on the bottom right. It wasn't even in a town, just a cluster of a few farms.

Right down the street we stopped at a waterfall that you can walk behind. Because it's along the Ring Road in a part of Iceland that tourists frequently pass through, there were quite a lot of people stopped here.

The falls are at the junction of a road that eventually turns into a jeep track and heads into Þórsmörk ("Thor's-forest"), which is the most remote and inaccessible part of Iceland. The only way to get there is to hike, go by horse, or drive one of these monster vehicles:

This is probably one of the strangest places we saw sheep:

Here are the ruins of an old farmhouse:

The next stop along the southern coast was Skogar, where saw Skogafoss.

There was a stairway up, so I climbed to the top. This is where a lot of people begin the hike into Þórsmörk.

Here's the town of Skogar.

Next we stopped at some cliffs that are one of the easiest places to see puffins.

This looked like a place where ships would have been tied, except that it was a few hundred feet off the ground, so I have no idea what it was, actually.

Here's another of Iceland's famous rock formations.

From here we could also look over this amazing lava beach, and more interesting rock formations off the coast.

We left the puffin cliff and headed for the lava beach, passing a couple more farms along the way.

Then we came to the beach, where we could look back at the cliffs where we saw the puffins.

On the left is one of the caves along the beach, with me standing in front of it (it was huge!) On the right is a recent-looking rockslide.

The rock fingers, and a person in front of the huge basalt cliff.

I wanted to stop at this church (pretty much identical to every small church in Iceland) to get some photos.

Liz waited in the car.

Then we came into Vík, which simply means "Bay", so it is sometimes called Vík ý Mýrdals, to distinguish in from every other vík in Iceland.

Vík is the last big stop before Skeišarįrsandur, a wasteland of glacial debris that went on more or less like this for roughly 100 km. This part of the Ring Road wasn't completed until the 1970s. Before then, the only way to get to the Western coast was to cross this by horseback, hiring a local farmer as a guide, or to go all the way around the entire country, and come in from the North!

Finally we arrived at Skaftafell, and made a stop at the Park visitor's center to get a glimpse of one of the glacial fingers up close, before getting a late dinner at the hotel. (Hótel Skaftafell was like the Econolodge but with a nice restaurant. It wasn't photoworthy. And, the beds weren't even pushed together!)

Here's where the glacier (jökull) used to be in 1904. I think I should send this photo to those few people who still don't believe global warming exists.

However, the glaciers were actually more receeded when the Vikings first settled in the 10th century. There is a family in Denmark that has the title from a medieval farmstead that now sits under a glacial finger. The Earth cooled off between the 1400s and the late 1700s enough for the glaciers to flow faster than they melted, so they moved forward several kilometers. Now they are melting faster than they flow, so they are receeding back quickly (50 meters per year).