Day 9: Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Here's a nice-weather picture of Svínafellsjökull, as we were leaving Skaftafell and preparing to drive all the way back across Southern Iceland to Hveragerði, just a short distance from Reykjavík.

We had a long distance to cover and we'd already come through here slowly before, so we didn't make many stops along the way. One notable stop was at Núpsstaður, a nice farmstead...

next to this enormous cliff, called Lómagnúpur.

Inside this door...

which was not very large...

was all this stuff! Most of the little seemingly ruined buildings had relatively modern equipment in them.

The church at this farm is popular enough a stopping place to be photographed and described in our guidebooks.

Here's the inside:

The next stop along the way was the Viking Saga Center. We read about the history of the settlement of Iceland and creation of the Sagas, and spent a lot of time reading the shortened version of Njal's Saga that was told along the museum walls. Vikings spent a lot of time farming, fighting...

and writing.

On the other side of the museum was a display of pharmacy and office equipment from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. None of the descriptions on this half were in English, so we passed through quickly.

There was also this fully functional, but currently unattended bar. I didn't take photos of the log tables and benches, covered in horse skins for seat covers.

The next three photos are best explained by the description below:

We stopped at a Pýlsur (hotdog) store for lunch. Though it was not a good meal at all, Liz had an interesting exchange with the shopkeeper:

Woman: "Are you British" [everyone thought we were British!]
Liz: "No, we're American, from near Boston."
Woman: "Oh, okay. My sister lives in Mashpee."
Liz: "No way! I grew up in Sandwich, the next town over!"

The woman didn't seem to think this was a very big coincidence. Since Iceland has only about 300,000 inhabitants, they're pretty accostomed to knowing someone who know someone... But wow, how strange!"

Finally we reached Hveragerði—famous for its geothermal power and greenhouses—where most of the produce grown in Iceland comes from. We stopped at the geothermal fields in town, and saw a bunch of hot springs.

This one was deep and narrow:

This one had archeabacteria growing in it:

Here are some interesting calcifications:

This one is called "The Garbage Spring" because the town used to dump garbage in it (I assume it was deeper). Then there was an earthquake, and the spring turned into a geyser, spewing hot garbage all over town. Now that's Karma!

Here's a banana plant, growing in a geothermally heated greenhouse.

And some of the interesting mineral rocks from around the area.

We hung around our guesthouse (Guesthouse Frost and Fire) for a while and enjoyed the geothermally heated hot tub and pool.

For dinner we decided to drive the 30 minutes into Reykjavík and return to the site of one the best meals of our trip: Tapas Barinn! This time we ordered just the right amount of food, and got the best of last time plus some new things. Delicious. One really strange thing though: we sat at the exact same booth as the last time, and I got the exact same menu!! I could tell because a particular page had a distinctive rip in the plastic cover. It brought the trip full-circle.