Our Trip Episode 8
Our trip took us around the north-east of the country, this is fairly open grazing country for sheep and horses mainly, goodness knows what they do with so many horses, they dam near out number the sheep. There are still plenty of crops grown and some of this area is only 3k’s south of the Arctic Circle. That imaginary line is just 2.5k’s north of the most northerly point in Iceland. There are a few tiny fishing villages, about 100 to 200 people at most usually. Small boat harbours with a few small fishing boats moored, a few houses scattered about, a fuel station, sometimes a small shop, a school and always a church, often on the highest point. I do wonder what all the people do for a living as there is only a few small fishing boats and most of those owners rent their quotas to the big companies. There never seems to be very much activity in these little places. Sometimes there’s a free camp site, something to encourage the passing tourist to stop and spend some time there.
Egilsstadir was the next major town we came too. It sits on the shore of Lagarfljot, a lake that is home to a monster, probably a relative of Nessy from Lock Ness. It has a population of around 1700 and seems to be the first stopping point for people who arrive in Iceland on the ferry from Europe. There was a crowd of new arrivals stocking up at the local supermarket when we arrived. The ferry port is Seyđisfjordur 30k’s to the east.
In this area we saw the forest; it covers 800 hectares and is something the locals are quite proud of in this tree starved country. Originally there were trees here but the early settlers used all of them for building houses or for firewood to cook and keep warm in this cold climate. So that now there is none of the old timber left. This forest here was the first attempt at re-aforrestation. The trees growing here are silver birch, Alaskan poplar and Siberian larch, and the native dwarf birch. There is a short trail to the first tree planted here in 1938, I think it is a larch tree and it’s supposed to be 20 m high, but I reckon that’s stretching it a bit, it has a name too, Guttormslundur.
There is another nice waterfall that we hiked up too. When we set out we thought it was not very far but turned out it took us about 1 hour to climb to. Worth the walk though: On the way we passed a couple of smaller water falls on the same stream as it tumbled down the escarpment into the lake at the bottom. The main falls at the top, Hengifoss, are quite pretty though there is not a lot of water going over them at present. The wind was blowing the water as it fell sometimes even sending it back up in a fine mist, or pushing it to one side or the other. When the water is very low over the falls it is possible to walk behind them where there is cavern the water has gouged out.
We drove on up the valley and saw the turf roofed house that is now a restaurant, it is built of stone and the mortar is painted white so that it looks really pretty. A small church with a beautifully carved oak door is just up the road. This door is only a copy of the original that is now in the national museum in Reykjavik. The carving is of Roman soldiers on horseback in biblical times.
We found that we could drive right up to the wall of the new dam. The dam is almost finished; it and two other smaller ones will supply water for a hydro-electric power station that is being built to provide electricity for an Alcoa Aluminium plant being built at Reyđarfjordur on the east coast. The water in the dam will back up to one of the glaciers on the Votnajokull ice field. I hadn’t really intended to come here but we had followed the map and ended up here. The lady in the tourist office had assured me that the route marked in yellow was all sealed, so we had been looking for a particular turnoff and hadn’t found it. When we did find the intersection we wanted the road was very rough, just a 4x4 road so we could not go that way but had to return the way we’d come.
We drove on round the fjords through a few small villages. In one we stopped to visit the house of a lady who has collected rocks all her life. Her house and her garden are full of them. They are lined up on benches outside all around the big garden, there are flowers and shrubs in the garden too, and it’s a lovely garden. Then inside every available space has shelves and cabinets full of thousands more specimens. Its mind boggling: Mostly they come from a very small area, just the peninsular on which she had lived all her life. There is an amazing variety of rocks, and the quantity is astounding. Many are jasper. Probably even more have crystal inside and some are agate. Some of those with crystal inside are amethyst too; they are a very pale mauve. Others, that are generally a dark green colour are an opal apparently, but nothing at all like our opal and not gem quality. Very little of what she found has been gem quality but some have been quite rare. It’s a vast range of specimens considering the small area from which they all come. The lady also worked at the local fish processing factory and started collecting shells. She used to get the fish innards and go through them and find some lovely shells. Some of the other locals used to assist her. One shell they found has never been found anywhere else so has been given a local name.
How she ever got some of them home I really don’t know, they must weigh an enormous amount. I know the story of one that she hid away so no-one else would find it until she could get some help to get it home but even that one was not all that large, some she must have had a horse or something to pull them home.
Her name is Petru, and she was born in 1922 in this remote area of Iceland. It is not remote now but in that time it was. There were no bridges over streams and they are too swift and cold to ford most of the time so she really didn’t venture further away than what she could walk. Sadly now she does not live in the house but in a nursing home as she has had two strokes. Her daughter and granddaughter look after the house and the tourists that visit, around 20,000 each year. She does come back most afternoons so that she can talk to the visitors, but not the day we visited.
In the broad alluvial plain known as Lon where the rivers coming down from the icefield have deposited their debris there are some big shallow lagoons with reeds growing around them. This area is the habitat of lots of birds, especially white swans. There are vast numbers of them and most have half grown cygnets at present. The cygnets are still grey in colour and often you see 4 cygnets with two adults, a family group I expect. A few did have much younger cygnets, very small dark ones. Eider ducks abound here too, and they seem to have plenty of little ducklings with them.
On the southeast coast we had the glaciers of the icefield in view all the time. Several of them are visible at any one time along the road. Below them there are farms and sheep grazing.
As a point of interest the average depth of the ice in the icefield is around 450m, the deepest is 950m. This is the 3rd largest icefield in the world after Antarctica and Greenland. The largest outside the Polar Regions: Through the middle of this icecap runs the Lakagagir fissure, 30 k’s long and one of the most active volcanic areas in the world. Grimvotn and Oræfi are two active volcanos under the ice
On the broad outwash gravel planes south west of Lon and Nes, there is no vegetation, this is the area that has suffered the glacial burst floods in recent years. They are called Jőkulhlaup in the local language. These floods are caused by a couple of things, the main one here being eruptions of volcanos under the ice. This causes a build up of water that is blocked from flowing out by ice, until it gets to a stage where the ice can no longer contain it then it bursts free and roars downs the valley taking with it everything in its path including big chunks of ice that have broken off from the glacier. One of the most devastating was on the 5th November 1996 after the eruption under Votnajokull (Vatna glacier) some 6 weeks earlier. This flood swept away much of the road and several bridges, a few farms and anything else in its path. The flow the bridges and levies were built to withstand was about 20 cubic metres per second, what they got was 50 cubic metres per second. At one point there is one of the twisted girders on display and other bits and pieces can be seen in the stream bed. Smaller glacial floods happen fairly frequently and do not cause much damage as they are expected.
Went into the national park that is on the south western end of the icefield: There is an information centre and some walks and a camp site: We camped there one night. It was here too that we took a guided trip up onto one of the glaciers. I had done such a walk many years ago in New Zealand and had experienced a great deal of difficulty as we had not been given crampons to wear, just special boots, and the ice there is extremely slippery, so I was a bit wary about doing another such trip, however, I was assured that crampons would be used so I decided to go. I was really glad that I did so too. Wearing crampons made it fairly easy to climb and going down wasn’t too bad either when I got used to walking with them on, we also had an ice axe each to use as a walking aid if we needed it. We spent about 2 hours on the ice after we had been given instructions on how to use the crampons and had done a little practice. The ice here was much more rough than I remember it being on Fox glacier in NZ. The glacier we climbed onto here is Svinafellsjokell.
The ice has a great many crevasse and mill wells. Mill wells are formed when water, melt water or rain water finds a depressions and gathers there. The water being warmer melts the ice and so the depression gets deeper, eventually it will be so deep that it will join a stream either through the ice or underneath the ice, these mill wells are quite round so easily distinguishable from crevasses that are all shapes and can have vertical cliffs. In someplace we would climb a slope and find ourselves on the very edge of a crevasse that dropped hundreds of feet. Don’t slip!
The ice is quite dirty and that is because of the frequent volcanic eruptions in Iceland. Each time there is an eruption it drops a layer of ash on the ice, as the ice moves down the valley and ruptures and cavorts then those layers get quite wavy and twisted and they can be seen quite clearly as lines in the ice. Also there is the rock material that the ice has carved out of the mountains on its sides or from beneath it. Some of these glaciers have carved out valleys that are now 300m below sea level, if the conditions are right when the ice melts then that valley will become another fjord. However, it is possible that the valley will fill with other debris and become an alluvial plain. The deepest of these valleys at 300m below sea level is just 15 k’s from Iceland’s highest mountain at something over 2000metres.
There is some ice captured in these glaciers that is more than a thousand years old. Like glaciers in most places they are receding at present quite fast, some as much as 100m per year, but they are still much more extensive than when the country was first settled in the 9th or 10 century, then the whole country was much warmer and the ice cap much smaller. It was from the 15th century to the 19th century when the icecap and the glaciers grew very large, it is referred to as the mini ice age: Prior to that the outwash gravel plain didn’t exist, it was all good farmland that has since been washed away and replaced with this gravel.
For ships this plain also causes problems, it is the same colour as the water and many ships have run aground on it especially in bad weather. Those seamen lucky enough to get off the ships safely usually perished in the quick sand of these plains. Now there is a series of lighthouses built at intervals along this coast.
In another place we took a trip on an old ‘duck’ into a lagoon full of icebergs from the glacier above it. These icebergs, some the size of a large building, and that’s only the 10% above the water that we can see take up to 7 years to melt down small enough to float off down the stream and into the sea. We saw seals lazing in the sun on the ice, a thing seals do really well, and just a couple swimming in the water. In summer the water is around 2C to 6C degrees and in winter about -5C. No iceberg carved off from the terminal face of the glacier while we watched from around 150m distance, the terminal here being some 30m high. Because the glaciers are melting fast this lake which only started to form around 1930 now covers 15 sq kilometres.
It seems that in the time of the first settlers, and I now have two different dates for this so take your pick, one is around 834, the other 930, and somewhere else I read that when the first Norse came here there were already some Irish Monks living on a small island just off the southeast coast. In those early times the climate was warm enough to grow corn and mostly cows and pigs were kept, now there are still cows but its mainly sheep and horses, and I haven’t seen any pigs at all. Have only seen a couple of crops of wheat and/or barley, mostly it is other pasture, some oats, and these crops are cut and made into silage.
Around the coast we have seen a lot of driftwood, often in the form of cut logs. As there are no forests that can be logged in Iceland we wondered where this wood came from and finally we found out. It comes from two totally different sources, one is northern Russia and Siberia, it comes on the current that comes from there, the other is the Caribbean and is brought by the gulf stream and offshoots of that stream. Some beaches are littered with this wood and no-one bothers to collect it or use it for anything so it seems. It can be hundreds of years old.
At the southern most point of the Island near the little town of Vik there are some sea stacks just off shore. On shore there is a large cave surrounded by basalt columns, some are perpendicular and others are at all odd angles. The beach here is made up of pebbles, lovely smooth ones that have been tumbled trillions of times by the roaring surf. They are quite large pebbles high up the beach and they gradually get smaller the lower down you go, but at no time above the water line do they become small enough to call sand. They are mostly black but there are just a few that are red and some even lighter. Many of them are aa type lava, you can clearly see the aerated holes in them others are possibly basalt. The aa lava is quite light being full of holes. The sea stacks are outcrops of lava that have resisted the erosion effect of the sea. One has a lovely arch in it.
A visit to Iceland must of course, include a visit to Geyser, the home of the geysers. The one here is the one that has given its name to all other similar geological phenomena. It sits in a small area of geothermal activity, however the one named Geyser is not the most reliable of geysers. There is another one here, Strokur, that spouts every few minutes, about 5 or 6 mins apart although it does seem to do its own thing and while we watched it spouted twice in the space of about 2 minutes then a 3rd time, and bigger, a minute of so later, then it didn’t spout again for at least 10 mins. Little Geyser doesn’t really spout steam, it just gently steams away all the time. There are a number of other little and big vents within a small area here but they bubble away on a continuous basis. The sulphur smell is not particularly strong. We camped the night here and during the evening while sitting in the car eating our tea we saw that Geyser had gone off with a great spout of steam, it was about 9pm but still daylight. Our camp here was about the coldest we had, in the morning there was frost on the ground and ice on both the inside and outside of the tent fly sheet.
Just a short distance from Geyser is the big waterfall of Gullfoss (golden falls). These are another magnificent waterfalls. In two stages the falls drop the first of 11 metres then a further 21 metres. Already in a shallow gorge the river descends over a series of small rapids before the first waterfall of 11 metres. This fall runs along the stream for about 100metres. Then 30 metres after that it falls another 21 metres into a narrow chasm with one end of the falls being right in the inside bend of the river. Looking down from above the river changes direction 90 degrees creating the narrow chasm; it is quite spectacular: Being a sunny day we could see a rainbow in the spray.
A better rainbow though, was to be seen in Skogarfoss. This is a magnificent waterfall of a single drop of around 62 metres. Like long silver flowing hair it falls over the escarpment and the wind catches it and blows it into a fine mist. The brilliant sunshine was in just the right angle to create a beautiful double rainbow.
Of course we had to visit the famous Blue Lagoon. The lagoon was really created through an environmental blunder. It was thought the water waste from the geothermal power station would just soak into the porous lava, but it didn’t quite happen that way. The water has such a high mineral content that it clogged up the lava and so created a lagoon of milky blue water. The bottom and the edges has an accumulation of a white mineral substance. When people started bathing in this pool they claimed that it cured all sorts of ailments so it became a very popular thing to go. Now they have built a new lagoon with flash facilities and a charge to suit, the equivalent of $36AUD just for a swim. We looked but didn’t go in. Instead we went back to the nearby town of Grindavik and paid just $6 each for a swim in the local pool, temp 28C with 2 hot tubs, one with a spa and also a small water slide that was great fun. We then camped in the local free camping area overnight.
The next day we drove around the rest of peninsular. We came across another geothermal power station and crossed some old lava flows, one 2000 years old and another one over the top less then 700 years old. We returned the car to the hire company office and wandered about Reykjavik for a couple of hours. It was raining again although it only started after we returned the car. It had been tipping down with rain when we arrived and it was again doing so when we left, we had been quite lucky to have such a lovely mostly dry spell in between. So ended out trip to Iceland: We boarded the Polar Pioneer around 5pm to begin our cruise to Greenland and Svalbard:
Finally just a couple of things that I recently learnt: There are 36 letters in the Icelandic language, some of them are old runic signs, like the đ and Þ. It is the Old Norse language that was spoken in most of Scandinavia and in parts of England. In the other places the language evolved into several different languages but Iceland has retained the same old language. When it comes to names its quite different to what we are used to as well: A boy child with have his father’s first name and add son to the end of it and use that as his last name, eg. Jon has a son named Peter, therefore Peters name is Peter Jonson. If Jon has a daughter named Christine then her name is Christine Jon(plus the local word for daughter that I have not been able to find out). Jon’s wife will keep the name she was given at birth, with the result that a family of 4 can have 4 quite different names. When speaking to anyone only first manes are used except in the case of speaking to a Judge or the President of Iceland. In a phone directory or similar alphabetically listed directory everyone is listed by their first name. I will try and find out what the Icelandic word for daughter is sometime and let you know. We are now on the Polar Pioneer so can’t look it up on the internet for you.
© Lynette Regan 29th August 2007
Our trip took us around the north-east of the country, this is fairly open grazing country for sheep and horses mainly, goodness knows what they do with so many horses, they dam near out number the sheep. There are still plenty of crops grown and some of this area is only 3k’s south of the Arctic Circle. That imaginary line is just 2.5k’s north of the most northerly point in Iceland. There are a few tiny fishing villages, about 100 to 200 people at most usually. Small boat harbours with a few small fishing boats moored, a few houses scattered about, a fuel station, sometimes a small shop, a school and always a church, often on the highest point. I do wonder what all the people do for a living as there is only a few small fishing boats and most of those owners rent their quotas to the big companies. There never seems to be very much activity in these little places. Sometimes there’s a free camp site, something to encourage the passing tourist to stop and spend some time there.
Egilsstadir was the next major town we came too. It sits on the shore of Lagarfljot, a lake that is home to a monster, probably a relative of Nessy from Lock Ness. It has a population of around 1700 and seems to be the first stopping point for people who arrive in Iceland on the ferry from Europe. There was a crowd of new arrivals stocking up at the local supermarket when we arrived. The ferry port is Seyđisfjordur 30k’s to the east.
In this area we saw the forest; it covers 800 hectares and is something the locals are quite proud of in this tree starved country. Originally there were trees here but the early settlers used all of them for building houses or for firewood to cook and keep warm in this cold climate. So that now there is none of the old timber left. This forest here was the first attempt at re-aforrestation. The trees growing here are silver birch, Alaskan poplar and Siberian larch, and the native dwarf birch. There is a short trail to the first tree planted here in 1938, I think it is a larch tree and it’s supposed to be 20 m high, but I reckon that’s stretching it a bit, it has a name too, Guttormslundur.
There is another nice waterfall that we hiked up too. When we set out we thought it was not very far but turned out it took us about 1 hour to climb to. Worth the walk though: On the way we passed a couple of smaller water falls on the same stream as it tumbled down the escarpment into the lake at the bottom. The main falls at the top, Hengifoss, are quite pretty though there is not a lot of water going over them at present. The wind was blowing the water as it fell sometimes even sending it back up in a fine mist, or pushing it to one side or the other. When the water is very low over the falls it is possible to walk behind them where there is cavern the water has gouged out.
We drove on up the valley and saw the turf roofed house that is now a restaurant, it is built of stone and the mortar is painted white so that it looks really pretty. A small church with a beautifully carved oak door is just up the road. This door is only a copy of the original that is now in the national museum in Reykjavik. The carving is of Roman soldiers on horseback in biblical times.
We found that we could drive right up to the wall of the new dam. The dam is almost finished; it and two other smaller ones will supply water for a hydro-electric power station that is being built to provide electricity for an Alcoa Aluminium plant being built at Reyđarfjordur on the east coast. The water in the dam will back up to one of the glaciers on the Votnajokull ice field. I hadn’t really intended to come here but we had followed the map and ended up here. The lady in the tourist office had assured me that the route marked in yellow was all sealed, so we had been looking for a particular turnoff and hadn’t found it. When we did find the intersection we wanted the road was very rough, just a 4x4 road so we could not go that way but had to return the way we’d come.
We drove on round the fjords through a few small villages. In one we stopped to visit the house of a lady who has collected rocks all her life. Her house and her garden are full of them. They are lined up on benches outside all around the big garden, there are flowers and shrubs in the garden too, and it’s a lovely garden. Then inside every available space has shelves and cabinets full of thousands more specimens. Its mind boggling: Mostly they come from a very small area, just the peninsular on which she had lived all her life. There is an amazing variety of rocks, and the quantity is astounding. Many are jasper. Probably even more have crystal inside and some are agate. Some of those with crystal inside are amethyst too; they are a very pale mauve. Others, that are generally a dark green colour are an opal apparently, but nothing at all like our opal and not gem quality. Very little of what she found has been gem quality but some have been quite rare. It’s a vast range of specimens considering the small area from which they all come. The lady also worked at the local fish processing factory and started collecting shells. She used to get the fish innards and go through them and find some lovely shells. Some of the other locals used to assist her. One shell they found has never been found anywhere else so has been given a local name.
How she ever got some of them home I really don’t know, they must weigh an enormous amount. I know the story of one that she hid away so no-one else would find it until she could get some help to get it home but even that one was not all that large, some she must have had a horse or something to pull them home.
Her name is Petru, and she was born in 1922 in this remote area of Iceland. It is not remote now but in that time it was. There were no bridges over streams and they are too swift and cold to ford most of the time so she really didn’t venture further away than what she could walk. Sadly now she does not live in the house but in a nursing home as she has had two strokes. Her daughter and granddaughter look after the house and the tourists that visit, around 20,000 each year. She does come back most afternoons so that she can talk to the visitors, but not the day we visited.
In the broad alluvial plain known as Lon where the rivers coming down from the icefield have deposited their debris there are some big shallow lagoons with reeds growing around them. This area is the habitat of lots of birds, especially white swans. There are vast numbers of them and most have half grown cygnets at present. The cygnets are still grey in colour and often you see 4 cygnets with two adults, a family group I expect. A few did have much younger cygnets, very small dark ones. Eider ducks abound here too, and they seem to have plenty of little ducklings with them.
On the southeast coast we had the glaciers of the icefield in view all the time. Several of them are visible at any one time along the road. Below them there are farms and sheep grazing.
As a point of interest the average depth of the ice in the icefield is around 450m, the deepest is 950m. This is the 3rd largest icefield in the world after Antarctica and Greenland. The largest outside the Polar Regions: Through the middle of this icecap runs the Lakagagir fissure, 30 k’s long and one of the most active volcanic areas in the world. Grimvotn and Oræfi are two active volcanos under the ice
On the broad outwash gravel planes south west of Lon and Nes, there is no vegetation, this is the area that has suffered the glacial burst floods in recent years. They are called Jőkulhlaup in the local language. These floods are caused by a couple of things, the main one here being eruptions of volcanos under the ice. This causes a build up of water that is blocked from flowing out by ice, until it gets to a stage where the ice can no longer contain it then it bursts free and roars downs the valley taking with it everything in its path including big chunks of ice that have broken off from the glacier. One of the most devastating was on the 5th November 1996 after the eruption under Votnajokull (Vatna glacier) some 6 weeks earlier. This flood swept away much of the road and several bridges, a few farms and anything else in its path. The flow the bridges and levies were built to withstand was about 20 cubic metres per second, what they got was 50 cubic metres per second. At one point there is one of the twisted girders on display and other bits and pieces can be seen in the stream bed. Smaller glacial floods happen fairly frequently and do not cause much damage as they are expected.
Went into the national park that is on the south western end of the icefield: There is an information centre and some walks and a camp site: We camped there one night. It was here too that we took a guided trip up onto one of the glaciers. I had done such a walk many years ago in New Zealand and had experienced a great deal of difficulty as we had not been given crampons to wear, just special boots, and the ice there is extremely slippery, so I was a bit wary about doing another such trip, however, I was assured that crampons would be used so I decided to go. I was really glad that I did so too. Wearing crampons made it fairly easy to climb and going down wasn’t too bad either when I got used to walking with them on, we also had an ice axe each to use as a walking aid if we needed it. We spent about 2 hours on the ice after we had been given instructions on how to use the crampons and had done a little practice. The ice here was much more rough than I remember it being on Fox glacier in NZ. The glacier we climbed onto here is Svinafellsjokell.
The ice has a great many crevasse and mill wells. Mill wells are formed when water, melt water or rain water finds a depressions and gathers there. The water being warmer melts the ice and so the depression gets deeper, eventually it will be so deep that it will join a stream either through the ice or underneath the ice, these mill wells are quite round so easily distinguishable from crevasses that are all shapes and can have vertical cliffs. In someplace we would climb a slope and find ourselves on the very edge of a crevasse that dropped hundreds of feet. Don’t slip!
The ice is quite dirty and that is because of the frequent volcanic eruptions in Iceland. Each time there is an eruption it drops a layer of ash on the ice, as the ice moves down the valley and ruptures and cavorts then those layers get quite wavy and twisted and they can be seen quite clearly as lines in the ice. Also there is the rock material that the ice has carved out of the mountains on its sides or from beneath it. Some of these glaciers have carved out valleys that are now 300m below sea level, if the conditions are right when the ice melts then that valley will become another fjord. However, it is possible that the valley will fill with other debris and become an alluvial plain. The deepest of these valleys at 300m below sea level is just 15 k’s from Iceland’s highest mountain at something over 2000metres.
There is some ice captured in these glaciers that is more than a thousand years old. Like glaciers in most places they are receding at present quite fast, some as much as 100m per year, but they are still much more extensive than when the country was first settled in the 9th or 10 century, then the whole country was much warmer and the ice cap much smaller. It was from the 15th century to the 19th century when the icecap and the glaciers grew very large, it is referred to as the mini ice age: Prior to that the outwash gravel plain didn’t exist, it was all good farmland that has since been washed away and replaced with this gravel.
For ships this plain also causes problems, it is the same colour as the water and many ships have run aground on it especially in bad weather. Those seamen lucky enough to get off the ships safely usually perished in the quick sand of these plains. Now there is a series of lighthouses built at intervals along this coast.
In another place we took a trip on an old ‘duck’ into a lagoon full of icebergs from the glacier above it. These icebergs, some the size of a large building, and that’s only the 10% above the water that we can see take up to 7 years to melt down small enough to float off down the stream and into the sea. We saw seals lazing in the sun on the ice, a thing seals do really well, and just a couple swimming in the water. In summer the water is around 2C to 6C degrees and in winter about -5C. No iceberg carved off from the terminal face of the glacier while we watched from around 150m distance, the terminal here being some 30m high. Because the glaciers are melting fast this lake which only started to form around 1930 now covers 15 sq kilometres.
It seems that in the time of the first settlers, and I now have two different dates for this so take your pick, one is around 834, the other 930, and somewhere else I read that when the first Norse came here there were already some Irish Monks living on a small island just off the southeast coast. In those early times the climate was warm enough to grow corn and mostly cows and pigs were kept, now there are still cows but its mainly sheep and horses, and I haven’t seen any pigs at all. Have only seen a couple of crops of wheat and/or barley, mostly it is other pasture, some oats, and these crops are cut and made into silage.
Around the coast we have seen a lot of driftwood, often in the form of cut logs. As there are no forests that can be logged in Iceland we wondered where this wood came from and finally we found out. It comes from two totally different sources, one is northern Russia and Siberia, it comes on the current that comes from there, the other is the Caribbean and is brought by the gulf stream and offshoots of that stream. Some beaches are littered with this wood and no-one bothers to collect it or use it for anything so it seems. It can be hundreds of years old.
At the southern most point of the Island near the little town of Vik there are some sea stacks just off shore. On shore there is a large cave surrounded by basalt columns, some are perpendicular and others are at all odd angles. The beach here is made up of pebbles, lovely smooth ones that have been tumbled trillions of times by the roaring surf. They are quite large pebbles high up the beach and they gradually get smaller the lower down you go, but at no time above the water line do they become small enough to call sand. They are mostly black but there are just a few that are red and some even lighter. Many of them are aa type lava, you can clearly see the aerated holes in them others are possibly basalt. The aa lava is quite light being full of holes. The sea stacks are outcrops of lava that have resisted the erosion effect of the sea. One has a lovely arch in it.
A visit to Iceland must of course, include a visit to Geyser, the home of the geysers. The one here is the one that has given its name to all other similar geological phenomena. It sits in a small area of geothermal activity, however the one named Geyser is not the most reliable of geysers. There is another one here, Strokur, that spouts every few minutes, about 5 or 6 mins apart although it does seem to do its own thing and while we watched it spouted twice in the space of about 2 minutes then a 3rd time, and bigger, a minute of so later, then it didn’t spout again for at least 10 mins. Little Geyser doesn’t really spout steam, it just gently steams away all the time. There are a number of other little and big vents within a small area here but they bubble away on a continuous basis. The sulphur smell is not particularly strong. We camped the night here and during the evening while sitting in the car eating our tea we saw that Geyser had gone off with a great spout of steam, it was about 9pm but still daylight. Our camp here was about the coldest we had, in the morning there was frost on the ground and ice on both the inside and outside of the tent fly sheet.
Just a short distance from Geyser is the big waterfall of Gullfoss (golden falls). These are another magnificent waterfalls. In two stages the falls drop the first of 11 metres then a further 21 metres. Already in a shallow gorge the river descends over a series of small rapids before the first waterfall of 11 metres. This fall runs along the stream for about 100metres. Then 30 metres after that it falls another 21 metres into a narrow chasm with one end of the falls being right in the inside bend of the river. Looking down from above the river changes direction 90 degrees creating the narrow chasm; it is quite spectacular: Being a sunny day we could see a rainbow in the spray.
A better rainbow though, was to be seen in Skogarfoss. This is a magnificent waterfall of a single drop of around 62 metres. Like long silver flowing hair it falls over the escarpment and the wind catches it and blows it into a fine mist. The brilliant sunshine was in just the right angle to create a beautiful double rainbow.
Of course we had to visit the famous Blue Lagoon. The lagoon was really created through an environmental blunder. It was thought the water waste from the geothermal power station would just soak into the porous lava, but it didn’t quite happen that way. The water has such a high mineral content that it clogged up the lava and so created a lagoon of milky blue water. The bottom and the edges has an accumulation of a white mineral substance. When people started bathing in this pool they claimed that it cured all sorts of ailments so it became a very popular thing to go. Now they have built a new lagoon with flash facilities and a charge to suit, the equivalent of $36AUD just for a swim. We looked but didn’t go in. Instead we went back to the nearby town of Grindavik and paid just $6 each for a swim in the local pool, temp 28C with 2 hot tubs, one with a spa and also a small water slide that was great fun. We then camped in the local free camping area overnight.
The next day we drove around the rest of peninsular. We came across another geothermal power station and crossed some old lava flows, one 2000 years old and another one over the top less then 700 years old. We returned the car to the hire company office and wandered about Reykjavik for a couple of hours. It was raining again although it only started after we returned the car. It had been tipping down with rain when we arrived and it was again doing so when we left, we had been quite lucky to have such a lovely mostly dry spell in between. So ended out trip to Iceland: We boarded the Polar Pioneer around 5pm to begin our cruise to Greenland and Svalbard:
Finally just a couple of things that I recently learnt: There are 36 letters in the Icelandic language, some of them are old runic signs, like the đ and Þ. It is the Old Norse language that was spoken in most of Scandinavia and in parts of England. In the other places the language evolved into several different languages but Iceland has retained the same old language. When it comes to names its quite different to what we are used to as well: A boy child with have his father’s first name and add son to the end of it and use that as his last name, eg. Jon has a son named Peter, therefore Peters name is Peter Jonson. If Jon has a daughter named Christine then her name is Christine Jon(plus the local word for daughter that I have not been able to find out). Jon’s wife will keep the name she was given at birth, with the result that a family of 4 can have 4 quite different names. When speaking to anyone only first manes are used except in the case of speaking to a Judge or the President of Iceland. In a phone directory or similar alphabetically listed directory everyone is listed by their first name. I will try and find out what the Icelandic word for daughter is sometime and let you know. We are now on the Polar Pioneer so can’t look it up on the internet for you.
© Lynette Regan 29th August 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment