We woke up to a lot of rain. We went into the breakfast area and were shocked by how big it was. We then realized how large the hotel actually was, with way more rooms than we noticed the night before. (One thing about these guesthouses/hotels is that they cram in as many rooms as they can.) This breakfast was pretty decent and the only one to have scrambled eggs during the trip (in addition to the standard hard boiled at every place). But the pancakes (another specialty of this place) were terrible, among the chewiest I’ve ever had in my life. They were easy to avoid, however, as this place had among the best spreads of anywhere we stayed. (Though it was mostly the usual Icelandic hotel breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, meat and cheese, fruits and veggies, toast, and oatmeal.)
Skógafoss is only a few km down the road from where we stayed, we had seen it the night before as it’s hard to miss. (One of the many large waterfalls you can see from the Ring Road.)
We opted not to walk to the top because Jenn was feeling a little worn out from yesterday and it was raining off and on. We also figured it would not be “a short and easy” walk to the top and would likely take us an hour return or what have you, meaning that everything else would be delayed by that. By the way, this parking lot we didn’t half to pay and we thought it was because it was because the parking lot was in absolutely horrible shape. (They were working on improving it while we were there.)
As we headed down the road, we opted not go to Dyrhólaey, a promontory that overlooks the infamous Reynisfjara and has a rock like Percé Rock in Gaspé. There was very little visibility so we figured we wouldn’t be able to see much.
We also skipped over the famous plane wreck on the beach in the area because we heard it wasn’t much to look at and because it was something like an hour walk one-way.
So instead we headed directly for Reynisfjara, the most famous black beach in Iceland, a country of black beaches. It is also famous for its “sneaker waves.” A number of beaches in Iceland see tourists swept out to see – or nearly swept out to see – by waves they don’t see coming. This is well documented and, unlike most other risks in Iceland, there is ample warning.
We didn’t see anything quite like that but I saw two people almost get caught because they were just flagrantly ignoring all the obvious warning signs at the entrance to the beach. Apparently people vanish every year here and a few other beaches simply because they believe it couldn’t possibly happen to them.
The beach isn’t just famous for its colour – though, again, black beaches are everywhere – but also for its basalt columns a little reminiscent of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland apparently. (I’ve never been.)
It is apparently a place where you shoot models. There were these two women sitting on the beach covered in emergency blankets and we couldn’t figure out why. Then we saw the woman and way too many photographers in the cave.
As Jenn said, why are there so many photographers? How is this profitable if they all have the pictures?
Anyway, though it is beautiful I think Reynisfjara has to be the most overrated place we went to in Iceland. (We did not go to the Blue Lagoon or Golden Circle!) It is a black beach like numerous other black beaches in Iceland but there are so many people there! It has basalt columns but so do other parts of Iceland, including beaches! People drive for hours from Reykjavik, or join expensive tours, to come to this place and there’s an equally striking place in Snæfellsnes (as one example) which might actually be closer to Reykjavik! I’m not saying we’re unhappy we stopped. We enjoyed being there, laughing at the idiots who almost got caught by sneaker waves – fortunately nobody died so we could laugh – and watching this weird photo shoot. But the idea that this is one of the great scenic experiences in a country that is just drowning in great scenic experiences seems really weird to me. I suspect it’s just been photographed too many times. That and it’s relative proximity to Reykjavik make it as popular as it is.
When we first started the car at the hotel an alarm went off saying there was not enough air in our back right tire. So we headed back into Vík, the next town on the Ring Road from Reynisfjara, in order to fill up our tire. We fiddled around with the air machine and made it improve a bit but didn’t cause the alarm to turn off. I will say one nice thing about the air machines at gas stations in Iceland is half of them have directions in English. By the way, Vík also has a black beach, because most of the coast of Iceland is black beaches.
Leaving Vík put us into a new part of the country in terms of both scenery and popularity. If you only make it to Vík and don’t go east or north of there, you won’t really see much of the absolutely insane landscape that dominates the southeast of the country. But many tours do go farther due to the presence of Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in Europe. Still, it was noticeable when leaving Vík, even more than leaving Selfoss, that we were in less popular tourist territory.
We made our way through endless lava fields – this part of the country has a lot of volcanoes, including the one that disrupted all the air travel 14 years ago – and it was just really strange country. We stopped at Eldhraun to take a look but this is what the ground looked like for much of the drive in this part.
Really close by is one of the highlights of this part of the Ring Road, but which is insanely popular, Fjaðrárgljúfur, a canyon.
If you climb up to the to you get to see multiple waterfalls, one of which could be a really fun (and extremely dangerous) slide.
It was, along with Seljalandsfoss, probably the busiest place we went to on the trip. But unlike Reynisfjara you can really understand why. As with every other scenic place in Iceland, the pictures do not do it justice.
We then went to Kirkjubæjarklaustur for lunch, as it’s the only place, really, between Vík to Höfn that has amenities. (Well, that’s not entirely true. There are a bunch of hotel complexes with restaurants. But I bet those are expensive.) We paid something like $56 for two burgers with fries and drinks at a gas station. When I tell you food is expensive in Iceland, I mean it. That being said, my fish burger was good!
Some time after leaving Kirkjubæjarklaustur we entered Skeiðarársandur. As with many other parts of Iceland, I’m not sure I have any words for Skeiðarársandur. It’s an absolutely massive area of something like 1300 square km of black sand and gravel. On one side, in the distance, are the mountains and, eventually, Vatnajökull. On the other side is the sea, somewhere, but the Ring Road is inland at this point and it’s just this flat expanse of black. It was so empty we never stopped for a picture though now I am regretting it. It wouldn’t have done any good, as it would have failed to capture the enormity of Skeiðarársandur. Along with the Highlands on the tour, this is one of those times where Jenn and I felt like we were on another planet.
As you drive across Skeiðarársandur Vatnajökull looms bigger and bigger in your field of view, in some places just above the mountains and in others forcing its way down valleys so that it appears to touch the endless sea of sand and gravel. We stopped at Skaftafell, an old farm at the bottom of Vatnajökull, to see what there was to do in the area. The visitor centre was actually quite sparse, with a tiny museum about the farm and not much else. We learned that Svartifoss, the most famous waterfall in the area, was at least 5k return. Given that it was well into the middle of the afternoon and we had a long way to go to our destination we decided to skip it. (There would be more waterfalls, to put it mildly.) But what we really missed was the opportunity to drive right up to Vatnajökull. What I didn’t realize until that night was that there is a road here that lets you basically drive up to it and park next to it so you can step on it and say you did, if, like us, you didn’t purchase a tour to go on it. So that’s a regret.
But we missed that because both Jenn and I had our eyes on Jökulsárlón, farther down the road.
There are four lakes at the base of Vatnajökull. 1-3 of them are actually connected to the ocean and are lagoons. Fjallsárlón is the less famous one of the two most famous and the first one you come across. We thought about stopping but we couldn’t see it and it looked like maybe it was only accessible via private tour. (In retrospect, it’s very unlikely but we couldn’t really see any sign of the actual lake.)
So instead we moved on to Jökulsárlón which is basically impossible to miss because, well, you can see some of the glaciers from the Ring Road and there’s a big bridge at it. (Well, big for the ring road.) If the view from the bridge doesn’t get you to stop, nothing will.
I have never in my life been to a place like Jökulsárlón, where the largest glacier on an entire continent meets a small body of water and launches little icebergs into it. There were multiple times on this trip that I was at a loss for words but Jökulsárlón is probably the time at which I was the most in absolute awe of my surroundings.
But here is the crazy part: that bridge above is the Ring Road! This place is next to the highway! Aside from driving the 380km from Reykjavik to get here, you don’t have to do anything to access one of the most incredible natural sites I have ever seen. You literally just pull into one of the two parking lots, pay the parking and walk a tiny bit. When I said Reynisfjara is overrated I was thinking of it in relation to places like Jökulsárlón.
We parked in the overflow parking lot so we had to walk under the bridge, an extra 100 metres or so which was just such a hardship. You can walk around the lagoon, or you can pay lots of money to take an amphibious vehicle or a kayak tour. It was late in the day and the prices were high so we decided to walk though I think if we had more time we might have done the kayak tour.
If you walk a little bit you soon get out of the crowds and can be essentially alone on the shore. Sometimes the smaller icebergs are close enough to touch. Though some of the ice is dirty, as it comes from a glacier that is literally grinding the earth in its path, some of it is crystal clear, clearer than ice from your tap.
A channel connects Jökulsárlón to the sea and icebergs just float down in, feet from you.
And then some of them wash up on the beach at the mouth of the channel.
This is a real place that I visited last month. Not only is it real, it is insanely accessible. People pay thousands of dollars to get on boats to hope to see an iceberg, and in some cases they travel on those boats for days to get there. And in Iceland you just pull off the side of the highway.
We still had a long way to go so at some point we decided we had stared at the icebergs enough and we got back in our car and headed east. Before we did, however, we witnessed a car halfway across the bridge having to back up because the oncoming cars wouldn’t yield. On the Ring Road, many of the bridges are one-lane and you just have to get there first. Normally, in the most rural parts of the country, this is rarely a problem because you only run into a few cars. I had only had to backup once the entire trip, for example. But at a place like Jökulsárlón, which is as busy as it is, it’s really hard to understand why they still only have a one-lane bridge.
So we drove alongside the glacier for the next 80km and eventually arrived at our guesthouse for the night. Our hotel the previous night had been in some fairly spectacular scenery, sitting at the base of some cliffs. Nothing really prepared us for just how stunning the scenery was outside of Hofn, however.
I have stayed in a lot of pretty cool places. The scenery at this place was among the best I’ve ever stayed in. Maybe the best. Unfortunately, the guesthouse itself was probably the worst place we stayed on the entire trip.
We drove into Hofn (don’t try to pronounce it) and had dinner. Jenn had pizza and I had langoustine pasta, that was greasy but good. Hofn itself is in an absolutely spectacular setting and it is the hub for tours of Vatnajökull but it isn’t a very nice looking town despite the scenery.
As to our guesthouse, it was just outside of town but was the second most expensive night of our trip. The walls were paper-thin so Jenn felt like she couldn’t do her usual of listening to podcasts or watching YouTube videos without headphones. We got our own sink but not our own toilet or shower. There were 7 rooms at $300 per so they are making a lot of money. (Though obviously the cost of living is insane here.) Unlike nearly everywhere else we stayed in Iceland, we didn’t get breakfast, which I think is one reason Jenn feels like it was the worst place we stayed. It seems odd that they can’t provide breakfast for $300 a night. (If you think that’s bad, staying in Hofn would have cost more.) But everyone was very considerate and we didn’t have to worry about noise like we did later on in the trip. Jenn and I played cards in the common area before we went to bed and we saw how other people travelled slightly more cheaply, by eating dinner at the guesthouse (at 9PM). We both were willing to spend more money to not live like we’re in our 20s.