Iceland (2): Lava, Puffins and Sea Stacks

Route 1 West from Reykjavik

Iceland

The title of this post appears a tad enigmatic, but although the map below shows no road numbers, Route 1, the Hringvegur (ring road), which runs right round the island can be clearly seen. Our day’s journey of around 240km is shown in red. Nothing is marked at the end, because there was nothing - except the hotel where we intended to stay. The box in the bottom left corner informs us that large dots mark ‘cities over 6,000’, medium dots ‘other main cities’, small dots ‘other cities.’ The word ‘city’ here is being stretched to include villages, even hamlets, and the small number of named settlements on the map suggests there are not many people about.

Our day's journey in southern Iceland

Leaving Reykjavik

Overnight (18.00 to 09.00) parking in Reykjavik is free, so our one hour ticket timed 17.30 allowed us until half past 9 to breakfast, check out and trundle our cases up the road.

Leaving our hotel (last building on the right) in its oddly village like setting in central Reykjavik

Reykjavik is not a large city, but. two thirds of Iceland’s 370,000 citizens live either in Reykjavik or the surrounding area so finding our way out of the urban sprawl took a while.

Into the South Iceland Region

We reached Route 1, which acts as an eastern by-pass, and followed it through the last of the city and up onto the ridge separating Iceland’s Capital Region from its Southern Region. For 30km we drove through lichen covered lava fields.

Lichen covered lava fields outside Reykjavik

Hveragerði

Before the road descends into Hveragerði, there is a pull off so drivers can pause to gawp at the thermal vents surrounding the village.

Thermal vents near Hveragerði

With over 2,000 people Hvaragerði is a large place to have been missed off a map which shows so many tiddlers but it is famed as Iceland’s hothouse town - and I inadvertently captured one on the photo above. Iceland’s weather is too cool to grow many vegetables other than potatoes (and Icelanders seem strangely proud of their spuds) but veggies grow well in hothouses heated by the abundant thermal energy of this volcanically active spot.

Oddities in the Icelandic Alphabet

Hvaragerði comtains one of the two Icelandic characters which no longer exist in English. The eth (or, in Icelandic eð) written Ð, ð, is pronounced like the th in father and the thorn Þ, þ like the th in thick. English speakers failed to notice their language had both voiced and voiceless dental fricatives so the letters were used interchangeably from the 8th century until the printing press replaced both with th. Welsh, on the other hand, recognised the difference and printers replaced the thorn with th and the eth with dd.

Selfoss

10km on, the town of Selfoss sits round the eastern end of the Ölfusábrú, the bridge over the Ölfusá. Before 1891 there was no bridge and no town - as there was no reason anyone would ever visit this spot. Selfoss now with 5,000 inhabitants, is a centre of the dairy industry and the biggest town and administrative centre of the Southern Iceland District. The eccentric former world chess champion Bobby Fischer became an Icelandic citizen in 2005. He died in 2008 and is buried just outside Selfoss.

Hella and Beyond

Hella, 35km further east, has a population of 800 and is another ‘town’ built because of a bridge. In 1927 a store was built by the Ytri-Rangá bridge and that grew into a village servicing the local agricultural industry. The main crop is potatoes.

Beyond Hella the old sea cliffs run parallel to the coast, though volcanic activity now means they are 5km or more inland. Small settlements nestle in the shelter of the cliffs.

A small settlement beneath the former sea cliffs in the land of Njál's Saga

This land is the setting for the 13th century epic Njál’s Saga. The settlement of Hvolsvöllur was used as a refuge during the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull – for some weeks a curse for airlines, their passengers and newsreaders as well as the locals.

Further on the land opens up…

Heading east on Route 1 about 20km before Vik

….and some 10km before Vik we turned off onto a minor road down to the coast at Dyrhólaey.

Dyrhólaey

Now firmly attached to the mainland, Dyrhólaey was an island formed 80,000 years ago by a submarine explosion. The ocean has eroded the island’s outer edge into a steep cliff with a single rocky promontory, in which the waves have battered a hole. Dyrhólaey means door-hill-island, not the most imaginative name perhaps, but its accuracy can’t be faulted.

The Promontory that gives Dyrhólaey its name

Dyrhólaey does not give the best angle for photographing itself, there is a better shot to come.

Once you have convinced yourself you are not about to be blown off this windswept rock...

Lynne's approach to not being blown away is to hang on to something heavy, like me

....the main attraction is the countless resident seabirds. Fulmars are, I read, the most common…

A Fulmar (until somebody tells me different), Dyrhólaey

Fulmars and Puffins

….but who looks at fulmars when the place is alive with puffins.

Puffins (1), Dyrhólaey

Puffins are locally common in the UK, particularly on the appropriately rocky parts of the West Wales coast, but I had never before seen one in the flesh. In real life they are as cute and comical as they appear on film, but I like to think we are laughing with them not at them (not that a puffin could spot the difference).

Puffins (2), Dyrhólaey

They fly in from the sea either singly or in groups of twenty or more. Often, they fly towards the rocks, have a look, bank sharply and wheel away. Did they come to the wrong roost, or have they popped back to give their mates an update on the fishing situation? Perhaps they just enjoy the clever flying. Who knows?

Puffins (3), Dyrhólaey

Mýrdalsjökull

From the high ground beside the puffins, we had a good view inland to Mýrdalsjökull (Mire Dale Glacier). 16km away at its nearest point and covering 600Km², Mýrdalsjökull is Iceland’s 4th biggest glacial icecap and covers the active volcano Katla. Sixteen eruptions have been documented since 930, roughly one every 70 years, the last in 1918 extending the coast line by 5km. The next is overdue, particularly after the 2010 eruption of nearby Eyjafjallajökull.

Mýrdalsjökull

Iceland lives up to its name, but the coast is washed by the warm Gulf Stream. It cannot do much for the cool summers (average daily max 13°C) but it moderates the winters and even in January most days venture above freezing. 50m of snow may fall annually on Mýrdalsjökull at 1,500m, but down on the coastal plain snowfall is very modest.

Reynisfjara Beach from Dyrhólaey

The Eastern side of Dyrhólaey ‘island’ overlooks the black volcanic sands of Reynisfjara….

Reynisfjara Beach

…a beach which sweeps round to the next headland and its set of sea stacks known as The Trolls.

The Trolls, Reynisfjara Beach

There is no access to Reynisfjara Beach from Dyrhólaey. Behind the beach is a lagoon fed by streams of meltwater….

The lagoon behind Reynisfjara Beach

…and that melt water find its way to the sea by swirling round the base of Dyrhólaey, the channel guarded by a stack known as Arnardrangur

Arnardrangur on the tip of Reynisfjara beach

This being Iceland, the car park was small but well made and beside it was a clean public toilet. Lynne needed to use this facility, but we still had no Icelandic money. No matter, the toilet door, like the parking meter in Reykjavik, was equipped for cards and one tap granted access. This was when we realised our whole Iceland excursion could realistically be totally cashless.

Reynisfjara Beach

The far end of Reynisfjara Beach was 3km away, as the puffin flies, but to get there we drove back to Route 1 and returned south on the next minor road, a 20km trip.

Although the gritty, black volcanic sand is not studded with sun loungers and umbrellas, and the rip currents and ‘sneaker waves’ make swimming in the cold sea extremely dangerous, Reynisfjara frequently appears on lists of the ‘world’s finest beaches’.

Sun and sand is not everything, there is also the view…

Dyrhólaey from Reynisfjara Beach

…at both ends of the beach, though one of the trolls is hidden from this angle.

The Trolls, Reynisfjara Beach

Visitors are advised not to turn their backs on the sea, nor approach within 30m. ‘Sneaker waves’ can, apparently, come from the calmest of seas, knock over the unwary and the undertow will deliver them to the rip currents. It sounds unlikely, but tourists die on this beach – although none did last year, an unintended benefit of Covid restrictions. The people in the photo above were ignoring these rules, and also risked being cut-off by the tide.

Trolls do stupid things, too. A group used to go out to pull boats onto the rocks. They so enjoyed their work that one night they stayed too late, dawn broke and they were turned to stone, hence the stacks off the headland.

Hálsanefshellir Cave

Hálsanefshellir Cave is more safely positioned on the headland…

Hálsanefshellir Cave

…with a pleasing collection of basalt columns…

Basalt columns, Hálsanefshellir Cave, Reynisfjara Beach

…also has a folk tale to tell. In the words of the information board (slightly abridged)…

Once upon a time a man in Mýrdal was walking past Hálsanefshellir early one morning when he heard sounds of festivities and dancing from within the cave. Outside the cave lay many sealskins. He took one of the skins, brought it home and locked it in a chest. A few days later he returned to the cave to find a young and beautiful woman there. She was naked and crying desperately. This was the seal whose skin he had taken. He gave her clothes, comforted her and took her to his home. She got along with him, but would not take to others and would often sit and look at the sea. As time passed, the man married her. Their union was harmonious and several children were born to them. The man left the skin locked in his chest and took the key with him wherever he went.

Once, when many years had passed, he forget the key when he rowed out to sea. When he returned the chest was open and both the skin and the woman were gone. She had taken the key, opened the chest out of curiosity and found the skin. Unable to resist the temptation, she bade her children farewell, put on her skin and plunged into the sea. Before doing so she is said to have uttered the following:

Woe is me,
I have seven children in the sea
And seven on land.

The man was greatly distressed. For years after, when he went fishing, a seal would swim round his boat, tears seeming to run from its eyes. He was always lucky with his fishing and gave the seal coloured shells and fish.

Lynne on the basalt columns, Hálsanefshellir Cave, Reynisfjara Beach

Other legends have been played out on this shore. In Game of Thrones, the area round the cave was Eastgate-on-the-Wall, the very end of the great wall dividing the realms of men from the icy wilderness beyond. And in part 1 of ‘Universe’ (shown 27/10/2021, BBC2), Brian Cox delivered several chunks of his semi-poetic narrative while walking the beach with Dyrhólaey in the background.

Tucked into a corner above the beach, the Black Sands Café is remarkably unobtrusive for such a large building. It was doing good business but despite the numbers, our onion rings, halloumi and coffee were swiftly delivered. Icelandic coffee is good and strong and readily available anywhere people gather together.

Vik and Mýrdalssandur

Back on Route 1, we crossed Reynisfjall, the ridge that divides the relatively fertile south west from the Mýrdalssandur (Mire Dale Sands), the lava dessert formed by Katla’s regular eruptions.

We will stop in Vik on our return journey on Friday, so for the moment I will say only that Vik has 300 inhabitants, is the biggest settlement for 70km in any direction and, according to the Lonely Planet is the last haven before taking on the deadening horizons of Mýrdalssandur.

For us, though Mýrdalssandur was a novelty so we found it interesting, at least for a while. The good people of Iceland have even arranged a pull-off where you can climb a gantry and gaze your full at the lava fields.

Mýrdalssandur

Anyway, they are all over before you reach Kirkjubæjarklaustur, 75kilometres from Vik.

Kirkjubæjarklaustur

Kirkjubæjarklaustur (meaning ‘church farm cloister’) is a difficult word even for Icelanders so the village is usually known as ‘Klaustur’. It had 501 in habitants at the time of the 2011 census but being the population centre for a large area it feels bigger and more important. It is the largest settlement between Hella, 170km back round the ring road, and Hofn, 200km further east. Iceland’s interior, of course, is far less heavily populated!

There are things to see in Klaustur, and we made a start, but I will leave it all for tomorrow’s longer visit in the next post.

There and Back Again

The 25km on to our hotel returned us to earlier scenery, with inland cliffs and settlements nestled beneath them.

Route 1 west of Klaustur

At one point we found a line of cars pulled off the road and what appeared to be a camera club photographing a roadside stream. We would eventually pass this spot four times, and on each occasion, there were people snapping away at the stream and its little waterfalls. Given how many major falls Iceland has, it seemed odd that they we bothered with these.

Little roadside waterfalls, west of Klaustur

Architecture in Iceland is relentlessly functional. Our hotel, when we reached it, was a huge, forbidding barn of a place. Icelandic interior decoration, on the other hand, is both elegant and comfortable, once inside the lobby our expectations rose considerably.

I approached the desk, announced my name and said we had a reservation. The young woman smiled welcomingly, looked at her computer, then looked closer and then did some scrolling. I was not worried, this was not unusual, but then she started to frown and the more she scrolled the more she frowned. What follows may not be the exact words of our conversation, but they convey the gist.

‘I am sorry, I can find no record of your reservation.' I expressed surprise.

'Do you have a reference number?’ I showed her our booking reference.

She tapped the number into her computer, fiddled for a few seconds, then said ‘Your booking was for the 11th and 12th of July, today is the 11th of August.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘And tonight, we are fully booked.’

‘Oh,’ I said again.

We phoned our agents in Reykjavik. The call was answered swiftly, I explained the situation and a woman said she would 'check'. I could hear the anxiety in her voice as it slowly dawned on her that somebody, probably herself, had made an embarrassing error. I know that feeling and felt a twinge of sympathy. She said, ‘Have some coffee, at our expense, and I will phone you back in twenty minutes with a solution.’

Despite my sympathy it was a worrying wait. It was the end of a long day, I had already driven 250km, I knew there was nothing on the road between here and Klaustur, and doubted there was anywhere further on. I was tired and really did not want to drive another 50km in any direction.

She called back. She had found two hotels, she said, only a few hundred metres apart on a minor road near Klaustur, we would stay in one tonight, with dinner provided by her company, and in the other, the Magma Hotel tomorrow. ‘You will like the Magma Hotel,’ she said.

It was not a long drive back to Klaustur, but her parting words preyed on my mind. ‘You will like the Magma Hotel’. Did that mean we would not like tonight’s hotel?

We found it without difficulty. For me smart phones still have a feeling of magic – and in Iceland you can get a full signal in the remotest of places.

As I mentioned, Icelandic architecture is relentlessly functional...

Functional architecture

...but here the interior décor was more ‘student hall of residence’ than Scandi chic….

Hotel Interior

… and our room was pokey, to say the least.

Not the largest hotel bedroom

And the dinner, the only buffet dinner we met in Iceland? The less said about that the better, but there is always tomorrow and perhaps we really would like the Magma Hotel.

Iceland

Part 1 Introduction to Reykjavik
Part 2 West from Reykjavik along Route 1
Part 3 A Calving Glacier, a Basalt Pavement and an Otherworldly Canyon
Part 4 Vik, Skógafoss and Skógar
Part 5 The Golden Circle, Gullfoss, Geysir and Þingvellir
Part 6 The Snæfellsnes Peninsula: Whale Watching and Fermented Shark
Part 7: Covid Testing, Grindavik and the Blue Lagoon
Part 8: A Day in Reykjavik