An Unexpected Day of Adventure in Iceland

Thanks in part to a little inclement weather, a little hangover and a little blind luck, we found ourselves on our first full day in Iceland completely free of an itinerary or any real sense of direction. What followed was one of the most memorable days of my life, and it didn’t even start until noon…

Originally the plan was to drive from Reykjavík to Jökulsárlón in time for a 5:30 p.m. Zodiak tour to the glacier face, stopping for a quick hike along the way at Vatnajökull National Park. The boat ride in the ice lagoon would have been exciting, but keeping to that plan would have meant missing out on so much more. So how did my well thought out plan go so awry? Well to start, I received an email before dinner the previous night saying the boat tour would have to be postponed for the following day because excessive snowfall during the winter was causing more iceberg calving into the lagoon than usual and the boats couldn’t navigate safely. Knowing that we didn’t have an appointment to keep, we took the liberty of staying out a little later than planned after dinner that night. That paired with one dead phone and another that never connected to the wi-fi to update its time zone, and let’s just say we got a bit of a late start.

I was overcome with remorse, considering we had already lost one day on our already short trip. Always the optimist, Rufio reminded me we had 22 hours of sunlight. I scowled, hid my face behind sunglasses and slumped into the passenger seat as we merged on to the Ring Road. As far as I was concerned, the day was a total loss. That was until we happened upon our first of many foss, or waterfall, we would pass along the way. Seljalandsfoss tumbled downward so beautifully that we stopped on the side of the road to snap a photo. It was then that Rufio realized a small side road up ahead led directly to the fall, so with as much time to kill as we wished, we turned off. At this point I was still whimpering about our late start, but as soon as I stepped on to the path behind the fall and the icy spray hit my face I couldn’t help but smile and realize we were going to make the most of this long day.

Seljafoss from the Ring Road

Behind the falls

Seljafoss

Cold and hungry, we bought coffee and smoked lamb sandwiches at the adjacent food stall, which we enjoyed as we watched the Arctic terns dart across the face of the waterfall and perch on the cliff. We loaded back into the car and set off once again without a plan. Over the next twelve hours the story would repeat. Our next quick stop was Eyjafjallajokull, pronounced AY-yah-fyad-layer-kuh-tel, the volcano named for the family farm that sits at its base, made world-famous in 2010 when its eruption halted thousands of European flights.

Eyjafjallajokull

A short distance later we passed a sign that indicated Skogafoss was near. Proud of the language cues I was learning along the drive, I smartly stated, “There must be a waterfa..”. As we turned the corner the words failed to escape my mouth, I was too dumbfounded by the view. Much more impressive than Seljalandsfoss, Skogafoss roared over the cliff and into a river powerfully flowing through farmland, across the Ring Road and in to the first desolate sands of the Myrdalssandur.

Skogafoss

We were so enchanted by the waterfall that we briefly neglected the neighboring sandur. We parked the car near a small camper’s lodge and trudged up what seemed like 1,000 stairs to the top of the fall. This marked one end of Fimmvorduhals, a 25+ km trek between the glaciers of Eyjafjallajokull and Myrdalsjokull. We walked along the path for a few meters to see another series of small waterfalls. The sun was beginning to peak out here after a mostly overcast morning, so we snapped plenty of photos of the falls and the grazing sheep and Icelandic horses.

Once again we were back in the car, headed east. In what seemed no more than 20 km away from the brilliant waterfall, we were suddenly engulfed in a torrential downpour, and no longer able to ignore the barrenness of the sandur that swamped the landscape on either side of the Ring Road. A sandur, as we learned, is an outwashed plain formed by the meltwaters of a glacier. It is typically a vast, completely flat, and black with volcanic ash expanse that shelters no life. Rivers that flow through sandurs are vulnerable to flash-flooding during periods of intense rain. As it were, the rain was so steady and heavy that we could see little, except vast blackness, a heaving river and…a washed out Ring Road. Since it was the beginning of the tourist season, the transportation authority made sure passage across the sandur was possible, so they constructed a makeshift bridge out of what looked like 2×4 planks for drivers to ford the river, which was gushing below. I couldn’t contain my laughter as Rufio muttered a barrage of insults against this “entrance to Hell”.

Sandur

Ring “Road”

Despair

As quickly as the sandur netherworld engulfed us, it seemingly vanished, transformed now into fields of rolling hardened lava covered by reindeer moss and lichens. The rain slowly eased and we could even see the silhouette of the sun in the distance. Soon enough the landscape changed again to sheer cliffs to marvel at, each with tumbling waterfalls, and then verdant fields grazed by sheep. This change of scenery would happen often and abruptly, depending on locations and activity of volcanos, glaciers and other geothermal phenomena over the course of the millennia.

On the road to Hofn, we were taken aback yet again, as our eyes caught a glimpse of the glacier lagoon through a valley in the surrounding ash mounds. We slammed on the brakes. We climbed up the hills and we peered outward in utter amazement. The lagoon was eerily silent as its ice sculptures bobbed and floated slowly toward the ocean. I remembered that the boat operator mentioned launching near the bridge, so we moved up the road to an even more incredible location, where we could see both the majesty of the lagoon to the left, and the chaos of the churning sea to the right. We watched as the icebergs freed from the lagoon marched down toward the open waters in a slow parade. The black sand beach was a graveyard for some massive ice sculptures that were caught during the outgoing tides. We trekked back over to the lagoon side to look for boat operators, but even the less adventurous amphibious boat tours had closed their doors for the evening.

Jokulsarlon

Beached Iceberg

Jokulsarlon

The day grew late, so we rushed on to Hofn for a uniquely Icelandic meal before checking in to our guest house for the evening. Over midnight ice cream I thought back to my frustrated and angry musings earlier over our late start. The blank slate on the day gave us flexibility to explore at our own pace. Little did I know how much raw, powerful beauty and adventure Iceland had to offer…just from the side of the road.