Travel: Iceland

Iceland is an incredible country. It has an amazing variety of landscapes, from lunar-landing scenes, to luscious rolling hills, to boiling lava pools, to fjords, to glaciers, to waterfalls, to lurid cool blue lagoons. You will not be able to spend enough time here to see it all. I only went for about 10 days and barely got started.

The lava flows are really interesting. This is Landmannalaugar, a huge, ancient lavaflow that is now solidified into this rocky mass right in the middle of a valley. There is a campground and some wonderful hot springs in the grassy marsh right at it's base. You can hike for days around the surrounding hills which have colors that vary from deep gray-green to tan, beige, black, etc. The hills are really quite beautiful from all of the minerals.

This is my friend Jeff Wishnie up at the top of Mt. Christian in the Southeast corner of Iceland (near Skaftafell). Yes, we climbed all the way up there in an afternoon, and it hurt afterwards.

This is the famous Blaa Lonith or Blue Lagoon. It looks the same color of an ice-blue snow cone, but it is steaming hot. It's actually the run-off lagoon from the geothermal powerplant right next to it and the water is supposed to be great for your skin due to the diotomacious earth in it. If you ever have a stop-over in Reykjavik for a few hours, take the bus here (it's about 15 minutes) and soak for an hour or so. It's very refreshing and will make your next flight a breeze.

This is the island of Grimsey. You can't tell from the photo, but the artic circle cuts right through it (roughly everything you see in the second photo). It's off the Northern coast and only a 30 minute ride from Akureyri (the second largest city).

Iceland has some huge, amazing waterfalls, but this is one in Skaftafell that was beautiful even though it was tiny by comparison ot the great Gullfoss, etc.

 

 

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