For previous entries on this adventure see:

• Iceland 2023 – The South – Genesis & Day 1 – JGB Imaging
• Iceland 2023 – Heading East – JGB Imaging
• Iceland – On to Egilsstaðir – JGB Imaging

Day 4

The original plan for day 4 was to head around the coast to Vopnafjörður and then to cut inland to Lake Myvatn. However, the previous nights experience with campsite being closed when the web site said they would be open gave me pause. I tried to contact the planned campsite and could get no response. So that, in conjunction with the weather caused a change of plan.

Instead of the planned coastal route I would instead go to the Lake Myvatn area and stay around there for 2 days. I had a campsite planned that I knew would be open. Also, ther skies were forecast to be clear over Lake Myvatn and the Aurora forecast was good!

I headed out from the Egilsstaðir campsite in the morning, planning to go to Stuðlagil Canyon first and then head to Lake Myvatn. I had a few possible stops along the way, but by now I had come to realize that plans never survived because there were so many unexpected things to see along the way.

Getting to Stuðlagil Canyon was fairly easy. At least until I decided to go to the far car park. The road started out fine, but I was shortly faced with a track barely worthy of the name, a little over a car width wide for much of its length. I couldn’t turn round, and was wondering if I would be able to drive out.

Stuðlagil Canyon

The canyon itself was magnificent. But it was sleeting, there were quite a few people, and it was very slippery. As a result, I did not go down to the water. It was cold, the water was fast moving, and I am not as agile as I used to be. I err towards discretion these days. You pass a really pretty waterfall on the way to the canyon that falls over columns of hexagonal basalt. It also started to sleet on the walk in.

On returning to the car, in the sleet, I began to wonder about the drive out. Looking around I saw a handful of front wheel cars, so I figured I should be able to get out. And indeed, I did manage to drive out, but it did get a bit hairy with oncoming traffic and really poor road conditions. I lost a hubcap along the way somewhere.

I drove back to the ring road and headed north-west. As I drove, I gained height, and the weather became gloomier. But the drive was not without its highlights. The terrain was markedly different than the low coastal areas and it became a plateau. Mountains and snow where still to be seen, but without that sense of wanting to crush the frail humanity below.

The weather continued to be changeable with intermittent rain and sleet along the way.

As you approach Lake Myvatn on the ring road you approach a geothermal area called alternately Hverir or Hverarönd, the latter name being used an Akureyri native.

You first smell the sulfurous essence being carried on the breeze. It is very noticeable. This is followed by the sight of steam rising about the ground behind the hills. I half expected Grendel to appear from the mist.

Pulling into the car park it started to sleet. Oh well, off I went anyway. The ground was slick with a mud made up from a very fine and very red slit that coated anything it came into contact with.

The geothermal area was a maze of spectacular colored earth, boiling mud and steaming fumaroles. As I walked around the otherworldly landscape, I saw beauty everywhere. Beauty which, as it happened, was exceedingly difficult to photograph in the sleet and very overcast skies. The pictures do it no justice at all.

By this time I was getting cold fingers and the camera was getting hard to operate as a result. I did have gloves with me, but they interfere with the controls.

The day was getting long, and I had been driving a while. I decided to head out to the campsite. I arrived shortly before dark and had time to cook myself a decent hot meal and relax a bit.

Inevitably, when I check the forecast that evening it had all changed. The clouds were due to roll in and my chance of seeing an Aurora were fading. I got the bed ready in the van and I did put together what I would need for the aurora, just in case. But it didn’t look good.

Nonetheless, just as the clouds began to roll in, the skies did light up. And even with the moon near full and clouds beginning to appear, it did take my breath away. That alone almost made the whole trip worthwhile.

For parts one and two of the adventure see

https://jgbimaging.com/2023/10/23/iceland-2023-the-south-genesis-day-1/

https://jgbimaging.com/2023/11/01/iceland-2023-east-and-north/

Day 3

We left off last time after arriving at the Viking Cafe in Stokksnes after a great day moving along the south coast of Iceland. We pick up in the morning of October 3rd, with your protagonist moving down to the beach at Stokksnes to photography the Vesturhorn.

This is one of the most famous mountains in Iceland and subject of many landscape photographs. Of course, you always want that epic shot with epic light, but the reality is that it can take dozens of attempts to get the perfect conditions. So you take the conditions as you find them.

After this I went back to the car park and had a late breakfast and sorted out the van before hitting the ring road to travel along the coast. The plan was just to meander my way along, before cutting inland and gaining some elevation on the way to Foldafoss, and then to Egilsstaðir and a campsite for the night.

I spotted some horses in a field on the road out of the Viking Cafe.

After leaving the Viking Cafe I stopped at an overlook up on a hill, but it wasn’t all that inspiring. Back onto the and travelling along to Skútafoss. I wasn’t planning to spend all that long there, but I ended up spending a lot longer than I thought I would. This in fact became a theme for the entire trip, where I never really know how long I would be anywhere. You could never tell till you eventually got there.

So I arrive at Skútafoss, and start walking up the trail. The falls are hidden, but the valley is spectacular.

Along the way you pass a secondary fall, which is pretty in its own right.

It’s when you get further up the trail and round a bend and the main falls come into view that it hits you just how awesomely beautiful this place actually is.

I show some video here, and a piece to camera and then turned back down the trail. The wind was howling the whole time.

After getting back into the van and back onto the road I continued to head east along the coast. I would stop from time to time at the various parking areas and soak in the view. While everywhere was truly spectacular, what looks awesome to the eye doesn’t always translate to the camera. Some of these stops were more fruitful than others.

One of the more successful stops was at Lækjavik, also marked as Stapavik on the map. Being the middle of the day, the light was difficult to work with, but the drone was flyable and saved the day.

I stopped for lunch here as well, and exchanged pleasantries with a young couple also on a van trip. This turned out to be an amusing side note, as we ran into each other again twice over the course of this day and the next.

After cleaning up after lunch, which was always accompanied by a hot drink, I continued further along the road. By this time traffic was visibly less as we had gone beyond the reach of Reykjavik day trippers. You could now stop somewhere and have only a handful of cars pass you.

One such stop was an entirely nameless place that was in front of an amazing set of cliffs. The formations were dramatic and covered with the ubiquitous green moss.

Across the fjord was the most amazing looking mountain. It looked like something right out of Mordor. The only missing was an encampment of orcs and a flying Nazgul.

I took the opportunity for a quick self-portrait with the van too, although at a spot a bit further down the road with the same rock formations in the background.

Travelling along you would see small villages and farmsteads hugged back into the terrain, dwarfed by the rinsing plateau of land behind them. This was a recurring theme throughout the whole trip.

With the impending fall of dusk, I stopped at the final site for the day, the waterfall Foldafoss. This was approached along the first real gravel road I had experienced in Iceland. I had travelled on some shorter sections that were quite smooth, but nothing quite prepares you for the potholed nightmare that is the “real thing”.

Foldafoss itself was nestled into the same tyoe of cascading rock formations I had been seeing for much of the afternoon. It was pretty apparent that whatever had formed this corner of the island had been pretty consistent over a large area.

Leaving Foldafoss I drove for miles and miles along a rutted, pothole strew gravel road surrounded by the deafening cacophony of sounds made by pots, pans and cutlery being tossed around in their drawers back of the van. The bassline for this chaotic choir was provided by the thumps of the tyres hitting the potholes, despite my best attempts to avoid them. All this in mist and light rain.

The original plan was to camp at a place called Atalvik on the shores of lake Lagarfljót. According to the website it was supposed to be open. But on arrival the gate was locked and the campsite was closed. The next nearest campsite was also supposed to be open, but was not staffed and had only very limited facilities open. I was clearly not the only one facing this dilemma as several other camper vans arrived around the same time and were equally bewildered.

There was supposed to be a campsite in Egilsstaðir, and it seemed to be open all year. At least the web site looked up to date. I struck out for the campsite. And yay, it was open! And really nice too.

With that weight off my mind I cooked a nice hot meal and took a long, hot shower under a showerhead that was 8″ across and feeding endless gallons and gallons of geothermal hot water. After driving a bit over 200 miles I was ready for a good night’s sleep. And I got it.

You can find part one of this adventure here. If you haven’t read it already, I suggest you start there. Also, the album of images is on flickr here.

At the end of the last post, I was just bedding down in the van at the Skogafoss campsite on Iceland’s south coast. We pick the story up on the morning of October 2nd…

I did wake up at about 05:00 after having gotten a somewhat decent night’s sleep. That was a bit surprising because I usually don’t sleep well in a strange place very well the first night. And if being in the back of a van in a strange new country and at a campsite within earshot of a large waterfall, well, then I don’t know what is strange.

First order of the day is breakfast and then sorting out the chaos that back of the van has become. Did I mention the importance of being organized? Why yes, yes I did!

After getting dressed I headed out to the waterfall, only a few hundred meters away. And was faced with loads of other people there already. Well, it’s not like expected to be alone, but everyone is vying for the same types of shots and getting close with each other. In other words, the very things I hate most.

Still, I do take some shots. But I’m not really in the moment and it shows. I also forget things, like remembering to wipe the spray off the lens. And overall, the light sucked too. It would be great later in the day, but then it would be totally mobbed by people. It would probably be great in the summer too round the midnight sun. I shot some video too but ended up heading back to van not exactly dejected, but knowing I didn’t have a great shot.

I toyed with where to go next. I had a general plan for the day of course, but it was flexible. There was another very pretty waterfall about a kilometer away. I figured it would be as busy as this was, and was on the verge of just heading out towards Stokksnes, but figured, I’m here, what the heck.

I drove over to that car park and to my eternal surprise, I’m the only one there. Really? Yes, really.

So, I get my gear on, record a piece to camera for the video and then head out. The trail is well maintained as it heads towards a short canyon that I can see the entrance to a few hundred meters up ahead on the right. I reach the entrance, enter the canyon and after a short walk to the crest of a low hill I see this in front of me!

My jaw hit the floor. This is what I really came here for, and I had it to myself. I spent a while photographing the waterfall, and I did meet one other person there, a musician from New York who was also into landscape photography.

After this I walked back to the van feeling very happy about how the morning ended.

Now the time really was right to head out east. The rough plan was to follow the ring road and stop at a few locations along the way and anywhere else I felt like it.

Foss á Síðu was the first stop along the road. It’s a very pretty waterfall by the side of the road. Most folks pull into the small car park there, but I wanted to shoot it from further away to put it into more of a landscape context.

Iceland is full of places like this, where you have the most amazing waterfalls cascading down from the highlands with farmsteads and homes perched just in front of them. I was always left with the feeling that the landscape was letting people live there, but with the caveat that the landscape was ready to crush the puny humans. But for the moment, it had decided it wasn’t worth the bother.

Next stop along was Lómagnúpur. The wind here had suddenly picked up. It seems there are places where the terrain either shields or funnels the wind. When it blows, it blows. Anyhow, I parked up, got the camera out, took some shots and then had lunch.

While munching my food, I spent some time people watching. Folks would pull into the car park, hop out with their cellphone, snap a picture or two and drive off again. Total time of stop – 5 minutes. And here’s me, soaking up places like this for maybe an hour just taking it all in. Oh well.

Packing up after lunch I headed out to Hosfkirkja. It’s the last timber and turf church built in Iceland in 1884. But on the way there I saw something and wanted to find a place to stop and photograph it.

Finding places to stop is an adventure all of its own. Every road in Iceland is built on an embankment of lava gravel and there is no shoulder. The embankment is also pretty sharp, so it’s not like you can just pull over, not without decent ground clearance, which I in an 2wd drive van did not have. You can’t stop in the middle of the road either. Dumb tourists do every year and cause accidents.

Anyhow, I did find somewhere to stop and soak up a view of the Vatnajökull icecap, which is the largest in Europe.

Pictures don’t do it justice. I could have stared at it for hours. But I things to do and places to see, and so off to Hosfkirkja.

All the graves had fresh turf mounded up on them, including some dating from the late 1800s. The graves without markers and weathered turf could be very, very old. There has been a timber and turf church here since at least 1343, when the first records about this church date from.

By this time the day was getting long, and I had a way to go yet. I had planned to always at camp before nightfall so I didn’t have to drive in the dark. So I set off again.

The last stop prior to the campsite was Jökulsárlón.

And with that I struck out for final hour drive to the Viking Cafe Campsite at Stokksnes. I arrived as the daylight faded, flew the drone for a bit and then rolled for the night.

The video of the trip has also been posted.

In the next installment, we photograph the Vesturhorn, visit Skútafoss and drive along the coast before cutting inland, past Folaldafoss and on my first true Icelandic gravel road and finally ending the day in Egilsstaðir.

Despite my best intentions I didn’t get to post regular updates from my recent trip to Iceland. This was because of some long days, poor bandwidth and just needing to cook, eat and do things like, oh, take a shower.

Having been back a couple of weeks, with a weeklong business trip thrown in, I’ve been able to sort through all my images and pick out the ones I want to share. I recently posted these all up to Flickr at https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAZs2x. But those are just images, and here I also get a chance to tell the story behind the images.

So why go to Iceland in the first place? Well, it is now well known as a landscape photographers paradise, quite rightly so. But my first efforts go back 30 years when I owned a Land Rover and lived in the UK.

I had a plan to take it to Iceland via the Demark – Iceland ferry. It was an ambitious idea at the time, and I needed to be able to share the costs. And I could never get anyone else interested. These days a Facebook post would network people with a goal like that together. But in 1992? Forget it. So that plan withered on the vine and seemingly died.

That didn’t stop me doing other things, like mountaineering and white water kayaking though.

Early this year (2023) I finally realized that the time had come for me to go to Iceland, and a plan for a 10 day trip around the ring road in a campervan was hatched for October. This was perhaps a bit aggressive in terms of scheduling, but travelling in October is outside peak season, and many of the summer campsites are closed. This ends up setting how long each leg ends up being. So, in the end it all worked out quite well. I viewed the whole trip as like an Iceland sampler. A bit of everything, but nothing in depth.

I flew out on icelandair from Boston. Flights heading East are always red-eyes, leaving around 8:00 pm or so. The flight is about 6 hours, which meant I arrived at about 6:00 am local time, or about 02:00 am Boston time. Day one was going to be rough, and I figured I had about till 4:00 pm local time before I hit the wall. Wherever I was going to go, I needed to be there by then.

After waiting for rental place to open & getting picked up by the rental shuttle I hit the road, first heading towards the supermarket to stock up, and then on to Reykjavik and out towards the Skogar campsite, my first overnight stop of the trip.

Shopping didn’t quite go according to plan. I was tired, dehydrated and to be honest a bit bewildered wandering around a strange supermarket and trying to translate everything. But I did manage to get the essentials that would see me through the next few days. And coffee. Can’t live without coffee.

Of course, I hadn’t come all this way just to drive on the first day of the trip. I had a photography backpack packed with camera gear, and I was going to use it!

First stop was Gluggafoss. When I arrived, I basically had the place to myself, and it was awesome to get out in the fresh air after the being stuck in a long metal tube to get to Iceland, and then to be stuck in a metal box to get to Gluggafoss.

Despite my best laid plans to get to the campsite by 4:00 pm, I ended up not leaving Gluggafoss until 3:30 pm, and it was about an hour to the campsite.

Nonetheless, I made it in one piece. The campsite is really just the carpark for the Skogafoss waterfall, but there were clean toilets, facilities for washing dishes and all things considered it was just fine.

After cooking a pasta dinner I started getting the van sorted out for sleeping. This is when I quickly learned that the small van life requires being very organized with the limited space available. The way I had organized things for packing really didn’t work for living in the van.

For packing, I organized things by what they were, grouping like with like. In the van I quickly discovered I really needed things organized by when I needed them, like first thing in the morning and at the end of the day. It took about 5 days to finally figure out how to organize things.

I finally got to sleep around 8:00 pm, after having been on the go and basically without sleep for about 34 hours.

Stay tuned for the next exciting installment!