Once the road became paved and we started up the road to Seydisfiodur, however, the scenery became even more stunning. On a good weather day don't expect to take less than an hour to traverse the road because it's simply too pretty. We stopped at every turn out, even in some places blocking dirt roads for pictures, and when we found the hiking pull out about 500m in elevation above the town we simply had to stop.
The scenery was gorgeous. The hiking reminded me a lot of my first day on the coast to coast: soaked through with water, and a severe test of the water proofing on my Salomon XA Pro 3D trail runners (summary: they failed --- the waterproof label is pretty worthless). Staring at the trail map, it looked like you could hike all the way to town from there, and it would have been awesome to arrange a one-way taxi from town to this location so you could hike down to town, or find the corresponding location in town to hike up --- it looked very rugged, but with gorgeous scenery it's definitely not something any serious hiker should pass up.
In town, we had a supermarket lunch, and then proceeded to find more hiking spots.
We shot picture after picture, and hiked up to a waterfall. Iceland on that day definitely exceeded my expectations --- it felt just as pretty as Switzerland was, but with its own unique vegetation and terrain.
We had to drive back to Eglistadir for lodging, and reluctantly left in the mid afternoon. The drive to our AirBnB turned out to be once again over a dirt road to a bunch of newly built buildings. The furnishings were quite elegant and compact, and it had an outdoor BBQ. We made dinner and then, given the infinite amount of light we had, ambitiously went for another waterfall hike. As usual, Google maps misled us as to where the trailhead was, but we eventually found it thanks to a local runner. When we got to the trailhead, it was quite clear that the trail was under going some heavy duty renovation: huge machines were driving up and down and were clearly about to pave it.
We got back to our AirBnB in time to see the horses back in their pasture. For more than the first time, I wished that I could have known in advance to spend way more time out here on the East Coast of Iceland, but the reality was that the forecast was for more crappy weather and we probably wouldn't have gotten a chance to do more hiking anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment