Iceland 2.3: Stykkishólmur

Stykkishólmur is a small fishing town and port on the north coast of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, and it provided a much needed break after a very long drive in challenging conditions.  It was cold and grey, with strong winds and occasional rain showers.  Pretty typical Icelandic weather, in other words.  As a place, Stykkishólmur is very pretty with lots of painted wooden buildings.  It is clearly fairly prosperous: as well as a thriving fishing industry, it's also the place to catch the ferry to Brjánslækur and the Westfjords.

I know I promised restraint on the hydrant front, but Stykkishólmur possesses a fine specimen made by Kennedy of Elmira, NY.  Now, not a lot of people know that...

The church was locked - rather unusually for Iceland - although my trusty steed was happy enough to reside in its car park.  Since I couldn't get into the church, I went for a wander around the harbour instead.

As with other Icelandic fishing towns, the processing is done on the quayside with any waste being fed to a large congregation of sea birds.  The fulmars were waiting patiently on the water, but overhead a small number of gulls - herring, glaucus and black backed - were waiting to pounce and steal the juiciest morsels.

At 16:00, having pretty well exhausted Stykkishólmur, I decided to hit the road for my final destination of the day: Grundarfjörður.  Since it was absolutely tipping down, I picked up a couple of (rather drowned) hitch hikers and took them to a place with a shelter where they could catch the bus back to Reykjavík.  It turned out that they were French students, working on Icelandic bird life at the Reykjavík Natural History Museum (yes, the very same museum we visited back in 2013 which is very proud of its collection of molluscs!).

Iceland 2.2: Reykholt to Stykkishólmur

The combination of perpetual daylight and a one hour difference compared to the UK (Iceland does not have the concept of "summer time", for reasons which I hope are obvious) meant that I was awake stupidly early.  Since there was a French coach party also staying at the hotel, I grabbed an early breakfast before they appeared.  I then headed back into the church I'd visited the previous evening, but this time armed with a tripod in the hope of capturing the beautiful simplicity of its interior.

My original plan had been to visit the Snorrastofa, but soon abandoned this idea when I discovered that it was closed for some reason.  Instead I decided to wander around taking pictures for a while before heading off on my travels.  It was extremely windy with the sun appearing occasionally from behind scudding clouds; the temperature was a bracing 10C, but it felt significantly colder in the wind.

Having exhausted pretty well everything which Reykholt had to offer, I headed east along a dirt road towards Húsafell.  It wasn't long before I found a field containing my first set of Icelandic horses for the trip, so I stopped to take a few pictures.  One of the horses wasn't moving very much, and the others appeared to be nuzzling up to it and licking one of its back legs.  It was only when I downloaded the pictures from the camera and looked closely that I spotted a huge gash in the horse's knee - presumably caused by barbed wire - so no wonder it wasn't going anywhere.  The way in which the other horses were looking after the injured animal was rather touching, and I just wish I'd been able to report the injury to someone who could have helped.

It was clear that some serious weather was heading my way, but before the rain started I managed to get a couple of pictures of Strútur with Langjökull in the distance.

After a brief downpour the weather cleared for a bit, so I decided it was time to hit my first waterfall of the trip.  It turned out to be two for the price of one, since Hraunfossar and Barnafossar are practically adjacent to one another.  Hraunfossar is a series of waterfalls which cascade over a lava field (Hraun is the Icelandic for lava, and also gives its name to an excellent chocolate bar).

A short walk up the hill led to a canyon which narrowed abruptly to form the Barnafossar.  The name (literally "children's waterfall") comes from an old Icelandic tale of two brothers who decided to take a short-cut home by walking over the narrow stone bridge which crosses the falls.  Needless to say the boys fell in and drowned, and the story goes that their mother was so distraught about what had happened that she cursed the bridge to stop anyone else crossing it without also falling in.  Iceland is full of such folk-lore...

Having gone east as far as I could, it was time to start heading towards my next destination: Stykkishólmur, a fishing town on the Snæfellsnes peninsula.  There was some serious driving in the meantime - accompanied by some even more serious weather - meaning that there were precious few places to stop.  I did manage to pull over once in the dry, however, in order to photograph a farmstead with its own church.  Red roofed, naturally.

Iceland 2.1: Heathrow to Reykholt

The beginning of a brand new year is as good a time as any to start yet another interminable saga, I suppose, but the truth is that it's taken me since July to get round to processing the pictures from our summer holiday.  The few days off work after Christmas have allowed me to do a little bit of catching up, so brace yourselves for "Iceland 2: Just when you thought it was safe".  Don't say you weren't warned...

Those who followed the account of my previous trip to Iceland in 2013 will know that the place made a deep impression on both of us, so it's unsurprising that - when the opportunity arose to go back during July 2015 - we jumped at it.  Partly based on the experience gained during our previous visit, Harriet was asked to lead a small group to Iceland for ACE Cultural Tours.  ACE specialise in art, architecture, archaeology, history, music, regional culture and natural history, with its Iceland tour fitting very much into the last two categories.  (Incidentally, the picture advertising the 2016 ACE tour to Iceland, which Harriet is also leading, turns out to be one of mine: a pair of whimbrels.)  Harriet's tour started on July 12th, and I travelled out a week later on the 19th.  The idea was for me to be independent for three days, and then meet up with Harriet in Reykjavík to coincide with the end of her tour.  We would then embark on the rest of our holiday together, returning to the UK on August 2nd - a cunning plan which ended up working flawlessly.

Rather than head to Heathrow at the crack of dawn on departure day, I spent the previous night at the Holiday Inn Express in (not quite so sunny) Slough.  As it turns out the hotel was absolutely excellent, and infinitely better than the Sheraton Skyline we'd used before.  Despite dragging breakfast out for as long as I possibly could, I was still at Heathrow very early for my flight.  This gave me the opportunity to take a few snaps in the airport with my new toy - a Fuji X-T1 - which is far more discreet than any full-size SLR.

My mother always told me to beware of strange men on escalators...

Eventually it was time to go to the gate and wait to board the aircraft.  Unlike last time we travelled to Keflavík, there were no departure delays.  In fact, we even managed to jump the queue of several British Airways flights which were also waiting to take off.

This was my first view of Iceland: a small town on the Reykjanes peninsula.  I didn't know it at the time, but the town in question turned out to be Grindavík where we spent our final evening before returning home.

It was sunny but cool in Keflavík, and the airport was undergoing yet more renovations.  As before it was full of Americans, and the entrance hall was complete chaos as much of it was being rebuilt.  Eventually I found the Europcar desk - in a small, makeshift shack at the end of a corridor - and was able to pick up the keys for our trusty steed: a Suzuki Grand Vitara 4x4 in which we were destined to explore parts of the country which had been out of bounds to us on the previous trip.

The journey from Keflavík to Reykholt took about three hours and, apart from relatively heavy traffic returning to Reykjavík after the weekend, was very easy.  Reykholt itself turned out to be no more than a hamlet, but it is an important site to the Icelanders because of the Snorrastofa - a cultural centre dedicated to the mediaeval writer Snorri Sturluson who originally had a farmstead in Reykholt.

Apart from the Snorrastofa, the only other large building in Reykholt was the Foss Hotel where I was staying.  It was rather basic and slightly frayed at the edges, but otherwise clean and friendly.  More importantly it served food, which is just as well as lunch had been well over eight hours earlier!  Time for a quick walk around the block to look at Snorri's statue and Reykholt church before heading back to the hotel for an excellent dinner.

I didn't have a tripod with me, so decided to return to the church and spend more time there the following morning.  I'll finish this post with a couple of "Iceland specials" which I remembered very well from my previous trip.  The first shows lots of geo-thermally heated greenhouses, which are used to grow vegetables and flowers.  The second is a rather incongruous American hydrant - this one had been planted by the side of the main road!  I promise that I won't be quite so obsessed by hydrants during this trip.