A Land of Ice and Fire - Day 4

Today we did a day's tour of the south coast by coach.  Normally we'd have taken ourselves, but actually the coach trip turned out to be really informative, and of course everyone got to look out the window rather than having to drive.  So much to see!



After heading out through the familiar mountains around Reykjavik, you drop down onto the coastal lowlands (passing Selfoss, the ice cream making capital of Iceland).  There are lots of small firms dotted about here - we pass a microbrewery on the site of what used to be a women's prison.  It just looks like a little house in the middle of nowhere!

There is a mountain range though, to our left (north).  Up there are the glaciers, and the active volcano Eyjafjallajokul, which erupted in 2010 producing enough smoke to stop air travel across most of Europe for an entire week.  It seems calm today!

We're also going to see a lot of waterfalls.  Here's the first; Seljalandsfoss.

It drops sheer over a vertical rock face, surrounded by lots of smaller trickles.  This is a really fun one, because if you've got the notion you can walk round behind it, through the spray that clings to the moss and the roar as it hits the plunge pool.  It's a slightly slipper clamber to get up and out the other side, but very much worth it.

Hi Mum and Dad!

We carry on to the furthest point of our trip, the iconic volcanic beach of Reynisfjara.  If we're talking about memorable Icelandic geography, this has to be one of the most well known.  As we leave the coach we're given a strict warning to stay away from the sea.  People drown here every year because they want to paddle, and then 'sneaker' waves suddenly burst up the beach and grab them.  We have no incentive to go that far down the beach anyway - the wind is insane.  It rips across the beach, pelting hard sand into your legs and anything else you've left exposed.  It's bitingly cold and physically painful, even when you turn your back on it.
The payoff however, is one of the strangest sights of our trip.

The beach is black.  Volcanic rock slowly crushed into gritty black sand.  And the cliffs they've come from are blocky basalt columns, like a giant sculpture someone left there.  In some places they form mounds, in others caves.  They're so precise it's odd; it looks almost manmade.  Amazingly, these columns that march off into the North Atlantic only to emerge again... in Ireland.  These columns are part of the same geological strata as the Giant's Causeway.



Further along you can see where the pounding waves have driven holes and tunnels through outcrops of rock, which have then collapsed leaving extant towers free-standing in the ocean.  These are Dyrholaey - Sea Stacks.  Four of these are best visible from Vik - they call them the Four Trolls, after the myth that trolls turn to stone in sunlight.  Half-seen through the whip of the wind, the rain and the sea mist, they do seem to loom a bit!

We break here and eat our sandwiches before heading away from the sea and up, up, up.  Passing out of the rainstorm, we pop up into an area of lovely blue sky, with the glacier Solheimajokull towering up ahead of us.  Dad was particularly looking forward to this bit, and it's crazy to look at.  

With happy Dad for scale!

This huge wall of solid ice is the very edge of a glacier that stretches for miles up into the mountains, en covering the (extremely active!) volcano Katla.  Centuries have compacted the ice and rock together.  Although it looks indestructible, in other ways it's very fragile.  Our guide has been coming up here since he was a boy, and in the last twenty year the glacier has receded several hundred metres.  The pool in front of it now, complete with iceburgs the size of shipping containers, was once part of the glacier too.

For our last stop, we got another waterfall; Skogafoss.  There a flight of stairs that goes all the way to the top, so of course we took it is a personal challenge.

We'd crammed a lot into one day, and everyone was surprisingly tired.  Fortunately we could just veg on the ride back, and stare at the scenery (despite some over-excited guests in the back).  In this one relatively small area there's such a vast range of geography.  Vast plains, high glaciers, volatile volcanoes, crashing waves, sea stacks, plunging waterfalls...  We've only got one day left to see it all!