Last time on Dragonball Z: I talked about arriving in Iceland and staying in Reykjavik. While Reykjavik is a very nice city it’s not what springs to mind when you think of Iceland. That honor is reserved for the country’s natural splendors (at least for me) and trust me, Iceland has plenty of that.
Since I had chosen to base myself out of Reykjavik for the whole of my stay I was limited to doing daytrips to the surrounding areas. I decided on the following three early on:
- Snaefellsnes (Reykjavik Excursions)
- Golden Circle and Green Energy (Sterna Travel)
- Beautiful South Coast (Sterna Travel)
The idea behind these three tours was to go north, east and south of Reykjavik and see different types of landscapes. All these tours had a pickup at the hostel, or near the hostel, and funnily enough all pick-ups were late. Thankfully this didn’t affect the duration of the tour, so I didn’t mind that much, but it’s funny that not a single one was on time.
The first tour went to Snaefellsnes, a peninsula to the north of Reykjavik. Time to learn some Icelandic:
- Snae: Stands for snow, specifically the snow that glitters prettily in the sunlight.
- Fell: Mountain
- Nes: Peninsula
- Jökull: Glacier
This was the longest tour of the three, for about 11 hours. Unlike the areas to the east of Reykjavik that you see in the Golden Circle tours this area hasn’t seen a lot of touristic development. The land is rough and there are hardly any facilities (especially ones that can handle a tour bus full of people). As a result there was a lot of driving involved and only a couple rest stops. The great thing about this was that there were no other tour buses around and the only other tourists were those occasional few who had a car to drive around the island.
So this tour really gives you a feeling of the desolate nature of the island, which I thought was really nice. Occasionally you come across the ruins of old farm buildings in really beautiful areas, but the land is so inhospitable none of the farms survived. I recall one farm, in a really nice spot, that would basically turn into an island for a few months every year, cut off from the rest of the land. That’s not really ideal for a farm.
In the morning we were pretty lucky with the weather, so we could see the glacier, Snaefellsjökull, in the distance. Later on the glacier was completely hidden by clouds. It’s a pretty glacier, but a small one, especially compared to some of the other glaciers in Iceland. Unfortunately the glaciers in Iceland are all shrinking (except one, which grew a little this year), which is a shame. There might come a time when there are no more glaciers in Iceland.
Before our lunchbreak in a small restaurant in the middle of absolutely nowhere we stopped to take a couple pictures along the way. At one point we stopped at the coast where the seals were showing off on the rocks. The coastline of the peninsula is really pretty and the further you go it changes from low ground into high cliffs. Beautiful to see on a tour, but I can only imagine the horror of sailors as their ships got close to those cliffs. We saw the result of such an encounter at a beach of black rocks, smooth and shiny like black pearls. On this beach the remains of the British trawler Epine, which shipwrecked in 1948, can still be found to this day. Out of a crew of 19 people only 5 were rescued.
We had lunch in a small restaurant, where I had a lamb soup. The lamb soup in Iceland is really good, but also pretty expensive. My soup was 2,500 Krona, or about 17 Euro. That’s a lot for a soup, but in Iceland that’s the norm. My wallet remembers Iceland as much as I do.
In the afternoon we took another walk along the cliffs of the coastline, which was totally different than the place where we saw the seals, or the black pebble beach with the wreck of the Epine. At this walk we stopped at some sink holes to peer down at the churning water, before we went on further into the peninsula. By this point the glacier was gone from sight, but the landscape wasn’t any less brilliant. I’ve seen some descriptions of Snaefellsnes that basically say the peninsula is Iceland in miniature and it’s true, over the span of the day I saw many different landscapes, all within easy driving distance of each other. Iceland really is quite incredible.
Near the tip of the peninsula there lies a famous mountain, Kirkjufell, or Church Mountain. This mountain, in combination with a nearby waterfall, is featured on some phones as the default background. From a certain angle you can get a picture of both the waterfall as well as the mountain. Aside from our group there were a few more tourists here, since it’s one of the major sights in the area, but there weren’t more than fifteen other people there. That’s how remote it is.
After this stop we started to head back through the inside and the north side of the peninsula, where the landscape turned from green to volcanic once again. The iron in the soil gave the place a burnished rust look. All though we’d been going for most of the day at this point I could have gone on longer. That’s how beautiful the Snaefellsnes peninsula is.
I can definitely recommend going here, either on a tour or on your own.
