After Lausanne in Part 1, we arrived in Sion late in the afternoon of Thursday − late enough that we only had time to unwind a bit before we went for dinner. We decided to go for crêpes, as the offer in Zürich ist sub-par, especially when it comes to galettes, and we ended in Régal’ette in the city center, which was a very good crêperie − we got what we were hoping for (and they also have an excellent cider.)
After dinner, since we had apparently not walked uphill enough in Lausanne, we strolled to the heights of the city. The sun had just set and the light was very nice. The highlight of the evening, though, was to see a fox, which was definitely not afraid of humans − I don’t think I ever saw a fox from closer! I consequently have a bunch of blurry fox pictures.
After this we went back to the hotel to sleep – tomorrow, we visit the Grande Dixence dam!
My hope was to be able to avoid cars altogether during this trip, but convenience won when it came to reaching the Grande Dixence dam. Yes, there are four buses in each direction during the day, but the hours don’t align very well with the visits, and we also valued a bit of freedom to explore a bit around without risking missing the last bus down. So we rented a carsharing Mobility car (conveniently in the parking of the hotel, but we only realized that when we came back) and drove to the dam for the 11:30 visit.
The weather was, euphemistically, not optimal. We were in the clouds for most of our visit, and it rained for a non-trivial part of it too. Still: the visit was very cool; we got to walk inside the numerous galleries of the dam, and while it wasn’t visually super impressive, the experience was well worth it. From the outside, the dam is gigantic; the lake above is probably a very nice place to hike around when there’s any visibility, but as it was, we walked on the dam top and that was pretty much it. Pierre still ran from the top of the dam back to the parking lot − since I’m far more reasonable, I took the cable car back 😛
On the way down, we made a stop at the Pyramides d’Euseigne, a super weird rock structure that I still can’t wrap my head around. And that is on the Grand Tour, so here, I have a new picture for my collection (it’s a very smol collection so far.)
Finally, before we went back to the hotel, we made a final stop at the Mont d’Orge lac, where we had a ~1km stroll around the lake and saw a bunch of water lilies.
For dinner, we went to Pinte Contheysanne, a Swiss restaurant where we had great dried meat and awesome cheese croûtes. After that meal we needed a bit of a walk, though, so we made a detour to see the Rhône river, which had a nice pedestrian bridge and a cool view over the castle and basilica at the top of the city.
Overall, I liked Sion very much; the city center is car-free and lively-in-a-good-way, and while it’s also not quite flat, it’s definitely more me-compatible than Lausanne 😉
The next morning, Pierre went for a run around the top of the city, and we took the train to our next destination, Zermatt.
This summer, we decided to go on an 8-night train trip around Switzerland, to visit places that we had wanted to go to for a while and never did anything about.
This is my traveling log − mostly something for me to remember, but I like reading other people’s traveling blogs/threads, so maybe someone will enjoy these as well! It’s organized in 4 parts, where each part corresponds to”where we dropped our suitcases” (we stayed in 4 hotels, 2 nights in each). After some hesitation, we decided to travel in style and to not worry about transportation tickets – we each got a month-long General Abonnement (in first class because see previous point about “in style”), which covers the very, very vast majority of the transportation in Switzerland. Probably somewhat more expensive than unit tickets, and probably slightly more expensive than planning things correctly and taking individual day cards with a discount, but peace of mind also has a huge amount in value in my book.
We first travelled to Lausanne, which we have passed many times over the years, but where we had never stopped. We left home around noon, got lunch at the Zürich Hauptbahnhof, and took a direct train to Lausanne. First train control, and our tickets do seem to be valid – yay, I didn’t mess up the dates! 😛
The arrival in Lausanne and the following small walk to the hotel gives as a very first impression of the city: it’s Not Flat. By then, it was roughly 15:00; we decided to go for a small walk around the Lavaux vineyards. These are the one place that will inevitably make me go “wooooooow” when traveling past them on a train, and walking around them definitely confirmed the wow factor.
We walked from Grandvaux to Cully, and again: Not Flat. Going down that hill was already challenging enough; I would not have liked climbing uphill, I think! (For sure my shitty right knee would have looked at me with disapproval. As it is…) After this walk, where we also saw a shitton of lizards and somehow resisted the temptation of stealing some grapes from the vine (they looked ripe!), we went back to the hotel and arrived there around 18:00.
Time to find a restaurant, to go there, to have an absolutely excellent meal sitting at a delightful terrace (Jacques Restaurant, highly recommended). The food was amazing (especially anything around fish); the only annoying thing was that our neighbors were smokers, which got on my nerves a few times (but then I also didn’t ask them to move downwind for their cigarette, soooo.)
On the way back, we took the metro to go see the lake. Lausanne is the only city with a metro, and that metro is also Not Flat − there’s a sticker in the train warning that one of the stops’ platforms is at a 12% slope. It’s kind of weird to feel the metro brake much harder than it actually does due to the acceleration added by gravity!
The lake was quiet; we walked to the end of the jetty and went back home. The last adventure for the day was that our bus broke down: it was a trolley, and it needed to get its perches down to handle a section with road works… and one of the perches stayed up. We walked the remaining 3 stops (… uphill), and didn’t get passed by another bus. Hopefully they resolved it swiftly, still.
On the next day, Pierre went for a run in the city, and then we took the train to go to Bex, where we had tickets to visit the salt mine! We took the train to Bex, the bus to the salt mine, and started the visit at noon.
For the visit, we take the small mine train, go visit some tunnels with some explanations, come back to the main site with the train, and have a bit of food – chips salted with some salt from the mine, sausage that is actually dried in the mine too (fun gimmick tbh). The whole visit was pretty cool, but we both felt it was lacking a bit on the technical aspects of it. In particular, we did spend roughly 30 minutes on the train, and we got 0 mention of it during the visit − at the very least, I would have liked to know when it was built, see a map of the tracks (there was definitely some intersection going on)… and discuss the building of the rolling material itself, which is quite custom!
We still had some energy after the visit, so we decided for an impromptu visit to the Château de Chillon, which was on our way back to Lausanne. We decided against the audioguide – while I love a good guided visit, audioguides tend to get my attention drifting quite swiftly. So we visited the castle with the paper guide given at the entrance and following a number of information panels.
The path through the castle is very well made and well indicated; the castle itself has some very cool rooms and some neat furniture. There’s an overall feeling of “… yeaaaaah that’s how they restaured this at the beginning of the 20th century and the historical accuracy may not have been the priority” which was also interesting. Overall, I liked the visit − and the building itself is an impressive sight for sure.
We hurried a bit for the end of the visit, because we were pretty close to the timing of the boat that was going from the castle back to Lausanne, and that sounded like a great idea (especially since our month-long transport ticket also covers boats!) And it was indeed a very pleasant trip along the lake, looking at the Lavaux vineyards from below, having the train and the boat exchanging honks, and getting some apéro on the deck.
We went back to the hotel to drop stuff, and went for dinner to Les Trois Rois, a very nice brasserie-style restaurant next to the train station − good food, pleasant service, this was nice! And we went back to the hotel around 21:30, where I’m writing this post as we’re planning for tomorrow.
On the next day, we checked out from the hotel and dropped our luggage in a locker at the train station in Lausanne, so that we could have some freedom to walk a bit in the city. We visited the cathedral, which has an impressive organ (quite modern, it seems) and stained glass windows from the 1930s that I found myself spending more time than I usually do on stained glass. We also walked in the city, visited a board game shop (because that’s what we do), and decided on a whim to visit the Élysée photographic museum.
Said museum had three exhibitions, dedicated to Alfredo Jaar, Hannah Darabi and Ella Maillart. The first one hit me the hardest: 20 photojournalists had been asked for their most joyful and saddest pictures, and both of them were projected on the walls in large format. The exhibition “mood” changed every 20 minutes to go from one side (“paradiso”) to the other (“inferno”), and both “sides” of the exhibition moved me tremendously, in very different ways (I was in tears when I exited the “inferno” part). The other exhibitions were also interesting, but didn’t move me nearly as much.
After the museum, we got our luggage back from the lockers and, after a short train ride, arrived in Montreux where we left them in the local lockers 🙂
As a life-long Queen fan, I almost cannot believe that it took me 18 years living in Switzerland before I went to Montreux − where a number of albums were recorded, and where there’s a very cool Freddie Mercury statue next to the lake.
The casino in Montreux is also home to the studio where Queen recorded there (they did buy said studio, actually), and there’s a small Queen museum on the first floor of the casino. There’s a lot of items; I particularly liked seeing a lot of song lyrics/drafts. There’s also a room where you can see some recording equipment and play with a few sliders to mix various song parts of a song. It was all quite neat; and it made me happy to see a bunch of fans around (the statue has a lot of people taking pictures with various extra items, and the museum has a full corridor plastered with pieces of paper with fan messages. That felt quite wholesome.
In Montreux, apart from that, we mostly strolled along the lake − there’s a very nice promenade; but we didn’t stay much longer before taking the train to Sion, our next destination.
Today is our last day, as we’re flying home at stupid’o’clock tomorrow morning. Hence, we travelled to our next hotel, which is very (very) close to the airport.
Instead of taking the most direct route, and stopping on a few stops along the way, we opted to go back to a couple favorites from 9 years ago. First stop, Geysir, which has, well, geysers. A few bubbly ones, a few dormant ones, some steam vents, and the current star of the show, Strokkur, which erupts every few minutes. We saw it multiple times during the time we were there, and as we were leaving, I went to try to get a video. I had a perfect spot with nobody in front of me… maaaaybe for a reason.
We ended up pretty soaked, to the point that we changed t-shirts and sweaters when coming back to the car! Maybe not our finest moment, but it was hilarious, and not everyone can say they’ve had a geyser shower.
After Geysir, we went to Þingvellir, which is both the place where the northern american and European tectonic plates meet (in first approximation, if I remember correctly it’s a bit more complicated than that) and the place where the parliament of Iceland met from 930 to 1798 (according to Wikipedia). And that place gives me literal goosebumps (in a good way).
We walked along the path and it was nice and an easy path; lots of people, though (it is one of the very popular sites, very close to Reykjavik – nothing surprising there).
On our way to Keflavik, we decided to make a detour to approach Keflavik from the south, and to pass through the “new” lava field from 2024 next to the Blue Lagoon (we had checked earlier in the day that there was no warning or closure around the area and that it looked safe to do).
The lava field is impressive; all the other ones we’ve seen during the trip were covered with moss or other vegetation, this one is *raw* (and still smoking in some points).
We drove next to Grindavík, which is currently evacuated (and, I presume, consequently completely uninhabited), which was eerie and very sad.
Our last stop for the day and for the trip was the Reykjanes lighthouse, next to an impressive geothermal energy facility. The wind and state of the stairs (and general fatigue) made us renounce going up the lighthouse itself, but it was still a cool view point.
And there, we’re currently 3km away from the airport, the alarm-clocks are set to 4.30, and tomorrow we go home (and start sorting through ALL THE PICTURES).
Our plan for today was very specific and involved bus tickets booked at the same time as the whole trip. We took a bus to Landmannalaugar, a place we had visited 9 years ago under similar circumstances and were both eager to revisit.
We were a bit nervous yesterday when looking at the weather forecast; but evidently, we can’t read a weather forecast, as we were planning for the worst and had something very close to a perfect weather!
We left our apartment around 7:30; we had a 30-minute drive to the bus pick-up, and we wanted to grab breakfast and something for lunch before that too. We did all that, the bus arrived early, we boarded the bus, and onwards we were!
The main reason for taking a bus there is that the road is *brutal*. Not in terms of distance – Hella (where we took the bus) to the base station is a hundred kilometers. It’s also 2h45 by bus. The first 50km are not a problem. The last 50 are a track road that is unpassable unless you drive a 4-wheel-drive vehicle, and some argue you need a non-trivial one too (at the very least there’s a couple of streams to cross, and depending where you park a larger river). So that’s definitely not something we’d feel comfortable doing, even if we had rented such a vehicle – so bus it is!
The road is very bumpy but also very beautiful. We finally arrived at the base station (there’s a large camping area and it’s a large Serious Hiking Trail start point), looked at the maps, decided for the hike we wanted and had time to do, and off we went. We did end up doing a very similar trail to the one we did 9 years ago; we were both thinking that being willing to sit almost 6h on a bus (3h in each direction) to redo a hike that we had already done said something about how special that place is.
It is literally one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever had the privilege to visit – and I live in Switzerland. The only reason why I’m not saying “the most beautiful place” is because I did go to Grand Canyon as a kid, and it might come first. (Would need to check.)
Pictures (especially phone pictures that I haven’t processed myself) won’t give a good idea of the magnificence of that place, but have a few, still.
Lunch break!
We considered trying to go a bit higher on this hike, there was a path to a lower summit, but looking at the path going up, knowing the path going down was steeper, and having a strict deadline for the bus home made us decide to not do that. It was the right move: the lava field after that was plenty challenging enough, and it would have been difficult for me after that extra part. We still did go to almost the foot of the path in question before giving up and going back to our main path.
After the hike, we were an hour early before the bus would start; we walked around a bit to the thermal source nearby where people were enjoying the hot water, and we flomped back in the bus at the first occasion.
And, just for completion, a couple of pictures from the road back, taken from the bus window!
Yes, that’s our bus crossing the waterNow that’s our bus crossing another bus. Unclear which is more challenging, honestly.But the landscape is pretty.And we saw horses!
After the bus left us where we had left our car, we went for dinner (Midgard, great place), and drove home where we were back in the gloomy and windy weather. And both: tired 🙂
The theme of the day was probably “lava”! We started the day under, let’s say, challenging weather conditions (light rain, significant wind, gloomy atmosphere), so we were quite happy to start the day with an indoor activity, namely the Lava Show in Vík. Their spiel is “you get to see real lava!” and, indeed, you do. It’s a 1h show with an introduction, a small movie about volcano eruptions in general and Katla in particular, and then we get to the core of the show: they pour melting lava in the room, and demonstrate how it cools down. Is it gimmicky? Absolutely. Is it very cool? Well, not really because lava is really hot, but y’know, conceptually, yes, it’s very cool.
We also got to see the furnace where they melt the lava, which was also pretty neat. Overall, the general memory is that my cheeks still feel kind of flushed from the heat! (They’re probably not. The memory is there.)
After the show, the weather was still gloomy; we still made way to the “more dangerous” black sand beach.
That beach is known for very dangerous waves, and there’s been a few accidents recently. There’s a set of lights that indicates where it should be safe to go, and here it was okay to go at the beginning of the beach (there was a map with the area to avoid), so we did that.
There’s actually less sand and more pebbles than on the other side of the mountain, but the waves are indeed more impressive (although we didn’t see anything awe-inspiring – probably for the best!). And we saw more puffins!
We do expect to have significant weather tomorrow, so our plan was to go to the Lava Center a bit after our next hotel (our planned road was much smaller today) and not get tired of the weather just yet. But there was a neat waterfall on the way, so we stopped, and the weather was significantly better by then, so we hiked 😛 The hike started with a 500-step stair (ow), but apart from that it was reasonable. And we did get not one, not two, but three waterfalls for the price of one!
We still made plans with the objective of being able to visit the Lava Centre in Hvolsvöllur, and we did manage to do that. It’s a small but well-made museum on the various ways Iceland tends to emit ash and lava; I missed a bit of more technical information on actual lava rather than volcanoes, but it was still a nice visit. There was also a series of video interviews from people who got recently evacuated from Grindavík after the recent eruptions, and it was moving.
After the museum, we had a bit of time to kill before our restaurant reservation. We ended up popping by Efra-Hvolshellar, a place where there’s a few old (settlement time or earlier, apparently) man-made caves. It was kind of creepy-weird, but it was fun to see.
Finally, we went for dinner and went back to our lodging (this night and the next we’re in a kind of studio in a group of cabins, and there’s no restaurant there). We ended the day by preparing the bags for tomorrow: we’re going to Landmannalaugar (where we kind of expect challenging weather), by bus because the road to there is not one we can drive on (especially with the car we rented!).
Oh, and today I finished my first 64G memory card in my camera. Good thing I had planned for that eventuality. Future me is wincing at the idea of sorting all this 🙂
Today’s highlight was, without hesitation: we saw icebergs!
We went to a place called “Diamond Beach” – some pieces of the glacier occasionally fall in the nearby lake (the picture above), follow a path to the sea, and sometimes end their trip on the beach, where they’re quite impressive (and, depending on the type of ice and the light, definitely diamond reminiscent).
This place gave me a lot of feelings – yes, it’s stunning, but it’s also quite depressing when one thinks about it, and with that comes the guilt associated with being part of the problem, as a tourist. Still, I’m very grateful that I got to see this, and hey, I’ve seen icebergs, I didn’t even know it was on my bucket list 🙂
Our next step was a bit further down that road, in Fjallsárlón – another place with icebergs, but with a better view of the glacier. Very cool, and far less crowded, which I appreciated.
Then, we drove to Skaftafell, where we wanted to go for a small hike. We pondered two options, a shorter and easier one, and a slightly longer and with more ascent; the latter won due to promising a waterfall (I’m weak.) The hike was pleasant, but less so than yesterday’s, possibly due to the larger amount of people around (and/or existing fatigue). It was still very nice, and the waterfall at the end was pretty and had cool basalt columns behind it. After the hike, we were both hungry, so we shared a fish&chips at the camping site – it was surprisingly good!
As our last step of the day, we popped a head at the “non-dangerous black sand beach” (the one on the other side of the mountain apparently has genuinely dangerous waves). I was tired and I was cold, but I still really liked the beach and the rock structures behind it.
We had dinner at the hotel, where both the food and drinks were great, and that’s it for today! There’s exactly 0 chance of northern lights tonight considering the clouds. For tomorrow, we have tickets to the “Lava Show” here in Vík, we’ll get to see real hot lava made for the show 🙂
We woke up early this morning, and Pierre went for a run. So I was first under the shower and: achievement unlocked, first egg shower of the trip! We had strong memories of hot water really smelling like sulphur on our first trip, but we hadn’t experienced it yet on this one – this is now fixed 😀
Our first hesitation of the day was pondering whether we wanted to go to Hengifoss, which seemed to be a beautiful waterfall, but slightly out of our way. Additionally, some of the comments on Google Maps made me fear that the hike would be beyond my abilities. But I was reasonably rested, the waterfall did look very pretty (and high), it was still quite early in the day – so we decided to go.
I was fairly reassured when we arrived at the parking lot at the bottom of the hike: it looked FEASIBLE. Not easy, but feasible. And indeed, the ascent didn’t pose much of a problem – slow and steady wins the hike, etc etc. And the waterfall was splendid.
Going down was somewhat more challenging (I’m not very good at uphill, but I’m very bad at downhill), but we still managed with ALMOST NO DRAMA and overall it was a great hike.
We got a piece of cake and a coffee at the café next to the parking lot as a reward (and, most of all, as an essential break) before deciding what to do next.
Our next candidate (and next hesitation) was Petra’s Stone Collection. We were both very interested, but it did require going back all the way to our starting point, rather than being able to catch another more direct road south. We finally decided to do that, and am I glad we did.
It’s the private collection of a woman, Petra Sveinsdóttir, who collected stones during her whole life and displayed them in her home and garden. She passed away in 2012, but the museum lives as a family endeavour, and the whole thing brought me so much joy to see – such a labor of passion and love is to be commended. And obviously the collection itself is both impressive and has stunning pieces.
This is just a small corner of a part of the whole exhibition (and we have Pierre hiding in the middle of… pierres 🙂 ) (yeah that one only works in French) (he’s also been called a rock star, so that works). Anyway, I’m so happy that I got to see this place, which felt really special.
For the rest of the day, we mostly drove down the coast, enjoying the wonderful landscapes – this coast line is incredible. It did help that we had great weather, but still.
We did a last stop at the lighthouse in Hvalnes, which has a very nice view over the sea and the surrounding mountains too.
And we arrived tonight at our hotel, which has a clear view over Vatnajökull, the glacier which is the largest ice cap in Iceland (it covers roughly 10% of the country!). We had dinner, a sunset stroll around the hotel, and had a drink at the hotel bar, which had a good view over the nearby mountains and said glacier.
Little hope of northern lights tonight, the cloud layer that’s been absent for a large part of the day spawned around sunset time…
Today was much lighter, visits wise, partly because we had a bit of adventures in the morning. Yesterday, the car started complaining about the tire pressure – not something one wants to be sloppy about, especially on these roads. Hence, the first stop this morning was a gas station for, well, gas, and tire pressure. At first, I couldn’t see a tire pressure device anywhere, so I asked the person at the attending shop, who told me “it’s on the side of the building” and gave me a small metallic device.
Somewhat confused, we go to the side of a building, and find a/ a cupboard with a manometer, but locked b/ an air pipe without a manometer. After another confused conversation with a local who didn’t seem to understand why we couldn’t read the tire pressure, we went back in the shop, and the nice lady at the register explained to us that the mysterious metallic device was, indeed, a manometer. Behold:
Yes, it’s a manual linear manometer expressed in PSI. We were not expecting that for sure. But once we got that piece of information, we checked the tire pressure and went on our merry way (after giving back the manometer and our thanks to the shop clerk).
We were on our merry way… not for very long, though, because we hadn’t looked well enough at the road condition website (“it’s summer and we’re on the main road of the country, what can possibly go wrong?”) and it turns out that the bridge over the river of the large fall we saw yesterday was closed multiple hours a day for road works.
We arrived there around 11:15, and the closure was planned until 12:00, with no obvious choice of anything else to do than wait. So we did that, the closure ended a bit earlier than expected (surprising the second person in the queue who ran back to their car), and we were on our merry way… again.
Our first “real” stop of the day was at the Stuðlagil Canyon, where we enjoyed the view over the river and the impressive basalt structures. There was a set of paths and platforms on our side of the canyon, with more hiking paths on the other side (there was a bit of regret of not having gone to the other side, but oh well) and the view was super impressive. And not only because the island in the middle looked like a gigantic alligator.
After this, it was already quite later than what we had expected. There was another possible stop on our path to our other main stop, and the words “we’ll time box the waterfall” may have been pronounced today. It was indeed a quick stop along the ring road, but Rjúkandi was a pretty waterfall.
Our last objective for the day was to go see Hafnarhólmi, known for being a breeding ground for puffins and other birds (although it was slightly too late for the season). Mostly, the road to there was supposed to be spectacular, and there was also many hiking paths in the vicinity. We didn’t have time for the hiking paths, but the road was indeed wonderful: the mountain pass next to the see made us stop multiple times and gush with awe all along the way.
Hafnarhólmi was a nice place, with some installations to be able to watch birds from inside. We saw a lot of gulls, but it was definitely not puffin season. We did see one from afar, however! and decided the mission was a success.
Following that, we drove to our hotel in Egilsstaðir, where we settled and had a great dinner and went for a very short stroll around the hotel to see the lake. We had some hope to see Northern lights tonight, but it seems the cloud layer is disagreeing with that hope. Maybe later!
We’re staying another night in the hotel we reached last night; and today we didn’t go that far away from our home base, but we still did a lot of things!
We had a few spots we wanted to get to, and we had seen many other possibilities in the region. We had some worries this morning because at first it looked like the road to Dettifoss might not be easily accessible with our small car, but the information that we had first found was outdated, and the road was a beautiful paved road all along.
We left shortly after these breakfast worries to go a few kilometers away to have a look at the Skútustadagrig pseudo-craters – pseudo-craters because they haven’t been created by a magma chamber but by a steam explosion when lava came in contact with the lake. Beautiful area, cool formations, and amazing views on the Mýtavn lake.
A bit further away, Höfði was a small hike in a woody area which, considering the low amount of trees in this country, is somewhat of an oddity. The viewpoint at the end of the wood was lovely, and it was a nice and quiet moment.
Next was one of our “must do” for the day: the lava field in Dimmuborgir. It was apparently a “must do” for many people, because this may well be the place where we’ve seen the most tourists so far! And it’s not surprising: it’s a really peculiar place. It’s full of lava pillars that were formed as a lava lake drained and steam erupted, and there’s a lot of structures that really feel unique. The site is well developed with multiple paths of various lengths going through the lava field. Walking around these was definitely a great experience (we may or may not have made Astrosmurf references.)
Our next “must see” was Dettifoss, and we decided to go there immediately after that since it was already the beginning of the afternoon. We made a very short stop on the way when we saw a lake with an amazing blue/turquoise color next to a geothermic power plant.
After a few dozens of kilometers in a landscape that I’d qualify as “desolate”, we arrived at the Dentifoss site. Dentifoss is the second largest waterfall (in terms of water volume) of Europe (the first one being the Rhine falls in Switzerland). I’ve been to the Rhine falls, and the weirdest thing about Dentifoss is how long it takes before you actually see water. We saw the rainbow of the fall much before seeing any water at all, and the surrounding area looks very dry (it’s mostly basalt columns everywhere).
But Dentifoss itself is awe-inspiring. I was speechless when we reached it, and for a while after that I could only make incomprehension noises and gestures.
It’s powerful, it demands respect, it’s incredibly beautiful. The water is an opaque grey, probably from the rock around, and the swirls before the waterfall are mesmerizing.
We walked to Selfoss as well, which is on the same site; and Selfoss is probably suffering from the comparison with its big sister. It’s still a grandiose waterfall (after all, the water volume is comparable, even if it’s not split exactly in the same way), and the area just before the waterfall is beautiful.
Our initial hope was to be able to reach the canyon in Ásbyrgi, but it was too tight, timing-wise, to be sure to be back in our hotel vicinity for dinner time. Instead, we drove back to where we were coming from, and did a stop in Námafjall – we had seen the site from the road on the way, and it looked interesting. Interesting it was, but beware the smell! It’s a geothermal site with a lot of fumerolles and clay pots, and it’s super impressive to see the gray clay boil. The steam coming out of these was also impressive. A great visit, but the strong smell (more than sulfur in there, we think) can be at times overwhelming.
Finally, we still had a bit of time before we had to go back, so we went to see the Krafla crater that was basically on the other side of the road. It’s also the site of a geothermal power plant, and we were both fascinated by the industrial infrastructure around it, pipes going down the volcano and high pressure steam coming out of the vents. The crater itself was also beautiful, with some water at the bottom, and very cool to see from above.
With that, we reached the end of our day; we had dinner at a hotel next to ours – the food was tasty (I particularly liked my broccoli soup), if not super memorable. And we’re back to the hotel, I’m hurting a bit everywhere (it’s been two fairly intensive walking days!) but I’m incredibly happy with the great day we’ve had today.
We had a significant amount of road of today’s programme, because the minimum amount of driving was 270km for 3h21. We ended up doing more than that and visited many things along the way: we left the previous hotel around 9h30 and we arrived at today’s hotel at 19h15!
We started with a first stop in Kolugljúfur Canyon, which was, as expected, a canyon. Beautiful place with a waterfall ending in a river flowing inside a canyon.
We then drove to Þingeyraklausturskirkja, which promised a small church with a beautiful panoramic view, and it didn’t disappoint. The church was unfortunately closed (I would have liked to see the inside!), but the panoramic view didn’t disappoint!
Nearby (basically going back to the main road and crossing it), we did a stop at the Vatnsdalshólar view point. Google Maps had a lot of pictures of a dog, and said dog was indeed in the vicinity and very friendly 🙂 There was a small hill with a staircase that had a very nice view over the nearby water and the field of hills behind it.
By that point, we hadn’t moved very far from our departure point towards our goal, so we drove a bit more of the main road, with the goal of stopping at Reykjafoss.
Reykjafoss is a beautiful waterfall, and probably my favorite one of all the ones I saw today. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and the river that feeds it is surprisingly quiet. Of note: there’s also a hot pot on the side of said river, so we crossed paths with a least a pair of people in bathing suits and there was a few more around 🙂 It’s also very close to a stable, so there’s quite a few horses around.
After Reykjafoss, we aimed for our next stop, but did an extra one near Hörgarsveit, which was a decent parking lot on the Ring Road, where we wanted to switch drivers (I don’t drive that much, but I’m trying to drive a bit more so that Pierre can rest a bit!). That bit didn’t work that well because I had to yield the wheel earlier than I would have liked (but my drowsiness level was becoming dangerous 🙁 ), but Hörgarsveit was a nice road stop, with a river flowing down a canyon. Officially there should be hiking trails starting there, but the bit we saw looked frankly too dangerous for us.
Goðafoss was our last planned stop for the day; an impressive waterfall (although carrying a significant amount of particles), with very well organized paths on both sides of it. A very enjoyable site (and sight!).
By then, we were half an hour away from our hotel, which was a good thing as we had a restaurant reservation there 45 minutes later. We arrived in the beautiful area of the Mývatn lake in time for the evening light. We had dinner at the restaurant hotel (good stuff and well prepared), went outside for a little bit to enjoy the evening view – vaguely spoiled by the amount of insects; this is going to be a problem tomorrow, probably. Still, the area looks amazing.
Back in our hotel room, I realized sunscreen would have been smart today (oops), and Pierre stumbled upon Ghostbusters on the TV (so I watched the end of Ghostbusters, which apparently I know by heart more than I thought), and that’s pretty much it for today!
