Following our full day exploring Reykjavík on the Saturday our Sunday plan was to hit the southern coast of Iceland instead. Prior to visiting the country we’d booked a 10-hour tour with Gray Line called South Iceland, Waterfalls, and Black Sand Beach.
Gray Line tours depart from their main office to the north east of the capital city just across the water from the island of Videy. It is possible to make your own way there for the departure time but free pick-ups are provided around Reykjavík too using minibuses. Our pick-up was just a few minutes walk from our hotel at Bus Stop Number 1 – Ráðhúsið/City Hall. It’s worth noting if you’re looking at a map or arriving at the location that there are bus stops on both sides of the road but as far as we could tell – and certainly as far as we were concerned – tour buses were picking people up only from the southern side. Our excursion was due to start at 09:00 which meant pick-ups were commencing from 08:30 and when we arrived just before then there were a lot of people already waiting and trying to find somewhere that the wind wasn’t striking them quite so violently. We initially thought everyone was going on the same tour as us but it soon became apparent that there were at least a dozen different groups getting ready to explore the Icelandic landscape somewhere with different companies.
Of course, with this being Iceland in December it was dark at 08:30. And cold. Very, very cold.
Our minibus eventually turned up, our names were checked, we got aboard, were whisked across to the main office, transferred to the big bus, and very soon after 09:00 were on our way eastwards out of the city then south towards the coast. It was still dark but the sun was starting to create some lovely colours on the horizon.
Hvolsvöllur
The first stop was at the small town of Hvolsvöllur. This was strictly a toilet and refreshments break as there was very little else to see or do where we parked. But that’s a relative term when you’re talking about Iceland because the views are always spectacular in some way wherever you are, and since we neither required the use of the loo nor picking up anything to eat or drink, having sensibly done the latter at the shop near our hotel before we left, I snapped a few images of the Icelandic landscape while everyone else sunk some coffee and grabbed snacks.
Eyjafjallajökull
We passed Seljalandsfoss on our left hand side – this would be the last place we would visit during our return to Reykjavík later in the day – then made a stop by the roadside a while after, a photo opportunity to take pictures of Eyjafjallajökull. The almost unpronounceable Eyjafjallajökull is an ice cap which feeds several glaciers in the region. It’s far more famous, though, as being on top of the stratovolcano that erupted in 2010 and caused huge disruption to air travel around Iceland.
The long shadows cast by the sun slowly creeping into the sky were fabulous.
Skógafoss Waterfall
The next stop on our tour of southern Iceland was the first of the two waterfalls we would be visiting, Skógafoss. Its 60 metre drop makes it one of the largest waterfalls in Iceland and even if you’ve not visited it in person you might have still seen it anyway as it featured as a location in the movie Thor: The Dark World.
With the low, weak sun coming from the south our view of the waterfall and the huge amount of spray it was throwing up was accompanied by a rainbow. The waterfall area formed a small valley and the wind was bitterly cold as it thundered down it. Taking photos was a case of removing gloves for the briefest of seconds to take the picture then immediately replacing them and rubbing the fingers for warmth. That spray and the wind were the reasons we didn’t want to venture too close to Skógafoss although plenty of people did. If I hadn’t had my camera with me then I might have done so too. But when don’t I have my camera with me?
There are steps to the right side of Skógafoss that lead up to a viewing platform and form part of a walking route that heads as far back to the west as Eyjafjallajökull. Because of our tour duration limits we would only really have had time to climb to the top then come back down and with the light falling on the waterfall the way it was I decided we’d get better views from ground level. At a different time of the year or even day I might have made the ascent.
All that water cascading off Skógafoss has to go somewhere and it was into a river that flowed surprisingly slowly to the south of us. You can see just how cold it was from the lumps of ice floating downstream and the shallow edge closest to where we were was frozen over completely which encouraged some people to even walk on it and take photos.
In the second post covering this south coast of Iceland tour I’ll include the next two stops – the village of Vík and the black sand beach at Reynisfjara – and the third post will conclude this excellent Gray Line excursion with an unexpected stop at the Sólheimajökull glacier before our second waterfall of the day and the place we’d passed a little earlier, Seljalandsfoss.