Akureyri, Iceland

Iceland is beautiful!

   
This is the fjord as we're pulling into Akureyri. We got up by 6:30 to watch as we cruised down the fjord. Of course it was light outside, it was light all night. It's strange to wake up and see light behind the curtains and check your watch and see that it's 2:30 in the morning. Very strange.

  
Our position on the Navigation Channel. Second picture is our map of Iceland an Jim is pointing to our location.


  
The beauty is so amazing and so different from anything we've ever seen before and just like the Grand Canyon and other places, so difficult to really capture it.

  


  
Finally some green and a flat place to put a house and have some land.

  
More green and me looking through the binoculars.

  

  
We went up to the front of the ship on the deck as we cruised in. It was windy and cold up there.

  
The town of Akureyri and the first look at the port.

  
We're off the ship and a picture in front of the map.

  
This was our itinerary for the day.... it was a lot to see in one day, and our transportation. He had a ladder to help get up into the truck. It was a long ride to get to our first stop. Our tour company was IceAk Super Jeep Tours. Our guide, Sven, was a great driver as we drove about 300 km, but not so much of a guide. Nice enough guy but not used to talking with or watching out for his guests.

  
A map of our stop and Denise making a snow ball. She, of course, lives in Phoenix and she doesn't get to do that very often.

  
We walked through the snow for over 1.2 km to get to the falls. It was difficult to walk in and exhausting as well.

  
Then we got to the Dettifoss Falls.


  
Huge falls and massive amounts of water falling over it.

  
We walked to another viewing point and took some pictures. Denise up on the rocks taking pictures.

  
Our guide brought us to another view of the falls, kind of a side view which I enjoyed even better.

  
It was chilly and windy but by the time we had hiked all that way we were warmer and opened up our jackets some. It really was a beautiful day.

If you notice our shoes, they're waterproof hiking type shoes. This was a last minute purchase, and I mean last minute. We had talked to Bob and Denise who had purchased some shoes like these and after talking with Jim about it we decided it would be a good idea. So on our way to Miami to spend the night before we got on the ship we stopped at Bass Pro and bought these. They are and have been a wonderful purchase.  

  
We walked a little closer to the side of the waterfall and we saw a beautiful rainbow.

  
It was nice to have our guide with us to take some pictures.

  
Another view of the rainbow and in the picture on the right look in the snow in front of the falls and you see part of what looks like a circle. The black from the volcanic rock and the spray from the falls make these interesting circle patterns in the snow.



Our next stop was Hafragilsfoss, another waterfall. However there was no road there. I showed you what our vehicle looked like and we drove out onto the snowy landscape. The jeep was struggling at first in the snow and he put it in 4-wheel drive. Still it wasn't working very well so he got out and let air out of the tires and off we went through the snow. We drove for about 1 km, almost to the edge of the cliff. We got out and walked the rest of the way to the edge to see another beautiful waterfall.

  

  
Almost like the Grand Canyon of Iceland.

   
The waterfall is behind me in this picture and the picture on the right was of the opposite view, down stream.

  
  
We headed back up to the truck.  We wanted to get a picture of our tire tracks coming into the area. We followed the same tracks back out and then our driver had to refill the tires with air, fortunately there was a compressor built into the engine of the truck. Good thing to have in this area.

 
A couple more pictures of our snow tracks.

Our next stop was Hverir, a geothermal area with fumaroles and mud pots and a lot of sulfur smell.
  
The steam was just hissing out of this pile of rocks.

 
The mud was blooping up like a boiling pot.

 
This explains a little about how this occurs.

Next we stopped for lunch at Jardbodin, a great little lunch spot with great soup, a traditional lunch in Iceland.
  
They also had nature baths and lots of people were there enjoying the hot water baths.

  
Gtjotagja is the home of the former nature baths and as you can see it was down in a cave. You cannot bathe in this place anymore.  The water was not as hot as it once was nor as hot as the other nature bath.

Up on top was a place where the North American and European tectonic plates are dividing. Iceland is the only place where the effects of two major tectonic plates drifting apart can easily be observed above sea level.

  
Some silliness standing on two different tectonic plates, the North American plate and the European plate.

  
It was an amazing sight.

    
Our next stop was Dimmuborgir which is an unusually shaped lava field.

  

  
A beautiful photo stop.

Skutustadagigar is a place where pseudo craters were formed by gas explosions when boiling lava flowed over the wetlands.

  

We were getting so tired after all these stops but we had a couple more to go.

Our next stop was Godafoss waterfall.

  

  


Beautiful falls!

Our last stop was a view of our ship.
  
Beautiful view.

We were exhausted and got back to the ship at 6:20 pm and the ship was leaving at 6:30 pm. We just made it.

We had so many stops and it was tough walking in the snow and climbing steps, I believe we walked 17,000 steps and climbed over 40 flights of stairs. We were all so tired we grabbed a quick bite from the cafeteria and then went to bed. Tomorrow is another day and another port.