It did not start well. If you decide to travel with Iceladair, be ready to spend €10 for a chicken salad and €6 for a pair of headphones. When we landed at midnight, it was dark and cold and windy and raining and of course, the car we had booked was not there, nor anyone from the rental company. After a couple of calls and twenty minutes a guy looking 15 picked us up and drove us to their office, 5km away from Keflavik international. He filled the paperwork, gave us the keys and waited inside while we were outside trying to inspect the car in the freezing rain! The inspection was done under the flashlight of our iPhones and as we discovered later, we were very right to insist doing it.
Hotel Keflavik has small rooms but it was more than ok after the long flight and the post-midnight rental pickup adventure. The next day, the first thing I saw outside the hotel window was a gas station, the grey sky and the rain. Great…
After the breakfast buffet, with the interesting choices of smoked herring, pickles and cold cuts (what?) we Hekla. We drove to Reykjavik then followed route 1 eastbound, exited on F268 and 40km later, a right took a right towards the Hekla volcano. The landscape was black, volacnic turf everywhere, very close to what I had imagined the lunar landscape would look like (except for the color). We reached the bottom of Hekla and form there we experienced a wonderful view of the exotic landscape. It was a 3 hour walk to the top, so we decided to eat the breakfast sandwiches and head back to route 1.
After 90 minutes drive we reached the Seljalandfoss, a 60m waterfall. It is an impressive waterfall by all means, but what makes it more interesting is that you can actually walk behind the waterfall. I did, armed with my tripod mounted camera and 6 stop ND filter and came our soaked. But it was absolutely worth it. Next to the big waterfall there is a farm and at the back there is a fairy tail setup. You have to walk through a small river – actually you have to step in the water, it help us that I was wearing waterproof hiking boots – and get in a hidden canyon with a waterfall, surrounded by 30 meter high walls.
It was dark when we reached our hotel after a ridiculously expensive buffet dinner in a motel, four phone calls to ask for directions and some wrong turns. Welcome Edinborg is situated at the foot of Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano that stopped air traffic in Europe for a week during its last eruption in 2010. It is of typical ship-container architecture and has the smallest rooms I had ever slept in. I mean the rooms are really tiny and you need a high level of coordination with your partner to move around if both of you are in the room. You can reach the upper level by climbing a boat-style narrow stairway, where you find the breakfast room, a pool table and a quite cozy seating area.
Hotel Welcome Edinborg
Next: The southeast