The South Coast with Sara

Today started with Sara’s prompt arrival at 8am… we gave her 2 hours to sleep, rest, relax, and get ready… so we laid in bed until 9:45 and then were late 🤣

Gummi, our guide for today, is a cool Icelandic dude who has been guiding tours for about 10 years. I asked what he did before that and he said he was a rockstar… and he wasn’t kidding- so he was in this band called Solstafir that toured Europe and the US as a drummer. He played us some of his music while we drove today, super cool. A few cool things he taught us:

1. Iceland has crazy detailed records of its citizens, so he can trace his own lineage back to like 800 AD 

2. Old English is similar to the Norse language of the Vikings, but when the Normans came up from France, they bastardized English to be more like those languages. Even Scandinavian languages have evolved more than Icelandic, which is the closest to the original Norse language. 

3. Icelandic people used to have to learn Danish, but now they learn English first. Even though they learn British English in school, they speak more American English because their tv and movies aren’t dubbed. 

4. The central highlands is not traveled very often, but is mostly a desert with little to no vegetation. Most activity is along the coast.

5. After the banks failed in 2008, there was a volcano eruption that made world news a couple years later, and that really put Iceland on that map. Between that and social media, tourism has become the biggest part of their economy since then. 

6. Iceland had the first female president in the world, and she was a single mom, in the 80s. They have 9 political parties, and the prime minister is elected from parliament usually based on which party has the most control in parliament. We asked what party he liked the most and he said he hated all of them! 

Our first stop after another fabulous rest stop visit for snacks (there was a whole section of dried fish) was this amazing series of waterfalls. Side note about rest stops here- it’s a good thing that the exchange rate is so hard to calculate because I’m pretty sure every time I walk out of a rest stop I’ve spent like 50 bucks. So I got an array of Icelandic chocolate and licorice for the road. 

Back to the waterfalls- so the first one was in this cave and insanely powerful… it was really misty and loud in there, and we were pretty soaked coming out. But such a cool force of nature. 

So we walked along this cliff past a few more smaller waterfalls just trickling down the mountain with green growing on either side. Just beautiful and peaceful. The second big waterfall was a little ways down and also super powerful. We didn’t walk under it but there was a path where it looked like you could during some times of year maybe. 

Our next stop was just as cool but in a different way- it was this black sand beach. But somehow the weather turned on our way there and by the time we arrived it was a sleet snowstorm with ridiculous wind, like almost knock you over wind. Like the storm was so bad that we didn’t even know we were at a beach! 

So we fought the way to the shore and there was this cave surrounded in basalt which gave us some refuge from the wind. I kept hearing George Costanza say “the sea was angry that day” while I looked at the huge waves crashing. There’s a phenomenon here called the “sneaker wave” because we were on the open Atlantic, so we had to be careful not to get too close to the ocean. The basalt cave was awesome, it is made from lava flow that cools and somehow forms hexagonal columns and as the water keeps hitting it, it falls off in this cool pattern. There was another frozen troll (rock formation) in the water, I think this one turned to stone when he was trying to move Iceland and then the sun came up and he froze.  So the trip back to the car was treacherous, and off to the next stop.

The next stop was the exact same weather but this time we were on a cliff. The irony is this morning when Sara got onto the shuttle the driver said “look at this beautiful spring day in Iceland! There’s no wind, not a cloud in the sky, and it’s so warm!” Obviously being sarcastic… and here we were, couldn’t be more opposite, and we kept shouting through the wind “Spring has sprung!!” This cliff overlooked another black sand beach and a stone arch. A little too cold to do more than snap a new photo and try to get back to the car. At this point my pink travel pants had worn off their welcome and I opted for my ski pants. Even Gummi wasn’t prepared in his jeans and he said he was cold, which made me feel better because I was continuously wondering how on earth he could tolerate this weather in jeans.

So next we went to this hidden surprise that blew our minds- we ended at the bottom of the Sohlheimajokull, which obviously means that it was a glacier. It is an outlet glacier which means that it is stretching out from this crevice in the mountain. They had photos of how it receded until the 60s, then it grew back, and now it is receding pretty quickly because of global warming. The icebergs in the water were crazy- it almost looked like a cartoon when we first saw them. And some of them were blue, which Gummi told us was because the ice has been compacted so much over time that it only lets blue light through, all the other frequencies are blocked by the density of the ice. Beautiful place.

Our last stop was one more huge waterfall- I mean these waterfalls are just as impressive, maybe more impressive as Yosemite in the spring. This one had steps so we could walk to the top and Gummi arranged for a rainbow to be brought out at the bottom, which was pretty rad. Again, just amazing the power of the waterfall and yet, in some ways seems to move in slow motion. 

Our last stop was this food hall in Selfoss on our way to the bubble! I got delicious lamb skewers and Sara got cod, and now we are here waiting for dark in our bubble  to see if the northern lights make an appearance. We won’t know for another 2 hours at least, because the sun just set now and it’s 9pm! Fingers crossed!