After breakfast, the landlady told me that driving around island must be possible, but that some roads are closed during winter... We would find out later...
we started driving direction north and found ourselfs alone again on the road... roads... Iceland has 5 different roads: the first is a black asfalt road, almost brand new... suprizingly iceland has lots of these... max speed 90km... Then there are gravel roads... suddenly an asfalt road can change into a gravel road for many kilometers, and then back again... the gravel roads are ok... max speed 80km... next you have snow-roads... roads you recogize because there are yellow poles at both sides, so inbetween this must be the road... all white, not necessarily with tracks... furthermore you have ice-roads, more about that in the next chapter... and finally, there are closed roads they have a sign "impassable"... Be aware that "impassable" means really impassable.
Driving along the coastline we spotted suddenly some reindeers.
I was able to get real close and took some pictures from the car...
the landscape was again changing with the minute... let me show you what I mean...
it was not sunny, and since we wanted to drive a shortcut over land, it was not going to get better we thought. It got colder and at times we were driving through the snow...
Still back at the coast, the landscape kept on grabbing our attention...
they say... A picture is worth a thousand words...
But soon we would leave the sea side, As you can see on the map... so we said goodbye for now... to the sun and the sea...
As you can see on the map here below, we are on the blue line now... and there's a short dotted line, this road was closed... impassable... we almost tried it... I'm glad we didn't... there whas a sign 17% steep... that's a lot! and on snow and ice, just dangerous!
But we didn't want to follow the green road on the map, thus we drove into the country...
the first signs didn't look to good
this must have been a german car.
well, from now on, it started to get tough, steep, and snowy...
I have to skip the pictures for a while... they are all equal... white... the car gave us a lot of confidence though and after a while, weather was getting a lot better.
this was a beautiful moment, I will try to pass it to you, by posting some pictures... but we were driving there, all alone, and the landscape was sooo amazing, we stopped a lot to take pictures and enjoy the environment. let me show you what I mean...
we drove for a few hours through that amzing landscape and little by little it started to change, we were comming closer to some new places...
sun was slowly going down too...
I said to myself... if you haven't seen the fumaroles and boiling mudpools, you haven't been to iceland... unfortunately, there's not so many of them. there's more mountains and lava then mudpools... but... we found them...
only back at home, I noticed that there were some nasty dirt spots on my camera's sensor, fortunately there's lightroom :-) just now, I noticed that the two pics here above haven't been treated yet... ;-)
the fumaroles were sometimes real cute... enjoy...
after visiting these... smelling like rotten eggs... it took us ages to get back into the car... the earth, or clay was sticking onto our shoes so hard... guess they really wanted to come with us back to belgium... perhaps they liked chocolates... ;-)
we were reaching our new goal, a place with lots of geotermic activity... we were going for a swim later, there was a second blue lagoon over there, but first we were amazed again, enjoying the scenery...
there was a lake at myvatn that naturaly was steaming
obviously the water was not so cold...
time for a swim... and... for a drink?
after this wonderful swim, 41° feels heavenly... we rushed down the mountain towards Akureyri and just catched the last sun
Akureyri, is the second biggest city in Iceland, and felt so strange to be among people again... In our quest for a place to sleep, we stumbeled onto a hostel we didn't like very much, but since it was late and we were hungry (it was 21.00)...
food in Iceland is kinda strange, lots of thai, italian and other foreing kitchen, but of course we wanted to taste the icelandic food... there was not so many, in fact you have to enter a genereal restaurant, offering pizza's aswell as lamb and fish... mmm... lamb was soo good, and I bought a bottle of brunello for about 40€ in the restaurant... would have been at least the double in belgium... :-)
Good night... tell you more tomorrow...
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