Monday, August 2
The drive from the far north to the Snaefellnes Peninsula in the far west took a bit more than five hours. The opening stretches, down the west coast of the Tröllaskagi Peninsula, included some spectacular stretches high above the Arctic Ocean. Much of the rest of the drive saw us rolling through surprisingly bucolic farmland.
The Snaefellnes Peninsula is a kind of Iceland in miniature: volcanos, a glacier, and lots and lots of water. Our hotel was in a place called Budir, which consisted of our hotel and an unusual black church sitting above the ocean. We threw our things into our room and headed out for a walk along the high basalt cliffs in the region. Starting out from the village of Arnarstapi, a path leads up onto the cliffs; within two hundred yards we were startled by a deafening racket coming from the ocean. We were soon above the biggest rookery either of us had ever seen.
This was only the first of many sites along the path that harbored bird life; we must have seen hundreds of thousands of birds of a number of different species. As we walked along we encountered several more areas with astonishing numbers of birds; some of the rock formations–or at least those not covered by bird dung–were memorable.
The sun was coming in and out late in the day, but we were occasionally reminded that we were walking right under the Snaefells Glacier.
About halfway along the path, we entered the vast lava flow coming down from the volcano that erupted underneath the glacier about 1200 years ago.
This particular flow had come all the way down from the volcano and right into the water. Some of the wild formations in the water are this lava, while others are volcanic plugs (small volcanos erupted under the water, and as the water cooled the magma, their core was. solidified).
This was a good walk after a day in the car…and a nice dinner at the hotel put an exclamation mark on the day.