Seydisfjordur was first on our list today. This is a seventeen km long fjord and a town at the inland end of the fjord. It was a beautiful 26 km drive from Egilsstadir over a mountain range and then dropping down to the harbour that is where the ferry from Denmark comes to. We saw beautiful tree and moss covered hills and many waterfalls. The quaint town has always been a fishing village and is now also an artist colony.
We then returned to Egilsstadir on our way south to visit the East Iceland Heritage Museum which only opens at 1 pm during the off season
. This is a remarkable museum that shows by photos and artifacts what life was like in this area farming and raising sheep and cows during the last two centuries. This is the period of time that saw the transition from life as it was after Iceland was discovered in the tenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Inside the museum there was reconstructed an actual turf house that was lived in from the mid eighteenth century until as late as 1964.
After our museum visit, we started on travels down the eastern fjords. Although it was raining, it did not deter us from our proposed drive south. It was a hair raising drive as we were accosted by rain (that sounded like hail), fog, gravel roads, blind hills in the road that had to be approached carefully as you could not see oncoming traffic, one lane bridges, and a particular joyride on one nineteen km stretch where there were all of the above AND seventeen degree inclines with some on curves and some just curved only at the crest of a hill. Best of all was more guard rails that the previous thousand km! In Iceland, guard rails at the road edge are only used at the side of the road when there is a straight vertical sheer drop, not just an incredibly steep death defying slope at the side of the road. Oh, did we mention that Icelandic road have no guard rails to speak of? Although the road are pretty good generally, they are narrow and have no shoulders as well
. The roads are also elevated as compared to ours in Canada. We assume that is for snow control. The snow just blows off the road surface which is higher than the surrounding land.
Djupivogur was the next fishing town we reached. Here we saw the unloading of cod from a large trawler into large vats on the dock by forklifts picking up large plastic containers and tipping them sideways. We also saw an outdoor art exhibit of eggs by a local famous artist Sigurdur Gudmundsson. He carved eggs out of marble and mounted them on the roadside posts on a very scenic drive at the edge of town. Each egg was a larger than life replica of the different eggs that the 34 different local birds lay.
At the southeast corner of this island we encounter their famous black beaches. The beaches are made up of black sand and tiny pieces of gravel that landed there as a result of the erupting volcanos many many years ago. The beaches were very wide and flat so there was a beautiful contrast of the beach with the foam of the breaking waves as they rolled very far up the black sand
. The mountains in this area were covered in very small gravel, unlike most of the areas that had large chunks or boulders of lava.
Hofn was our destination for the night. It is another fishing town with 2000 inhabitants, but lots of great restaurants and hotels and guest houses. We ate at Pakkhus Bar and Grill as was recommended by a fellow bathing couple, from Canada, when we were at the hot baths in Lake Myvatn. This is the lobster capital of Iceland, so we ate the specialty. The meal consisted of warm feta cheese in phyllo packets, langoustine duo, local beer made from glacier water and spiced with local thyme (white wine for Minna) and skyr volcano desert (skyr, an Icelandic yogurt, as a mousse covered with caramel sauce and crispy crackling rice). The duo consisted of about thirty langoustines grilled in their shells with bread crumbs and butter and garlic and langoustine spring rolls - heaven from an exoskeleton.
We waddled to our hotel room and off to sleep because of a necessary early start tomorrow.
Eastern fjords
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Höfn, East, Iceland
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