South Iceland – Hella to Öræfum (ORE-eye-fum)

Nonni’s breakfast lived up to his reputation (look up Guesthouse Nonni on Trip Advisor…he’s a solid five stars, with 80 reviews.  Waffles, home-baked bread (3 kinds!!), ham, cheese, home-made jam, tomatoes, cucumbers, and raisin buns.  We chatted with our host and two of the other guests for an hour, then got on our way.  Among other sights, we passed Seljalandsfoss, a lovely waterfall you can walk behind, though at 8C (46F), we decided not to, as it looked pretty damp back there.

Soon, we drove past Eyjafjallajökull, where there is little sign of damage caused by the 2010 eruption.  All the ash seems to have been shoveled away to somewhere else.  I think they pave their roads with it…it’s a very tough material.

Not too far down the road was the village of Skógar, with its well-known folk museum.  The main building contains a dizzying amount of stuff, from pump-organs to fishing boats, side-saddles to hand-lathes, all more or less organized.  But basically, too much stuff all crammed together to be able to take it all in.  The outdoor part was much more to our taste…old buildings brought from the area and set up in one place.  Turf-houses, the first wooden house from the area (built entirely from driftwood from shipwrecks), the tiniest church ever, and a house built around its cow-shed…sleeping quarters above the cows, sitting room next door to them.  Early central heating?

Today turned out to be kind of long, and pretty tiring for Lars.  We had been seeing warnings about sandstorms for some days, and so decided to buy the extra insurance on the car, against damage from sand.  Today, we were glad we had!  When we got to Vik, where we planned to eat lunch, we drove out to the bird cliffs.  There were LOTS of fulmars nesting and swooping around, but they don’t photograph well.  There were some cool rock formations, though…

But…when we finished with that and turned back into town, we could see a brown haze on the horizon.  We decided we should at least go see if it was sand or only dust.  Icelandic sand is mostly ground-up lava particles…very sharp edges that can really do in a car’s paint. The signs said the winds were “only” 15m/s (34 mph), and from the color it looked like dust.  Since we HAD bought the insurance, we forged ahead.  We did encounter some sand, clearly visible as blackness blowing across the road, but it was minimal.  By the time we got to Kirkujbærklauster (CHURCH-you-bye-er-Kloy-ster), 75 kilometers away and over the worst “sandur”, the winds had increased to 30m/s (67 mph, and constant).  Haven’t checked yet to see if the road was closed behind us, but we were happy to have come ahead.  The car had some very fine dust on it, but nothing more.  You can see the brown dust against the white glacier in the first picture.

Part of why we wanted to get to Kirkjubærklauster was the 3 restaurants advertised.  All were closed.  So we had lunch at the gas station—all gas stations seem to have a grill as well as a convenience store.  Then we braved the winds to visit the Kirkjugólf (CHURCH-you-golf), an interesting geologic formation.  You can’t usually see the tops of basalt columns, as they are usually caprock and get covered over with dirt and grass. Here the ocean had eroded away the overlying rocks and soil and worn this patch of columnar basalt down to a nice, smooth surface, similar to the floor in an ancient church.  There is evidence that Irish hermit-monks lived in the area, well before the Vikings settled Iceland in 874.   (http://www.klaustur.is/Ferdathjonusta/English/Interesting_places/Kirkjugolf).

Kirkjubærklauster is the site of a notable historical event, Eldmessa  (http://icelandicroots.com/tag/eldmessa/), when Reverend Jón Steingrímsson (1728-1791) was the pastor at Kirkjubæjarklaustur during the huge 1783 Laki fissure eruption. This was the deadliest volcanic eruption in Iceland. Reverend Steingrimsson performed a mass that came to be called “Eldmessa” that appeared to have stopped a massive lava-flow a short distance from the Kirkjubærklauster church.

And, we now have a couple of favorite Icelandic birds, the tjalder (CHAL-dur) and the lóa (like it looks…).

And just because they didn’t make it into yesterday’s post, here are the two mandatory travel shots of us….there may not be many more!