Fire and ice: Iceland road trip, day 1

Southern Iceland from the ring road

The only way to visit Iceland properly is by road trip. Marko and I hired a campervan to drive the ring road all the way around the country. We asked the lady who handed over our vehicle for directions to get out of Reykjavik. She eagerly punched the name of a town into the Garmin navigation device and waved us along.

A pretty church in a small town

We allowed the Garmin to lead us and thus we ended up in a town where we learned our first lesson: supermarkets in Iceland don't open until 11:00 AM. We were there almost an hour earlier. We needed supplies for our road trip so we decided to wait by browsing through brochures in the adjoining tourist information office and then by having coffee in a nearby coffee shop, both of which were open. Traveling through Iceland is easy. Everyone speaks English and plenty of tourist information is available.

One of many waterfalls

As we continued our way along the ring road, we excitedly stopped for our first sight, a waterfall. It wasn't until many waterfalls later that we realized that the country is so abundant with waterfalls, they aren't really attractions.

Lava field

The scenery became more interesting as we approached first an intriguing lava field and then the two glaciers on the south, first the Mýrdalsjökull and then the much larger Vatnajökull. They looked ominous with their icy flanks reaching out from behind mountains and their upper sections vanishing into the clouds.

Vatnajökull glacier

The most majestic and amazing sight was when we reached the point where the Vatnajökull glacier is melting into a short river that leads out towards the sea. This was my first encounter with a glacier up close and I was totally in awe with the huge proportions of the ice blocks that were floating out. The weather had cleared up and it was sunny so that the ice sparkled beautifully. But a fierce wind was blowing that seemed to remind me that we were still dealing with nature at its strongest.

Glacier melting

We ended our first day in Höfn, advertised as the lobster capital of Iceland. We decided to head into a restaurant to try the langoustine. It was delicious and came with beer made from glacier water.