Day 12 - more waterfalls and black sand beaches

 We spent the night at Hellisholar Cottages  - dubbed the hell hole.  It was horribly flooded, and only had one toilet block for the entire camp, comprised of 3 toilets and two showers for the women, assume same for the men.  No kitchen or common room, so absolutely nowhere to charge anything that needed a 3 pin plug.

B had decided to sleep in the front seat of the van rather than brave the tent, which turned out to be not so comfortable, not helped by my midnight excursion to the loo, and having to slam the door 3 times to get the stupid thing to close properly.  It’s really heavy and you really do have to be mad with it to get it to close.  And if it doesn’t close properly, the wind fair whistles in, bringing the cold with it.  When we left this morning it was 2 degrees, feels like minus 3, and the puddles had all iced over.

Hell Hole campsite


We boiled water and made coffee in the van, made a passable breakfast of rolled oats and dried cranberries, wondered what Ham Guy would be having for breakfast with no kitchen to slice in, and left about 8.30ish.  We headed for the black sand beach that had been recommended as a good drone spot, but the wind was pretty strong and I had to fly with caution and land asap.  Still it was good to get it up in the air in Iceland for the first time.  Interestingly I got a warning to say I was close to an airport and I had to accept responsibility for the drone to be allowed to continue.  Very relaxed rules it seems.

Time for more waterfalls - Seljalandsfoss was first up.  


Seljalandsfoss

Quite busy with tourists and while you can walk in behind it, we opted not to as we didn’t want to get wet.

There was a 500 metre walk from Seljandsfoss to Gljufurarfoss, which was less busy and quite a neat spot, though again, we didn’t want to schlep camera gear in to the cave and risk slipping and dropping the lot in the river.

Gljufurarfoss


Next we headed for Skogafoss waterfall, and it was packed with tourists.  Very tall and wide and quite impressive spectacle but terrible for photo ops.  You can walk up the very steep hill next to the waterfall to the top, but it was lined with slow moving people and we couldn’t be bothered. 

If this is shoulder season, it must be heaving with people in the height of summer.  We are hoping as we get further from Reykjavik it will get less crowded as we get away from the “3 days in Iceland” tours.

Skogafoss


And we weren’t quite done with waterfalls, one more for today.  The stupid GPS guy on the tablet we got with the van directed us to a dead end road on the wrong side of the river. That’s a few times he has sent us to the wrong place, so we now have to double check everything.  We back-tracked, almost right back to where we were at Skogafoss, and walked to it. It was a lovely spot, way less people than the others and much more interesting.

Kvernufoss


We are now slightly ahead of the suggested schedule that we were working to, we skipped a few things that were recommended that we weren’t terribly interested in, and spent less time than expected at some of the waterfalls as they were so crowded.

We decided to spend the night in Vik, a small town near the famous Reynisfjara black sand beach, that has an amazing volcanic formation at the end, and the Reynisdrangar sea stacks.  This camp ground is marginally better, it has a very new and clean toilet block, and a kitchen, though it only has one hot plate to cook with and one working set of 4 plugs.  I grabbed one to charge camera batteries as I now have two flat.  We cooked dinner of pasta and fresh veges flavoured with a bought tomato pasta sauce left over from yesterday.

We had grand plans to catch the sunrise tomorrow morning but the rain has stared and that seems unlikely.


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