Seljalandsfoss
This was a looong, exhausting day! It’s always light and we didn’t manage to get into bed before 11 or 11:30pm. That would be fine if we were sleeping late, but for example, this morning I got up just after 4 am and woke up Pam shortly after because the light was so pretty for photographs. We spent the full morning photographing all the falls.
Photos were also of cliffs, birds, the smaller waterfalls right above the campground. The light was beautiful. The sunlight started to hit the cliffs, rising from behind and we walked back and forth on the ¼ mile trail between Seljalandsfoss and the hidden waterfall of Gljufrabui all morning. Later, we put on our rain gear to walk behind the big waterfall, and into the grotto of Gljufrabui. Around 11am, we left the campground and went to the snack trailer at the tourist entrance to look for lunch. Meat soup was on the menu, but it wasn’t ready yet. We drove out at around 11:30 heading to another famous waterfall called Skogafoss.
Skógafoss
After more than an hour of driving, we reached the short road at the entrance to Skogafoss where we stopped and took pictures of the lupines. (Lupine fields were in full bloom everywhere and we couldn’t resist taking lots of pictures of them as we traveled around Iceland.) We then took a ton of pictures at the base of the falls before walking up a huge flight of primitive metal stairs to see the top view. Not only was the waterfall itself stunning (water spray rainbows everywhere), but the stream feeding the falls had a whole series of smaller waterfalls that went on as far as you could see. We later learned that this was the start of a series of hiking trails that eventually ended up at Þórsmörk (Thorsmork), a valley of steep cliffs and stunning vistas.
Dyrhólaey
We drove on and arrived at the Dyrhólaey Lighthouse around 3:30 after about 45 min of driving, which included a hair-raising drive to the top of this promontory at the end. The narrow loose-gravel road was steep with lots of switchbacks and hard to do in a large-ish campervan with a manual shift. We should have gone to the lower road and hiked up but we were blindly following Google directions. When we realized that the road was a bad idea, it was too late. There was no turning around and nothing to do but continue up. If there was no traffic it would have been OK, but passing other cars was awful.
The view at the top, however, was magnificent! And it was really, really windy! We took care not to get blown off any cliffs…, seriously! The views of the lighthouse, bird cliffs, black-sand beaches and distant glacier were all breathtaking. Looking south near the lighthouse were the iconic sea stacks (Dyrholaey means “the hill island with the door hole”, referring to the sea stack just off shore).
There was also a wedding photographer with bride and groom posing on a cliff edge. Though they appeared to stay back from the edge, I don’t have a clue how they got anything useful in that wind!
We drove on to Vik, over another mountain ridge. We checked in to the campground at around 6:40 pm where we took more photos of the lupine-covered hillsides after dinner. We crashed back into bed around 10:30 pm, an early night.
