July 29

Geirland-Kirkjugolf-Dverghamrar-Svartifoss-Svinafellsjokull-Jokulsarlon-Stokksnes-Egilsstadir

tracklog: http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=1222547
képek: http://www.panoramio.com/user/4350353/tags/day4
video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZhRUU_3q90

Day 4 promised to be a long one with long distances and lots of sights to see. We made short stops and the basalt stones of Kirkjugolf and Dverghamrar and planned to go to Nuppstadur but they opened only at 10am – d’oh! Lomagnupur mountain and the perfect weather more than made up for this loss. Svartifoss was along the way, made the hike up there to this relatively small but beautiful waterfall with black basalt rocks serving as the background.

Lomagnupur

Svartifoss

Svinafellsjokull is yet another glacier tongue close to Ring Road, we gave it a visit and saw how an organized group is glacier walking on it. As we drove east we saw more and more of  the mighty Vantnajokull, a glacier covering 8% of Iceland, the largest one in Europe. Our next stop was yet another totally amazing out of this world, ”only in Iceland” place: Jokulsarlon glacier lagoon. Huge icebergs fall into a lake and travel several kilometers until reaching the sea. They have a boat here which drives around the lake, really nice but you can see almost the same from the land as well. We were really lucky with the weather as it was just perfect, don’t even want to think about how it is to sit on an open boat in rain and look at grey icebergs.

Jokulsarlon

Jokulsarlon icebergs

We had around 250km to go and stopped next at Stokksnes peninsula(?) with impressive mountains right at the sea, white sea lions, a NATO radar site and an “ancient viking village” left over from a Hollywood movie set. From here on the scenery changed quite drastically, we entered the east fjords with barren and desolate mountains and rocks. We stopped for a short while at a seaside rock called Dalkur then made a shortcut on road 939 which is hardly worse than the ring Road at this place and finally arrived to Egillstadir, capital of the east with a massive 2000 inhabitants.

video: