Day 5 After a really restful night, I woke up and briefly hung out with some of the other friends I

Day 5

After a really restful night, I woke up and briefly hung out with some of the other friends I had met the night before. We took goofy photos and talked about what we had planned for our Icelandic excursion. I left the AirBnB and headed back westward on Ring Road, ultimately ending at Hella, where my next stay would be.

Things started off pretty well, and since I had a total of 5 hours to drive, I wanted to make sure I made a few pit stops along the way. The first was Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon, which is, as it’s described, a lagoon at the base of a glacier. A myriad of chunks of ice were flowing slowly in the lagoon downstream, and people have a great opportunity to see some of these ice chunks and take pictures. I snapped a few photos before heading across the street to Diamond Beach, a sandy black sand beach right by the lagoon that gets it’s name from the remarkably clear chunks of ice that can sometimes be found on the beach. This place was really phenomenal. You’re on a black sand beach, and then you have giant chunks of ice that are 5-8 feet tall. Some pieces are tiny and small, while others are much bigger. And they come in all sorts of colors. Some of them are crystal clear (like a diamond), while others are a translucent white. Some are really blue as well and others are black and tar colored. I need to figure out how they get their colors… 

After a brief stop at a smaller glacier lagoon about 15 minutes westward (Fjallsárlón), I continued my drive. I took another small detour near the city of Hof to check out the Hofskirkja Church, the last built turf church in Iceland, which dates back to 1885. I took a moment there to explore and look around the cemetery right beside the church. Each plot is a large rectangular mound of grass, almost resembling a coffin that’s above ground covered in turf. It’s really cool to see. At this point, a few snowflakes were coming down. Little did I know that later on my trip on Route 1 that the snow would start coming down like crazy…

As I continued my drive westward, my small car was beginning have some issues, as the snow continued to intensify. After about 30 minutes of heavy snow, I started to encounter slick spots on the road and slushy conditions that made driving really difficult. The snow would spin up into my tire well, causing my car to swerve every now and then. I drove slowly through most of it and thankfully stopped in Vik. I figured I’d wait for the snow to pass and explored Vik’s IceWear Factory Outlet. IceWear is an Icelandic clothing company that’s pretty much like a North Face. Everything is so expensive, including their famous Icelandic sweaters, made of sheep’s wool. They’re a little scratchy to the touch but they’re iconic, and pretty much everyone in Iceland has one. They cost anywhere between $120 – 250 USD+ which is way out of my price range. 

The snowfall began to lessen, and so I made my way from Vik westward, where I made another stop, this time in Sólheimasandur, which is near my previous hostel at Skógafoss  This is a site of a United States Navy Douglas Super DC-3 plane crash in 1973, which luckily everyone survived. The remains on the beach were never really cleaned up, and it’s been sitting there since. After about a 4 km walk to the crash site, you get to see a pretty cool relic surrounded by a black sand beach. It was cold and windy (but luckily no longer snowing), and the walk took a lot longer than I thought. You can’t see the plane from the parking lot, so that should be the first sign that the stroll’s going to take some time.

After a 4 km walk back to the car, I continued my drive and made my final pit stop back at Seljalandsfoss, the waterfall you can walk behind that I went to earlier in the week. I was hoping to catch it when there were less people and have more opportunity for good photography. There were only a dozen or so people there when I got there. I set up my tripod and got some awesome shots, including some of me posing all cool like on a rock adjacent to the waterfall. I put the camera on 20 second self timer and ran down to the spot, and managed to do so without falling and tripping, which is amazing. I was losing daylight and decided to head to my lodging in Hella.

After getting lost getting on my way there and showing up at someone else’s house, I finally made it to the AirBnB property with the help of the people who I inadvertently bothered. It’s crazy how pleasant my AirBnB experience was the night before near Vestrahorn versus this one. The host has several cabins, and sent me instructions and information, detailing that my cabin was the second on the left. I pulled up to the one I thought was mine, because the porch light was on and a key was in the door as she said there would be. I walked in, made myself at home. After figuring out that I had no WiFi (which was my fault for not knowing, even though it said there was no WiFi on the listing) I went to a nearby restaurant Kinslarinn, and ate a hamburger and fries. This was my first hot meal, for 1.65 ISK (16.50 USD). I used their internet and made plans to meet up with some of Huy’s friends (Lenika and Thor) when I returned to Reykjavik on Sunday. 

Anyway, I get back to my AirBnB, and as I looked out the window, a car pulls up to my place. They knock on my door and I greet them. The lady says she’s on the phone with the AirBnb host and that I’m in the wrong cabin… and the lady has a husband and three sleepy kids, so I was like.. oh shit sorry. After going to the correct cabin next door, I realize it’s more like a mini hostel. It’s a humongous cabin with four rooms with four beds each in them, multiple bathrooms, and a huge kitchen area. It sounds like it would be nice, but honestly, I’m not trying to stay in a giant cabin all by myself. Shit’s creepy. So anyway, the cabin had no instructions for anything, and she didn’t give me any information before I arrived except on how to get to the AirBnB. So, from what the nice couple from Seattle with their three kids said, there was 1 bed made for me in that house. It took me forever to find which bed was supposed to be mine while. It was odd because I figured, why don’t you just make all the beds? Like of the 12 beds, there’s only 1, and I have to find it. On top of that, the place wasn’t particularly clean. There were two rolls of toilet paper, but only about a quarter of the rolls were left. The TVs didn’t work, some of the lights weren’t working. Some sinks weren’t working either. It was not the greatest experience honestly. And I’m not picky or high maintenance. It was just a weird experience all around. I was tired, so I slept pretty well, but I kept thinking that this was a creepy horror movie waiting to happen. Needless to say, I checked out of that sucker in the morning thank the lawd.