Ordinarily, our arrival here might have marked the end of our day. Some time in the morning we’d rumbled away from Kirkjufell and the Snaefellsnes peninsula, driving across a mixture of tarmac and cinder roads through some of the grandest yet quietest coastal landscapes I’d ever witnessed. Around lunchtime we’d arrived back on the ring road, stopping at a service station to refuel both ourselves and the van, before swapping seats and heading into the sparsely populated northern region. It was my turn to be a passenger, marveling at the landscape without needing to watch the road, before sleep caught up with me and took me to somewhere else for an hour or more.
When I awoke, we definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore. Not that we’d ever been in Kansas, but well, you get the picture. In a country that is in no way bursting at the seams with people anywhere at all, most of the residents live in the area around Reykjavik, which was now more than a hundred miles behind us. We were somewhere on the road to the northern limits, excitingly close to the sixty-sixth line of latitude. Somebody named a high end outdoor clothing company after that, you know. Lee had in fact been further north than this before, on a Norwegian cruise one Christmas with his wife, but this was far beyond the realms in which I’d previously traveled. I’d once spent three nights in Helsinki, but this was an entire other world to me. We had to wait at a bridge while a herd of Icelandic horses were being ridden across, bringing what traffic there was to a halt. Such beautiful soft looking creatures, with those silky long manes, redolent of The Beatles somewhere around the Sergeant Pepper era, that mark them so clearly as being among the locals here.
Later we arrived in the handsome harbour town of Akureyri, flanked by mountains to the south and water to the north. Not that I’ve ever been, but we might have just landed somewhere on the west coast of Canada, gazing at snow capped mountains that towered over the town in the middle of summer as we were. For a while we strolled the quiet streets of this distant outpost, so far from the rest of Europe; so far even from Reykjavik it seemed. And then an hour later we parked at Godafoss, handily placed at the side of the ring road. We explored the gift shop, took sharp intakes of breath at the prices of the tourist trinkets and spent a rather more modest amount on hot dogs, liberally dressed with crunchy fried onion, a staple fare wherever you go in this magnificent country.
The waterfall was as impressive as we’d hoped it might be, wide curtains of water crashing down into a vast bowl that bubbled and frothed before racing away beneath the bridge in the direction of a not too distant northern ocean. Its proximity to the main road inevitably ensured that pretty much anyone who’d bothered to abandon the south coast gems in favour of the quiet northern half of the country was going to stop here, and we had to take our turn down in the basin, waiting for another pair of photographers to grab their shots and move on. Meanwhile, back at the top and late in the evening, the golden hour delivered a clean composition where I didn’t have to wait for Lee to elbow any bystanders out of the way.
Lee was keen to stay here, but twenty-five miles down a dirt track lay another waterfall in the form of Aldeyjarfoss. It was the reason I’d been so keen to head north on this trip, and it was the only location where we had to abandon the van and walk three miles each way to reach our destination. And there’s a thing. Maybe Godafoss is the lite version that you can simply dip into by parking and walking for three minutes to see it, whereas Aldeyjarfoss takes a lot more effort. That’s the beauty of Iceland. Call it Iceland Lite. You can see some of the most extraordinary sights imaginable by staggering just a few yards from the car. Godafoss, Kirkjufell, Budir, Vestrahorn, Eystrahorn, Diamond Beach, Jokulsarlon, Skogafoss all fall into this category and many more besides. Of course they’re busy, but if you pick your time and you’re prepared to stagger a few more yards, you might just get a moment to yourself. Especially during midsummer in twenty-four hour daylight. This was taken somewhere around 11pm, and we were standing at Aldeyjarfoss well after midnight.
Two waterfalls, two quite different experiences in getting to them. You can do Iceland Lite and see a varied and magical landscape. And you can do Iceland Intensive and see the surface of another planet. So far I’ve had a couple of small tastes of Iceland Intensive. Needless to say, I’m hungry for more.