3rd August 2003
We made an early start and headed anti-clockwise around Route 1 - the road that loops all the way around the outside of Iceland. The final destination for the day was Berunes hostel, in the south-east of the country.
The first place we came across on our journey was Seljalandsfoss, a beautiful waterfall tumbling off the edge of a cliff.
We continued on along our way, heading towards the Vatnajökull glacier.
We then came to Vatnajökull itself, which took a long time to drive around due to its immense size. Here are some of the views of it we had from the road - we would return to this area later to do the area properly, for now we were just passing through.
While we were driving around Vatnajökull we came across Jökulsárlón - not at the time knowing that it was a major tourist attraction in the area. Jökulsárlón is a glacial melt pool, where one of the tongues of Vatnajökull melts into the sea. There was an amazing quietness and tranquility to the place, the air was super crisp and clear, with a wonderful fresh breeze gently rolling off the glacier.
The icebergs created as the edge of the glacier broke up were gentley lolling across the pool, the water in the pool itself being perfectly still and calm.
An excellently shaped rock, with a divot in it the exact same shape and size as the back of our trusty Fujifilm FinePix 1400 digital camera, provided us with an excellent photo opportunity - so here we are at the edge of Jökulsárlón.
From here we headed into the fjords of south-east Iceland, where Berunes was situated.
Berunes was a very small settlement - it seemed to consist of one farm, a church, and the hostel.
The settlement and hostel were situated deep into one of the fjords, with steep, cloud-shrowded landscape behind.
Our room in the hostel was once again full of insects of a variety of types. Audrey spent quite some time trying to capture and liberate (or otherwise deal with) the inhabitants of our room...
Despite this, it was a very nice room - possibly the nicest we had - in a lovely, if out-of-the-way place. The next day we would head on to Lake Myvatn in the north of the country, then our first night of camping.
© Mark Hughes & Audrey Bowerman, July-August 2003
page created: 16th August 2003 | updated: 7th November 2005