Marjan was horrified when she found out that the cruise lasted four hours, but she drugged up and donned the inflatable overalls and on we went. It was quite a calm, warm day but rather overcast. The first two made for a good trip for Marjan, unlike one or two others, she kept her eye on the horizon and managed to keep her breakfast down. Lots of seabirds around our boat: fulmars and black backed gulls mostly, but the odd arctic tern and one or two others I could not recognise.
We initially headed off to Puffin Island. It is not called that of course, but Looney Eyejar, which is as close as I can get to what the boat man said, looks, and probably is, all wrong. Well from far away we could see a constant mist of puffins around the island, and the numbers were there in the water as well. The young were flexing their wings, preparing to head out to sea for the next 9 months. Puffins: tick.
So we hung a left and headed towards where the other whale boats were congregating, in the belief that if 4 whaling boats are hanging about, whales are sure to follow. On our way we saw a pod of white beaked dolphins.
And when we got to the other whale watchers we were greeted by two humpback whales. We kinda hung around for about an hour and a half, just waiting for the whales to come back up from feeding. They never disappointed. In the breaks we chatted to a young Valencian family having their first whale experience.
Marjan kept on her feet, stayed well and got some great up close whale sightings and the four hours flew by. In fact she was so far from queasy that she had a hot chocolate and cinnamon bun on the boat........and then managed to scoff down a cod lunch at the harbour. Whales: tick
By then the heatwave had kicked in. It was 19. We were sweating. Rather than head right back we decided to drive on to see.......yes Laura, a waterfall. Apparently the most powerful in Europe. But first we stopped off at the Jökulsárgljúfur National Park to have a little walk around. Nice place. It is essentially a glacial canyon, carved out about 10,000 years ago.....yes Dom, before wello had a beard. The cliffs narrowed and ended at an amazing peaceful pool with amazing tones of green. It was one of the most peaceful places we have been in Iceland........apart from the hoon scratching his armpit and talking on his mobile whilst laying on a bench........everybody was relieved when he got his daughter to shut down her mobile and left, because we were all looking at each other to see who would grab his phone and hurl it in the pool.
On the walk back we detoured through a remnant of the original Icelandic birch forest to check out a few flowers. Past their peak and starting to show autumn colour, but interesting. We even managed to huckle some berries. Nothing overly special. Birch: tick.
Then on to DentalFloss as Marjan decided to call our next stop: Dettifoss. There we met the relatives of the guy at the pool, they were drinking beer with their legs dangling in the water above the falls. They later passed us on a double line. I am guessing, and hoping if truth be told, that they are trying to take themselves out of the gene pool. Hoons: tick
No comments:
Post a Comment