Day 4: Thursday, August 17, 2006

Here's the parking lot of Hótel Hellnar in the morning. All the cars in Iceland are either tiny little hatchbacks (makes sense when gas is the equivalent of $7 /gallon) or enormous off-road vehicles, most of which—on either end of the spectrum—you can't get in the U.S.

We had a horse tour scheduled for the early afternoon, so in the morning we drove around the tip of Snæfellsnes, through the national park there.

This is a memorial to Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled Icelandic woman prior to the 20th century. As the map colorfully illustrates, she was born in Iceland in 980 AD, moved to Greenland and got married, and to North America, where she gave birth to "the first European child born in the New World" in 1000 AD. After that went back to Greenland for a while, then to Norway (I think after her husband died) and walked to the Vatican, where she became a nun. Finally, she went back to Iceland and became a hermit. The end.

Here's Guðríður's statue. It looked much bigger in the guidebooks.

And this is our lovely little Peugot! It was a great car, and we put over 2,000 km on it!

I liked this aerial view of the tip of Snæfellsnes.

Here's a little lava beach.

Notice Liz at the base of the cliff?

The rocks ranged in size from smaller than pebbles to slightly larger than my fist.

This was the ruins of some settlement.

One of many lava caves in Iceland

Here's the cockpit of our rental car. Liz drove 90% of the time, while I navigated using my four (or more) maps and at least two guidebooks. It worked out better for the both of us that way.

On the way up a mountain road toward the glacier (which we probably shouldn't have taken the Peugot all the way up) we saw a few of the sheep that seemed to be everywhere. The one ram that was far away ran toward us!

But then he stopped once he reached his fellow sheepies, and they all stared at us with curiousity. Maybe they thought we'd come to take them back to the farm; every September the farmers go up to the mountains for two weeks and gather all the sheep to bring them in for the winter.

This was the end of the road for the front-wheel-drive hatchback.

We got pretty close to the glacier though!

At this point our camera's memory card was almost completely full, so we stopped in another major town (Ólafsvík, pop. 1,008) to change some more cash and hopefully find another memory card. There was one little electronics/office supply shop in town, but they were all sold out of the type of card we needed. The shop owner did put all our photos on a CD though! After getting some sandwiches from a local bakery for lunch, we headed out across this main "highway" that cut across to the southern side of the peninsula so we could get to the horse farm in time for our ride.

We went riding with a Canadian family. Liz took this photo from atop her horse!

This was my first time riding a horse in my life! It was a lot more fun (and more of a workout) than I expected.

About halfway through we dismounted for a rest, and to give the horses a snack.

After the break, we rode along the beach. My horse consistantly rode up front, and I couldn't bring him closer to the back. Liz's horse, on the other hand, was slow, and she couldn't get him to go near the front. Suddenly I heard "whoa, whoa,... ... WHOA!!!" and when I turned around Liz was on her butt on the beach. Apparently her horse took off suddenly and wouldn't slow down, then when he finally did, she fell off. Fortunately, she wasn't hurt. Then, just before we got back to the farm, her horse actually fell going down an embankment, and did a faceplant into the dirt. Liz flew over its head, and landed on her head, damaging the helmet. Fortunately, she was okay, aside from being very sore the next day. And she got right back on!

We went back across the same mountain pass afterward, to go finish seeing the north side of Snæfellsnes and get some dinner. It was a lot more difficult to drive through the clouds!

Here's the side view of a particular mountain...

And here's the view of the same mountain from the end!

We noticed a sign for a museum a little ways off the road, and in the guidebook it mentioned that this museum was a place where hákarl was made. While planning the trip, we'd read that hákarl is shark that is poisonous when fresh, so it is traditionally putrefied for several months and then eaten. It sounded disgusting. But we had told so many people about this when mentioning that we were going to Iceland, that we had to stop at the museum. So we drove down a bumpy dirt road for a about 1 km and came upon a man, his wife, and their child sitting outside their house, which was attached to the small museum. We paid the fee and he gave us a personal tour. Here's half of the museum:

Check out the shark jaw, and photo of the museum's founder next to a fresh catch (I think the man in these photos is now dead, and probably the father of the man who gave us the tour, judging by all the memorials to him).

Doesn't it look yummy?

Let's ask Liz... Actually, this was before she got the full flavor. It was sort of squishy, with a sharp fishy/ammonia taste. Then, after a few seconds... the real horror set in. It was like taking a giant gulp of ammonia from a bottle under the sink. I could actually feel my stomach burning for a couple of minutes. The proprietor just stood there and smiled at us, eventually offering some dried haddock, saying "here's another traditional Icelandic way of preserving food." It was a welcome change of flavor, though Liz felt ill for a few hours afterward.

Sharks grow new teeth all the time, and the new rows progress toward the front, to replace the front row that periodically falls off. The guy giving us the tour said that of the hundreds of shark jaws he's seen, this was the only one that had a row of teeth in the process of changing.

The museum also had all sorts of other dead stuff. There were horses...

stuffed puffin...

starfish...

sheep...

more sharks...

Barbara Steisand, Elton John, and Bella Epoque records... (!?!?)

If you want, there's plenty more closeups of stuff in the museum (I left it out for those with weak stomachs for goat heads, horse shins, etc.).

Eventually we left the museum and headed toward Stykkishólmur, a 1,240 person town on the northeastern part of Snæfellsnes, in search of food. Here's a lava field we passed through.

On the way into town, we saw an ultra-light (basically a flying motorcycle).

This is the modern church in Stykkishólmur

Liz mailed some postcards while we were waiting for a table to open up at the local restaurant, where we had decided to eat (there were actually two or three restaurants to chose from!)

Finally, one more landscape to finish off the day.