Sunday, September 13, 2009

Arriving to Iceland

As promised, here it comes the first of the entries on the trip I made more than one month ago (for God's sake, it seems so long ago) to Iceland. Let me tell you in advance that I enjoyed every second and minute I spent in this amazing and beautiful island.

The beginning of my trip was not easy. I had to make a stop in London Gatwick and there my plane was an hour delayed. I had never been in Gatwick before and I must admit I was a bit surprised by what I found there: total chaos, a lot of people queuing (for check-in and for security control) without much order and not many information. I had to queue at check-in after a group of boy-scouts and it was not very nice: they had so many bags and were so slow... Finally, when the plane was taxiing (right spelling?) at Reikiavik Airport, it had to go back 20 metres because it made a mistake when approaching the finger!

My two friends were already waiting for me, and we were soon driving out of there in our rental car: a Toyota Corolla (known as Toyota Avensis, in Spain). According to our plan, we had to drive around 200 kilometres to Snaefellsjökull National Park, where Julius Verne placed the volcano which took the reader to the centre of the Earth (see below).
After having dinner (a weird and horrible lasagne, where is the Italian Embassy when one really needs one?), we went to the sea cliffs to watch some birdlife. But, just after leaving the hostel, an Artic tern decided to attack us with quick and sudden flights over our heads... Later on, I learnt that they could travel as far as South Africa (upps!). Anyway, the sea cliffs were amazing and we could spot a lot of birds, although the weather was a bit cold and we seemed to be disguised as esquimos.The next day, we tried to go to the top of the volcano but the fog and the ice prevented us from doing so. On our way down, we stopped in Olasfvik, where we manage to buy fish for our dinner that day directly to a fisherman (I cooked it and it tasted very, very good). After lunch in Olafsvik, we decided to walk a little bit, to a cape with a nice lighthouse (that was, at least, what the tourist guide said). After more than two hours of walking through a desert of lava, we decided to go back to the car and to watch pictures of that lighthouse in Internet at home...We then drove to Grundarfjördur, where we spent the night in the very cosy room of a Polish student. The next day we were driving back to Reikiavik.

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