It’s day 4 of our road trip and we are still exploring western Iceland but we are starting to head north! Our first destination of the day is Hvitserkur and the drive there from our campsite would take about 2 hours. We saw a cool abandoned house, Skardsviti Lighthouse, and so many Icelandic sheep along the way. We were also lucky enough to see some arctic foxes but didn’t have a change to snap some pictures before they ran away!
On Vatnsnes peninsula in North-West Iceland, some 50 meters offshore stands the majestic HvÃtserkur, a 15 meter’s high monolith or sea-stack, an eroded volcanic pillar. People argue that it looks like an elephant, or a rhino, or even a dinosaur drinking water.
From there, it was another hour and a half or so until our next destination – Grettirs Pool, a hot geothermal pool located at Reykir in Skagafjordur in north Iceland. The pool is named after Grettir Ásmundarson, the outlaw and the strongest man in the Icelandic Sagas. There were two pools you could choose from. One was comfortably warm and the other was slightly hot.
We ended up staying in the pools for a couple hours, switching back and forth between the two pools before continuing on. We said goodbye to the beautiful Icelandic horses we saw along the road and stopped for some of that delicious N1 gas station ice cream to brighten the afternoon.
We arrived at Reykjafoss waterfall around 7pm. I don’t remember how exactly we stumbled upon it – I think we probably just put “waterfall” into google maps and it came up as a result, but this was a real hidden gem. There were barely any people around and when we read that there was a natural hot spring at the top of the waterfall we had to take a dip.
At this point, we were starting to lose track of time and it was getting late. We decided we would be staying the night at the Lonsa Campsite in Akureyri which was an hour’s drive from the falls.
Daily roadmap recap: