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Category: Iceland

20.08.08 Kverkfjoll – Reykjahlíð
by Garik and Lena

  • Yesterday when we went to sleep it was rainy, so we prepared for a cold night. The night was extremely cold, I had to rub my feet all the time and found it hard to fall a sleep. Lena wanted to get up at 04:00AM, in order to go to the hut, to warm up. I tried to get “folded” as much as I could in the sleeping bag, tried to pass the time till more reasonable time to rise up. Me and Lena concluded to wake up around 06:30AM. At some point during the night, the rain had stopped and Lena thought, “goody!!!”, there will be some time for the things that hang outside the tent, to get dry till morning… After some time we started to hear weird noises and started to feel some wetness around us, though we were in our sleeping bags. We started to think, what can cause all this? The answer is snow! Yep, it was snow! I crawled outside the tent, just to see that our tent and all area around us is covered with snow. The entrance to the tent was blocked with a nice layer of snow, something like 5cm deep. At first, we were very excited, started to take pictures and play with snow, then we realized that we have to pack our stuff in snow conditions, it’s not going to be fun! Our fingertips called for help! Everything was wet and cold! Hands were freezing and it was difficult to hold anything. After an hour and a half, we managed to put everything in waterproof backpack’s bags and left them outside, making our way quickly to the hut.
  • We had a hot soup for breakfast and our guide told us that it’s snowing here even in July; this is because of the height, 800 meters OSL, so it will remain for couple of hours and then it will melt. After we got warmed a bit in the hut, we went outside to play with the snow. Here the snow is so soft, easy to lift from the ground and make a snow ball, not like in Israel… We have more ice than snow… It should be so easy to make snowman, the only problem is that the snow is on a grainy soil, so the snow balls are not quite white as we would like them to be… So we got a “black” snowman. One of the wardens passed us outside and thought that I’m rolling a black stone instead of snow, so she tried to teach me how to make a snowman. She realized pretty soon that she has the same problem as me, laugh about it and walked away.
  • We hoped that inside the bus there will be some sort of heating, but there wasn’t. Almost all the way back it was cold, wet and unpleasant in the bus. We stopped a few times to take pictures, today we finally got an answer for the question “what are these small triangle wood huts are?”… Toilets… or “Special Services” as Fredjon called them. Most of the way back, we were asleep or ate figs, as usual. We wanted to have small lunch when we will back to Reykjahlid and in the evening to go and have a decent dinner as a celebration of the ring. In the middle of our way back, we stopped at some ranch, Fredjon suggested to eat a meat soup there, and it turned out that the owner of the place, once, worked for Fredjon, our guide, as a ski instructor at his company that he owned in Reykjavik once… We didn’t had the soup, we walked around, saw some small huts with grass on their roofs. There were also many steel poles in the ground near the restaurant, so I asked Fredjon what is it all about, so he told us that once, in the ranch was born and lived all his life an artist that had some sort of autism, so he painted only one thing, the mountain Herdubreid, his paintings were very simplistic and naive and he always looked for the best spot to paint the mountain. So this year, last week, he should be 100 years old. So it was decided to bring hundred artists from all around the globe, to position them near the restaurant, so they can paint the mountain. And so, a week later we could see the hundred spots where hundred painters painted the mountain, the steel poles were support for their canvas.
  • When we came to Reykjahlid, we thanked Fredjon for the wonderful trip and gave him a postcard as we did with Iris, about weak ago. He was a bit surprised, thanked us and told us that it was nice to meet us. He put the postcard in a pocket in his pants and we walked away.
  • After we swallowed two sandwiches, I offered Lena ice-cream.She couldn’t resist, it was a hot day indeed. So I ordered two big ice-creams in a waffle with chocolate coat. Now, in Iceland, big is BIG! OMG, the ice-creams were huge! It was a suicide, when I reached at last, the waffle in my ice-cream, Lena still struggled with hers, trying to reach waffle too. She offered me to switch, she will take mine with waffle, and I will get hers and will have to eat ice-cream again. So we did so. Lena finished my waffle within few seconds while me trying to digest all ice-cream I eat. My stomach almost exploded, I felt sick and I had brain freeze, I didn’t finished the ice-cream, I had to throw it away, what a waste. And most of all, we were so excited with the ice-cream that we didn’t take a picture of it, it was the second time we didn’t took a picture of a unique ice-cream we had, (previously it was in Akureyri).
  • Now it was a time to settle a camp and take a decent shower. We went to the camp site, paid for another two nights and walked to the local pool. The pool was closed; we forgot that from 20th till 25th the pool is closed. It was said so in the camps’ site administration.
  • That way we discovered that there are two shower facilities in the camp site, those near the place where our tent was and another one, couple of minutes away from there, mostly for caravan people. Since our showers were out of use, we went to the others. It turned out that they were much better than ours… There were more toilets and more shower, also it was much cleaner.
  • On our way back, we surfed the web a bit in the camp’s site administration. A bit expensive for a slow connection Internet I would say. From there we continued to the restaurant Gamli Baerinn. We got wild and ordered two main dishes; Lasagna and lamb slices. For desert we had blueberry cake.
  • On our way back to camp, we wanted to buy a small doll of a puffin, it was after 22:00 when we reached the camp’s store, but the girl inside was kind to let me in and sell me a small doll of a puffin.
  • Happy and satisfied we went to sleep. Tonight we are going to sleep well!

Prices:

Sandwiches x2 = 700 ISK

Ice-cream x2 = 400 ISK

Shopping for landmannaguar = 4400 ISK

Camping = 3400 ISK

Puffin doll = 690 ISK

Restaurant = 5660 ISK

Internet = 600 ISK


My black snowman

My black snowman

Lena helps me

Lena helps me

Packing stuff in snow

Packing stuff in snow

This is how it looked when we woke up (who said Doite is a bad tent?)

This is how it looked when we woke up (who said Doite is a bad tent?)

Fredjon is in red...

Fredjon is in red...

At the ranch on our way back

At the ranch on our way back

Black sandbox?...

Black sandbox?...




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