Southeast & Eastern Iceland

I am currently typing this post as we drive to the Myvatn region in Northern Iceland. Our past two days have been spent lazily exploring the Southeast and Eastern regions of Iceland. We didn’t do very much driving on Sunday while exploring the Southeast. We stayed in the big town of Hofn (pronounced Hup). I’m just kidding, it was a tiny village but did seem huge after driving through literally nothing while on the road going around Vatnajokull National Park.

The Viking Film Village at the Viking Cafe

Hofn is a harbor town and offers a collection of restaurants, a grocery store, and guesthouses intermingled with local homes. It is a charming place with quite possibly the best restaurant in Iceland located here. While we were visiting Hofn, we did make the short jaunt out to Viking Cafe. The guidebook painted it as an interesting place with black sand beaches, mountains, hiking trails, and a movie set. For me, it turned out to be rather disappointing. From a distance, the movie set was rather cool with the mountains as a backdrop, but upon closer inspection, it was clear that they had finished filming everything and nothing was being done to the upkeep of it. Things were already starting to fall apart and a lot of the buildings contained discarded items. After exploring the film set, we did drive down the parking area by the cliffs/ beach. We wandered for a bit and took photos of the lighthouse and an old NATO communication defense system. We decided against the walk along the black sand beaches because of the wind. It is vicious and cuts through absolutely everything you are wearing.

The mountains and black sand beach around the Viking Cafe

For dinner and quite possibly one of the best meals either of us has ever had, we headed Parkhaus, located right on the harbor. Hofn is famous for it’s langoustine (Icelandic lobster). For a cool $70 a plate, most of the restaurants in Hofn serve it up in a variety of ways. However, at Parkhaus, Scott and I opted for the catch of the day. It turned out to be a wonderful choice and was by far the highlight of my day!

Looking down at Seydisfjordur. 

Yesterday, we drove through most of Eastern Iceland. This makes the area around Southern Iceland & Vatnajokull look like a sprawling metropolis. There are mountains, fjords, valleys, and very few people or villages. The Eastern coast is made up of a series of fjords. The ring road, Route 1, goes around the very Southern most fjord before cutting to the interior. We discovered that not the entire national highway is paved. We both had to chuckle at this. We wound our way through the mountains and had stunning views of waterfalls, mountain peaks, rivers, and valleys.

Avalanche Monument 

We made our way into Seydisfjordur. We went off the ring road here and the majority of it was unpaved as we made our way up and back down the mountain. The views down into the town from the top of the mountain were stunning. There was a big river with plenty of waterfall drops through it running right next to the road. The surrounding mountains had dozens of waterfalls as well. Seydisfjordur is advertised as having lots of artists with shops. Both Scott and I were excited at the prospect of finding some amazing paintings. However, what we found left us disappointed.

Scott's second NatGeo photograph of puffins.

After wandering around the town for a bit, we hit the road again, heading for our final destination of the day, Borgarfjordur Eystri. This was a tiny, tiny place with just a couple of guesthouses and restaurants. We came here because they have a big cliff that puffin’s nest in. The puffins burrow into the cliff to make their nests. There are other birds that nest on the cliff  (we think they were fulmers) that wait for the puffins to come back with food and try to steal it from them. The puffins that have caught fish fly straight for their nests and try not to get chased by these other birds. There is a really nice viewing platform where you can get up close to the puffins. They’re cute little birds and it’s hilarious to watch them take off and land as they’re not the most coordinated of birds. We spent a fair bit of time up on the cliff watching them and taking a ton of photos.

We’ve realized that in order to live in Eastern Iceland you would have to be a very self-sufficient individual especially if you lived there before modern roads and vehicles. We are assuming that in winter all the towns on the fjords become very isolated. It’s a beautiful area, but would be harsh t