For our fourth day in Iceland we had booked a mini bus tour of the south coast of Iceland to see its cool stuff. To avoid spending a ridiculous amount of money on lunch we made six PB&J’s and brought along the remaining Cheez-Its. Another really cool thing we have learned about Iceland is that there is WiFi everywhere. WiFi in the restaurants, WiFi on the bus. Everywhere seems to have its own setup! Very handy. Our hotel was the second to last one to be picked up so we waited outside a little bit, which was nice because we were able to wake up a little bit! The mini bus was almost full, and this time everyone was from North America – Mexico, USA and Canada were all represented. Our bus driver was Siggi and he was fairly entertaining and gave us a little bit of knowledge as we traveled. The first stop was Skogafoss – a really awesome waterfall (awesome waterfalls are a theme in Iceland) that we were able to walk up to the top and look down over. It was quite the hike to get up there, about 200 feet of stairs!
Next we headed to Reynisfjara which is the black sand/pebble beach in the south. Next to the beach you could get really close to the giant basalt columns and the fog/light rain made everything look really cool. Siggi said it was okay to snag a souvenir pebble from the beach so I spent a good amount of time looking for the best one I could find. The fog did make it so that we weren’t able to see all of the stuff in the water though. Apparently three of the basalt columns are from where the ships of giants turned into stone when they were exposed to sunlight. Here we also ate lunch and gave some of our extra PB&Js to our new Canadian friend Katie.
Next we went to look at the tip of the Solheimjokull glacier (jokull means glacier so that’s a little redundant). This glacier is a little outcropping of Myrdralsjokull which sits on top of the volcano Katla which is about 50 years overdue for an eruption! Cool stuff. The view here was pretty cool, although we weren’t able to get too close to the glacier because we didn’t have the glacier climbing gear. Our final stop on this tour was the waterfall Seljalandsfoss. I think someone actually just owns this waterfall… like it’s part of their farm. You can walk around the back of the waterfall and get a pretty cool view of it there too. Overall a very cool assortment of natural landmarks!
Our flight left pretty early the next morning, so naturally we stayed up too late and then made our way to the airport. The Reykjavik airport is… kinda unusual. We had a pretty long walk from the security check point (which also took about 10 seconds to go through, hooray!) to our gate, which I think was the farthest possible gate from the entrance to the airport. They don’t have any people movers or trams either. So it’s all walking. Once again nobody was sitting in the middle seat of the plane, score! We landed in Munich and I figured out how to take the train to our hotel, and we got there around 3:30/4 pm. Kristen went to Oktoberfest with her friend who was randomly also here while I walked around looking for an ATM. After about 30 minutes of walking around I found an ATM a block away from our hotel.
I snagged a good night’s sleep and then woke up around 8 am for our Oktoberfest tour. We decided to pay to do one because we didn’t really know anything about Oktoberfest and if you do a tour they reserve a table for you for a few hours which is always handy. Our tour guide was Dani, who was American, and she did an awesome job of explaining the history of the festival, what the attractions are, why the tents are the way they are, really everything! It was definitely worth it, especially since we also got half a chicken and a couple liters of beer in the deal. Although in hindsight I probably could’ve used a few less liters of beer throughout the night! We went to a few of the tents and sang some songs, saw the crazy devil’s circle (I think that’s what it’s called) and had a really good time!
