The Iceland Traverse - Day 2
A cold morning again but the sun was still shining so that made up for it. We continue across the tundra fascinated by the bird and plant life, taking picture saying, “we’ll look that up when we get home.” We might. Probably won’t. Might surprise ourselves. If this says, ‘insert species here,’ you’ll know we never got round to it!
Anyway, we slowly started to get to the end of the tundra and black sand hills came before us. Up and over up and over again, easy going and good hiking. Then the lupins started. Flowering in perfect colours as we came down the valley the other side. The valley opened up. Yet more flowers. Then the view across the bay to snow capped mountains in the distance. It really doesn’t get much better than that. We continued down through the lupins and fields of sheep until we hit a track that would take us to the road.
Icelandic Ponies
From here we went north to Kópasker. A little town on the west coast of the peninsula with a campsite, shop and some very angry arctic turns. After escaping the barrage of birds, we popped into the shop for a few extra snacks only to discover, they also had a little restaurant. Well we weren’t passing this up.
We had our fill and returned to heading south. This was going to be a very long road walk indeed. 25km minimum the roads were lined with lupins and the same bayside Mountain View’s continued. Icelandic ponies and their foals grazed in the fields nearby. We tried to get photos of the inquisitive young before they would get bored and turned away. Mountains to the side of us began to rise bringing some spectacular views of deep black cliffs. We stopped a few times along the way to rest our feet and have one of the extra snacks we bought in the town just gone.
Lupins above Kópasker
At 9pm we arrived in the campsite beside a village school. Can’t imagine there are enough people in the village to even fill the school. The campsite was a well protected field keeping us well out the wind with good views back to the mountains we passed. It was a bit of trail to get over and done with that day. The following days would be much slower with a few detours for some spectacular views.
