Hotel Eyjar Vestmannaeyjar

... has traveled there before and has some recommendations of places to visit or things to do please let me know. That would be great.

Tentative plans are to go mid January and to spend no more than 3 days there. A work colleague will be joining me and anyone else interested in joining just needs to say so.

If you are still asking yourself "Iceland in january?" the answer is YES !!!! Why the hell not? :-)

Take care.

... falls causes a solid wall of mist to be forced UP. The mist goes straight up past ground level and looks like something that Disney would project a laser show on, like a giant organic screen.

Unlike attractions in America - you can get as close as you like and there's nothing but your own intelligence to keep you from falling in. I like it that way - I managed to go where I wanted to go and still stay alive. It's quite easy to be safe, I'm just ...

... of them were in the 50-60 meter category.  You can begin a 3 day, 27km backpacking trip from Skogarfoss, up over the glacier (or past it) to a place called Thorsmork which is accessible by 4WD vehicles.  But to get to Thorsmork, any vehicle has to ford 27 (!) rivers.  

 

Several of the fosses are fairly small but fall in stages down the slope.  This one pictured here was over on the way to Mt. Hekla (mentioned in the ...

... They certainly seemed cleaner and much more permanent feeling than the "soddies" I've read about.  Perhaps the difference is due to the fact that the American frontiersmen knew that the railroads would soon make it possible to bring in lumber to construct a conventional farm house and barn and so always believed the "soddie" to be a temporary privation, whereas the Icelandic folk had never had any other choices and so perfected this building ...

... on our Iceland adventure. Navigation was quite easy once we became accustomed to the scale. The first port of call was Pingvellir National Park and Lake Pingvallavatn which is situated on the Icelandic rift zone. Apparently the lake has sunk 300m over the past 5000 years because of the tectonic plates pulling away from each other. This is where the Viking settlers formed parliament so we learnt quite a bit ...

... you go to visit a glacier with your own transportation, or if you even want to visit any inland natural site, I recommend paying the extra for 4 wheel drive or a sturdier car, as the highway at times changed without warning to a rough unpaved road...at times a drive that should have taken us an hour took double that as we had to go incredibly slow on the road to avoid completely killing the car...

... says Bjork once played a concert on a raft in the middle of the lake....Next we drove through a town called Selfoss. I had read that this town was "glaringly ugly" but when we drove through it was actually quite plesant. We stopped for lunch at a cute cafe and I had leek soup (I don't think I mentioned that the soup of the day EVERYWHERE was leek soup so I ate it numerous times on the trip). We drove around a bit and explored and then headed over to the farm where we were to go ...

Friends, I have been enjoying your comments . All of you now may be fledgling puffin lovers like me. More factoids about puffins then (from the tour guide). Some sources say they are cousins to penguins. They fly in a wobbly pattern, jumping off from a high cliff and using the air to their advantage. They flap their wings 8 times a second. They nest during from June to Aug (apparently Aug 23rd to be exact). They then fly off individually to some unknown place. They ...

... It´s a fabulously beautiful Island - stunning. It took me most of the day to wander around the Island, view the Puffins and check the town out - the last eruption had swamped a portion of the town, so it was interesting to have a look around. Luckily for me the camp site was directly below one of the Puffin breeding grounds, I could watch the little blighter's come and go - they are forever busy. They aren´t the ...

... their whiskey and upon arrival at some hut we were invited to have dinner and more whiskey with about twenty other guide people who were already waiting. To complete our luck, we were given a key to the neighbour hut where a little room with a double bed was waiting for us. Before going to sleep we went for a walk through the beautiful landscape Icelanders consider a "forest", and the evening dusk changed almost imperceptibly into dawn. What a promising beginning of our journey.