Day 4 – Snaefellsnes Peninsula

Today was a long day but a feast for our eyes and minds. We are spending two days in a little town called Stykkisholmur with a population of about 1000 people. It’s located at the northern part of the Snæfellsnes peninsula which is in western Iceland. I can’t even find the words to describe the area. the wow factor is off the chart!

First on the to do list for today was Kirkjufell mountain and waterfall. We barely made it out of Stykkisholmur before we had to pull over for this gorgeous view

 

The waterfall was only a 20-minute drive. The map is rather deceiving as we are used the driving  distances in Canada. Here you can drive around the whole country in about 6-7 hours ;-). Of course we quadruple the driving time with all the stops to take photos.

Here’s the beautiful Kirkjufell mountain and waterfall. They were very impressive.

Our friends Linda & Derek are spending two weeks in Iceland and arrived here on Saturday, so we decided to meet up and spend the day together. After taking a few hundred pictures at the waterfall and making new friends we cut across the peninsula to meet up with them on the other side.

There aren’t a lot of highways in this country. We had two options, go around the peninsula or take highway 54 to cut through which is what we did. Looking at the map, it seemed as if it would take us an hour or so to get to the other side but yet again we were fooled by the map! It look about 15 minutes.

Our plan was to do a hike from Anarstapi to Hellnar along the coast. Before meeting them we made a quick stop at the black church.

We finally made it to our meeting location. Distance wise, the hike is not very long but it did take us a few hours as we were in awe of scenery mother nature had granted us!  Between the 5 of us we must have taken over a 1000 photos.

 

 

After the hike, we decided to drive around the Peninsula to check out the black sand beach and then head back to Stykkisholmur. The whole peninsula is only 90-km long but it houses a vast variety of  spectacular mountains, beaches of sand and pebbles, lava fields, cute little villages and much more. The western part of the peninsula, where we were, is the national park and is home to Snæfellsjökull, a 700,000-year-old stratovolcano with a glacier covering its summit. It’s one of the most famous sites in Iceland due to the novel  “Journey to the center of earth” by Jules Verne. It is the entrance leading to the center of earth. We passed this spectacular mountain on our way to the beach.

And then there was the black sand beach! I am almost embarassed to be writing about the natural beauty Iceland has to offer as I don’t think I have the vocabulary to give it a well-deserved poetic description!

I will let the photos do the talking

 

 

 

 

The rest of the drive back was just as stunning. There were a lot of oooohhhs and ahhhhs between us in the car.

Our lovely friends treated us to dinner at Hraun. The lamb was delicious!

Linda & Derek, it was lovely spending the day with you guys. We hope you will enjoy the rest of your trip around Iceland and perhaps we will see you in another part of the world 🙂

And that’s it for Day 4!