2015-09-07 Day 05 Laugarvatn

I'm writing this in catch up mode ... ie two days after it happened ...

Normally this is not too much of a problem,, but with the completely foreign names of everything in Iceland I'm finding it difficult to sort out what happened when. We haven't yet arrived at a suitable, to me at least, organisational pattern to the day. Mark likes to start slowly and push the day to it's limits as he doesn't do as much processing of the days photographs as I like to do. It takes a couple of hours each day to sort and process a selection of photos taken and write this blog. When you are still looking for accommodation at 8pm and then have to find somewhere to eat it doesn't leave much time before you need to be asleep. And when you are sharing accomodation getting up early the next morning and bashing away on your computer is a bit anti-social ...

Never the less the gist of the days travel is that we are still in the tectonic plate boundary area which creates many valleys running NE-SW so we are seeing how far we can progress up a couple of the bigger ones hoping for some good scenery.

The weather continues to be mostly low grey skies, driving rain, high winds and freezing cold.

Early on we come across a quite nice waterfall called Oxarafoss, by now I am pretty sure that "foss" is Icelandic for "waterfall". We brave the weather for a short time to gat a couple of photos. It soon becomes apparent that these are not an unusal phenomena so this is the only one for today.

Around lunch time we get to the town of Geysir which, no prizes for guessing, means geyser. And of course in this town there is one almost in the main street. It is quite well known apparently as it regularly erupts every four or five minutes.

We count 21 tourist buses in the carpark ...

There is an unusual characteristic with this geyser as it creates a bubble of water just as it errupts. The trick for photographers is to get a photo of a good bubble. Not all bubbles are equal.

And sometimes you are just a millisecond too late and the bubble is bursting.

The fun soon wears off and we head off toward Gullfoss. This fall is quite interesting as it is in two parts at right angles to eachother and the second part is into a very narrow gully which looks like it has been created by plate movement rather than river erosion and doesn't seem nearly large enough to contain all the water going over the falls. It must be incredibly deep.

By now its getting late in the afternoon and we need to head for Laugarvatn where we will be staying the night ... if we can find accomodation ... for the off season it seems to be incredibly busy!

On the way we pass a field with a large quantity of wrapped hay bales which just catch the last bit of light before we are about to be swallowed up by an approaching storm front.

We risk stopping for a few shots but the light is changing and the storm approaching too fast for us to stay too long.

On to Selfoss ...