Adventures in Iceland

High mountains covered with a layer of snow, like a pile of strawberries toped with whipped cream, is what attracts us the most. During the last several years Tali and I have become more and more interested in geothermal activity such as volcanoes, mud pools and geysers. The combination of the two made Iceland our natural destination for the last summer of the millenium.

Iceland, the second largest island in Europe, with 270,000 inhabitants and an area of about 5 times bigger than Israel, can be "digested" in a rather short time. Most tourists go there for a week or two, or even in a 3 days stop-over between Europe and the USA. After reading about its trekking possibilities (there doesn't exist even one trekking book in the world written in a comprehensible language to us such as Hebrew, English, French, Spanish or Italian) we decided that 6 weeks should do.

Our tour plans were as follows:

1. Three days in Reykjavik for touring and arranging flight tickets and car rentals.
2. Four days in the small island of Heimay (in Westman Islands, with a radius of 2 Km), in order to see the active volcano that almost blocked the entrance of the fishing port in 1973. We are also interested to have a look at the famous puffins (a kind of an arctic parrot).
3. 22 days with a car, encircling the island (~1,400 Km) and doing short treks.
4. Walking the 8 days Landmannalaugar to Skogar trek, the "Milford Sound" (i.e. premium) trek of Iceland.
5. Three days with a car, in order to investigate the south-west part of Iceland.

A technical note: all photos were taken by us with an Elan IIE Canon camera, with zoom lenses of 18-35mm (Sigma) and 28-105mm (Canon). The photos were scanned in 200-300 dpi only, in order to decrease loading time. It is best to browse the following chapters with a screen resolution of at least 1024*768 pixels and with small fonts. Your comments regarding the photos or text are more than welcome !!!

Chapter 1 - The people (or Boredom)
Chapter 2 - Money
Chapter 3 - Ice
Chapter 4 - Fire

The following two points will be written in chronological order, in a style similar to the one been used for South America and Africa .

Chapter 5 - Landmannalaugar to Skogar Trek
Chapter 6 - Three days in a car
Epilogue