From Glacier Lagoon to Ranga
Day 9, 10th August 2023
What a difference a day makes? Yesterday was a gorgeous blue day, while today we awoke to greyness! We drove westwards along the south coast and decided to stop in Vic, as we had been listening to a podcast about this small town which sits at the bottom of the Katla Volcano. We discovered they had a Lava Show and decided this would be a good option to avoid the cold and rain of the morning. The audience sat around this runway of black sand and then a door opened and red hot lava flowed and we all felt the instant warmth. The guide showed us the effect of adding water to the hot lava, producing the bubble you see in the photo above. It was a fascinating experience as we learnt about the different properties of lava and could now better understand the nature of the geology we had been driving through. The Katla Volcano sits underneath a glacier, so when an eruption occurs, the result is a deluge of water coming down the mountain and drowning all below. Katla had a habit of erupting every 50 years, and it is long overdue for another blow up! Not comforting news to hear when you are sat in Vic! Everyone in Vic has an evacuation protocol and one hopes that technology would allow sufficient notice for people to escape.
Our intended destination today was the black sands of Reynisfjara beach and the offshore Reynisdrangar Stacks. While the rain had subsided a little, the wind was out in force and we could barely open the doors doors and stand up! We followed the path down onto the beach and were immediately sand-blasted by fine coarse black sand. It was not a pleasant experience at all! But we continued to walk towards the rocky outcrops, passing some incredible rock formations on the way. The hexagonal basalt stacks are formed when lava cools slowly.
In the photo above are the Reynisdrangar Stacks, much loved by photographers. One is supposed to walk over the rocks to behind the stacks and photograph from that direction. But the waves here are notoriously dangerous so I opted to stay on the wrong side for my photographs! We did not stay on the beach long and dreaded having to walk back into the wind and sand storm. We had spotted puffins on the cliffs here and I was impressed how they could fly and land safely in this wind. Lawrence got chatting to someone who said we should go to the other side of the beach for a better look at puffins. Also one gets a different view of the stacks in the far distance.
And here we saw many many puffins, and since you can't get enough photos of puffins, here are too many!
It too was quite difficult walking here in the wind, but a rainbow appeared so we lingered a little longer.
By now we thought we had seen enough waterfalls, but could see the spray from this waterfall in the distance and decided to pull over into the carpark. There was the option to walk up many steps to get to the top of the waterfall, but we stayed briefly at the bottom.
It seemed that today was the day of rainbows, with Skogafoss producing two rainbows, one of which landed on Lawrence!
Tonight's destination was Hotel Ranga and we watched a lovely sunset from the dining room while we enjoyed superb food. This would be a great place to revisit in winter to see the aurora and make use of their observatory to see the stars in this dark region of the world.
