6 - Road Trip down South

Dear readers,

This weekend I have been on one of the most amazing roadtrips I have ever experienced. I am still amazed by what I have seen and it still feels a little unreal... as if it was a dream or I died and woke up in heaven! So, I can't wait to tell you about the adventures we have been on.

On saturday, I left the city centre with four other international students. We rented a car, which I would definitely recommend if you are planning to visit some places outside of Reykjavík. Joining a 'guided' tour in a bus sounds attractive, but honestly it's not worth it. It's much cheaper to just rent a car yourself, decide where you want to go and spend as much time as you want at that particular place. As it is winter now the roads can be pretty slippery so we made sure

we hired a car with winter tyres, which is definitely a must-have I can tell you!

My German friend, Melissa, had done some research on the must-sees on our trip. She did an amazing job. We went to places which most tourists don't visit, which was really nice because we had most places all to ourselves.

At 9 o'clock in the morning we started driving off to the South. Our first stop was going to be at an enormous waterfall called 'Háifoss'. It wasn't easy to get there. At 5 kilometres from the waterfall the road started to become really bad. This road hadn't been worked on in many years and it had many potholes and we even had to drive through a small river. The most incredible thing: we did this while driving just a normal family car. Although we managed in the end (we

did decide to walk the last 2.5 kilometres), I wouldn't recommend coming here with just a normal car. You're better off driving here with a 4x4 or a jeep type of car. After a small hike we made it to the waterfall. It was an amazing beginning of the day: the waterfall was huge! This waterfall falls 122 meters down a two million years old cliff. The waterfall wasn't actually discovered until the first decade of the 20th century and was at that time believed to be not only the highest waterfall in Iceland but the highest in Europe. Now we know that the highest waterfall is the Morsi in Morsa river in Morsarjokull glacier. This one is about 240 meters high.

Háifoss was definitely worth the hike and the car ride on the bumpy road and after taking some pictures, it was time to move on to the next site.

Our next stop was another waterfall. But, it was very different from the

one before. This site consisted of multiple waterfalls. At about 18 I lost count but there were many more to see. The name of this stunning place is Sigöldugljúfur. I have no idea how to pronounce this name but I have encountered this problem already with many other Icelandic words ;). To see so many waterfalls at one place was something I had never experienced before. It is amazing to see how many stunning places Iceland has to offer. I really get why this country is starting to get so many visitors each year. It is just miraculous to think that this wasn't a popular place to visit before.

We had spent quite some time getting to each of these places, so it was time to move on to the last stop, which was only a 7 minute drive from the last stop: Sigoldufoss. A name ending with -foss means that it is a waterfall. So, this was our third waterfall which we were visiting this day. Every single waterfall is so different that I could just watch

(different) waterfalls all day long. I really liked this waterfall because you could get so close to it. Also, the environment around it was so untouched, for example, there weren't any fences around it or roads/ paths leading to it. This makes these kind of places even more special, as most sights nowadays are focused on tourists, with buildings or other man-made things around it.

It was time to go home now as it was starting to get dark and we still had a 2-hour drive back to Reykjavík. I was already looking forward to the next day as we had many stunning sites on our to do list. I will tell you more about this amazing day in the next chapter! We even tried to find the Northern lights. Whether we were able to see them, you will have to find out in the next chapter... ;).

Love,

Camille