Handy, you just have to mention something and Iceland magically summons it in front of you. I said something like I wish we had a chance to photograph some waterfall in here, after missing Dettifoss. 30 seconds later Mia yells from the backseat "STOP, waterfall!". A bit before that it was "STOP, reindeers!". Despite stopping for photographs once in a while our journey towards Reykjavik progresses, just 500 kilometers more to go.

Mia obviously lost her wallet somewhere earlier during the day and explained it on the phone to her mother: "I think it dropped on the volcano when our car started to sideslip down the steep hill and I jumped out of the heavily banked car". Yea, just one more normal day.. And yes, our Hyundai didn't want to climb all the way up to the active volcano Krafla due to the steepness and snow, we had to walk half of the way. :P

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This Eastern part of the country does not look too bad either. Coastline curvy roads, high cliffs and the sea. And we still have 735km to Reykjavik, probably will be there at midnight. Urgh.

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We found some Icelandic horses. :)

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One of the places we really wanted to visit during this trip was Dettifoss, the biggest waterfall in Europe. The 60 meter waterfall is familiar for example from the beginning of the movie Prometheus which was mostly filmed in here. Unfortunately all the information sites stated that the roads to Dettifoss would be closed during the winter.

We were anyway passing past the road crossing to Dettifoss, so we decided to see how the road looks. To our surprise the road seemed to be in good condition and the sign on the crossing only stated that the road CAN be impassable, but it was not forbidden to drive there. So, after considering for a while we decided to give it a try.

The road was mostly ok, just some wind blown snow piles which our Hyundai 4x4 car passed relatively easily and we were already believing we got really lucky and would make it to the waterfall. Unfortunately that did not happen, 30-40cm deep snow pile stopped us a few kilometers from the waterfall, as our car simply did not have high enough bottom to be able to drive through. A local tourist bus was trying to same as we, and had to stop and finally turn around at the same place. They were trying to get a snow ploughing tractor to assist them through, but did not manage to get one there so they had to give up, and so had we.

Too bad, after just 100 meters the road would have been in better condition again and we really would have wanted to see the waterfall. Well, you cannot win always. Now our journey continues towards Southern Iceland via eastern part of the country.

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Now we found them. :)

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Our journey through the country continued all the day. The weather was changing constantly, from driving inside zero-visibility clouds to snowing, rain or clear and beautiful sky. Sometimes the landscape looked like we were not in a Scandinavian country, but on a polar expedition just about to meet some polar bears.. Or on an another planet. I have to say that the northern part of the country is beautiful, even if it's just rocks, mountains, ice and coldness.

Just before sunset we arrived to Dimmuborgir, which is basically just a field of lava formations and lava caves. We stayed there for a while, found a guesthouse nearby to stay for the night, had a relaxing bath in a natural thermal bath and that's about it for today. Some pictures are below, shame that it isn't really possible to capture the atmosphere in pictures. While we were driving we were stopping somewhere all the time, "hey look, wild horses" and the driver hits brakes and goes back on reverse for photos, parking the car in the middle of the road. There is basically no traffic, so.. :)

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Driving through the country now. In the morning it was snowing heavily, but here in the north the sky is slowly clearing and the driving conditions are good. We are now literally in middle of nowhere, there was nothing on the map for 200 kilometers.

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Seems like it's snowing today in Reykjavik. We just woke up and after breakfast we should start driving to north, to start our journey around the country. If everything goes as planned we will be on the way for two days and return back to Reykjavik late tomorrow evening.

Some flight photos by Mia: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miamfi/sets/72157632706781312

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The bath wasn't a bad idea. Next door to our house there was an outside swimming pool with multiple pools of hot water. In the zero degrees outside temperature it feels nice to lay in a +44 degrees thermal pool. :)

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In the morning we woke up and headed to the airport and to the office of a local flight school, Flugskoli Islands and met their friendly teacher guy in there. While others were waiting on ground he took me through the procedures of the school and the airport, from refueling the aircraft to filing flight plans to the air traffic control. Many of those things are done differently in here, for example the flight plan is filed by calling the control tower and not with official web forms like in Finland nowadays.

After getting familiar with the procedures and maps we took an hour long flight to learn the landmarks and air routes near Reykjavik. Also, they wanted to see if I can actually fly the aircraft before letting us to use it alone. At that point the weather was quite nice although cloudy, only near the bigger mountains there was some heavy turbulence. During the flight I had good time to chat with the instructor and actually learned how things work in here. I was also pretty happy of the instructor telling me that my flying was really good for my relatively low amount of experience.. and obviously he actually thought so, as they let us to use the aircraft freely after that. :)

After landing we planned a new flight route with Timo, Mia and Mikko, thinking to fly to see the Gullfoss waterfall from the air. While we were playing around with plans, paperwork, refueling and everything the weather got worse and most of the aircraft landed at the same time as we departed. The weather was otherwise still decent, but the wind was much stronger and the extremely heavy turbulence was now affecting also flat areas and not just near the mountains. I think I have never flown in that strong turbulence before, but well.. I gained some useful experience and everything went just fine and was fun, at least when thinking of it on the ground. Mia also got addicted to flying, even if the weather was what it was. Some flying club might have a new student soon. :)

Originally we were planning to fly to Gullfoss, but above Þingvallavatn I made a decision to turn around due to rapidly descending cloud base.. Which obviously wasn't that bad decision, it started to rain after we had landed. We will upload some video of the flight later, as we had Timo's GoPro camera attached to the aircraft. Weather forecast is promising sunshine and nice weather for Sunday, so I think we will go back flying on early Sunday morning. I was way too busy all the time to take any photos, so the photos attached here are by Timo.

Now we are back in the apartment after having a dinner and thinking of what to do next.. Maybe a hot spring. As a funny detail the hot tap water in here is definitely volcanic, judging by the really strong smell of sulfur in the water and the sticky feeling it leaves on skin together with soap, familiar from volcanic baths where I have been to in different countries.

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