The Pit Stop
There can't be that many places in the world where you can sit on a hillock at the edge of a small town car park and gaze northwards towards a horizon filled with mountains and glaciers as you cradle a cup of hot coffee in your hands. If that's the sort of thing that appeals to you, Hofn in South East Iceland is one such place.
Lee and I arrived here as the weather began to show the first signs of breaking after more than twenty-four hours of worsening conditions. The day before, we'd driven for what seemed like an eternity from Husavik in the far north of the country in a clockwise direction as far as Hvalnes, where we parked in front of the Eystrahorn mountain range. Even now I shudder to think how many delights we missed, both in our sense of purpose to keep to our itinerary and the grey pervading mist which left fjord after fjord in the far south east more or less invisible. At Eystrahorn the stunning vista I'd watched Mads Peter-Iversen and Nigel Danson produce some of the most inspiring shots imaginable remained hidden more or less entirely by cloud. Eventually I gave up and took a grumpy shot across the black sand into the disappearing mist.
www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/49435483326/in/album-...
From Eystrahorn we moved along the coast the following morning to the famous Stokksnes, where the iconic Vestrahorn range reaches down to the sea. Many of you have made wonderful images of it and shared them with the rest of us in these pages. We saw nothing, the entire bulk of the range left to our imagination as it hid under a shroud of grey. I don't believe a morning has ever brought quite so much disappointment, although ironically it delivered my most viewed image of this year when I posted it in the spring. Maybe you liked the story all about Brian the Snail, our accommodation and transport for the week. Perhaps it's because it's not your usual composition from Stokksnes.
www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/49476904751/in/album-...
And so we ended up at the small town of Hofn, almost 300 miles from Reykjavik, where we stocked up on pasta and Haribo before pulling up at a patch of unpaved ground at the edge of the sound, which served as a car park. It was the first town we'd stopped in since Husavik, also almost 300 painstaking miles distant, yet in the opposite direction. All of this was coming at the end of an especially forgettable twelve months in my life, so putting the disappointment of our morning setbacks into perspective came easily. After the non stop travel of the last few days the simple pleasure of pulling a camping chair out of the van and sitting in the open air drinking coffee and gazing across the water at this view seemed both novel and refreshing.
As I write this I can't really account for why we didn't double back to Vestrahorn now that the sky was beginning to clear. It was only a short drive away. Perhaps we weren't on speaking terms with it - we needed some time before we'd forgive it for hiding from us. Maybe we were just looking at our watches in the knowledge that time, our ever present enemy was against us and the glacier lagoon of Jokulsarlon and Diamond Beach were next on the agenda. There's another story, and a much happier one too.
I would love to return and spend much longer in Iceland, but sadly it's not the sort of place where the budget will hold out for too long. How long for and when remains impossible to answer for now, but one day I'm going to stand in front of those two mountain ranges and gawp at them open mouthed as I wonder where to plant the tripod first.
The Pit Stop
There can't be that many places in the world where you can sit on a hillock at the edge of a small town car park and gaze northwards towards a horizon filled with mountains and glaciers as you cradle a cup of hot coffee in your hands. If that's the sort of thing that appeals to you, Hofn in South East Iceland is one such place.
Lee and I arrived here as the weather began to show the first signs of breaking after more than twenty-four hours of worsening conditions. The day before, we'd driven for what seemed like an eternity from Husavik in the far north of the country in a clockwise direction as far as Hvalnes, where we parked in front of the Eystrahorn mountain range. Even now I shudder to think how many delights we missed, both in our sense of purpose to keep to our itinerary and the grey pervading mist which left fjord after fjord in the far south east more or less invisible. At Eystrahorn the stunning vista I'd watched Mads Peter-Iversen and Nigel Danson produce some of the most inspiring shots imaginable remained hidden more or less entirely by cloud. Eventually I gave up and took a grumpy shot across the black sand into the disappearing mist.
www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/49435483326/in/album-...
From Eystrahorn we moved along the coast the following morning to the famous Stokksnes, where the iconic Vestrahorn range reaches down to the sea. Many of you have made wonderful images of it and shared them with the rest of us in these pages. We saw nothing, the entire bulk of the range left to our imagination as it hid under a shroud of grey. I don't believe a morning has ever brought quite so much disappointment, although ironically it delivered my most viewed image of this year when I posted it in the spring. Maybe you liked the story all about Brian the Snail, our accommodation and transport for the week. Perhaps it's because it's not your usual composition from Stokksnes.
www.flickr.com/photos/126574513@N04/49476904751/in/album-...
And so we ended up at the small town of Hofn, almost 300 miles from Reykjavik, where we stocked up on pasta and Haribo before pulling up at a patch of unpaved ground at the edge of the sound, which served as a car park. It was the first town we'd stopped in since Husavik, also almost 300 painstaking miles distant, yet in the opposite direction. All of this was coming at the end of an especially forgettable twelve months in my life, so putting the disappointment of our morning setbacks into perspective came easily. After the non stop travel of the last few days the simple pleasure of pulling a camping chair out of the van and sitting in the open air drinking coffee and gazing across the water at this view seemed both novel and refreshing.
As I write this I can't really account for why we didn't double back to Vestrahorn now that the sky was beginning to clear. It was only a short drive away. Perhaps we weren't on speaking terms with it - we needed some time before we'd forgive it for hiding from us. Maybe we were just looking at our watches in the knowledge that time, our ever present enemy was against us and the glacier lagoon of Jokulsarlon and Diamond Beach were next on the agenda. There's another story, and a much happier one too.
I would love to return and spend much longer in Iceland, but sadly it's not the sort of place where the budget will hold out for too long. How long for and when remains impossible to answer for now, but one day I'm going to stand in front of those two mountain ranges and gawp at them open mouthed as I wonder where to plant the tripod first.