It's been a while since I've laid my hands on a keyboard! All the more pleasant it is to feel the soft travel of the keys and the magic of gray Cyrillic characters appearing on a white background, a stream of thoughts straight from the bins of your consciousness.
Iceland Cycling - day 3
EveryTrail - Find hiking trails in California and beyond
But this isn't about my graphomaniac tendencies, it's about the third (only the third!) day in the land of harsh Vikings, mountains, sparse vegetation, and waterfalls. The latter is what we'll talk about today. When we were leaving the campsite in Geysir (as always, not exactly early), we met a couple of Germans at the exit — a guy and a girl. The guy's name was Mark, and the girl's was Rachel, except in German, so I can neither pronounce nor remember it. The Germans were brushing their teeth, and we decided that such hygienic people would come in handy on the road, so we rode on together. Andrey protested, of course, because he can never figure out whether he likes people or not, whether they're bothering him or entertaining him, and all that. Nevertheless, we rode together to our next immediate destination — the Gullfoss waterfall, which was luckily not far away, about 10 kilometers.
The color of the water in the rivers never ceases to invigorate my imagination
Rachel told me that this was their honeymoon, and before leaving they saw a cool tandem (a bike for two) where the front rider lies down and the back rider sits; everyone can see everything, and you can chat. But it cost five grand in euros, and they couldn't afford that much, especially considering their recent wedding.
Meanwhile, the Langjökull glacier loomed on the horizon
The visibility was good, so no one could guess the distance to the glacier. And I have a super map in my GPS, so I can be a bit of a snob by asking such a tricky question. By the way, you guys can also take a guess in the comments, but I can't guarantee that I measured the distance from this exact spot.
And here is Gullfoss itself, the most popular waterfall in Iceland!
The most popular, but far from the biggest — the steps are 25 and 11 meters. It mostly attracts tourists because it's close to the capital and it's beautiful. There's also a touching story connected to Gullfoss about how Sigríður Tómasdóttir, the owner of the nearby lands in the 1920s, protected the waterfall from an attempt to build a hydroelectric power plant, and even threatened to throw herself into it if the project was started after all. Perhaps she really would have done it, but the plant wasn't built for a much more mundane reason — a lack of funding. However, to attract tourists and create a mythos of Icelanders' eco-consciousness even back in those days, a monument to her was erected at the top of the watery monster.
The dust is literally standing in a column. Water dust.
I don't know what other visitors are thinking, but looking at the powerful flow, white breakers, and whirlpools makes me want to take a dip, even though it's far from sweltering outside, and flying onto the rocks is fast and very, very painful.
We observed this monster of the automotive industry many times
You can't really see the scale here, but there's a regular jeep sticking out right behind it, far from tiny, and you can see how much smaller it is. This self-propelled cart impressed us almost as much as the natural beauties. A man's soul has a weakness for machinery, even non-machos like me and the punk.
Exploiting kids in a 66 Degrees North ad
As I've already mentioned, this national brand is like Nokia for the Finns, so the logo kept popping up constantly, and even in the absolute middle of nowhere — on the mighty sides of super-jeeps and on the equally broad and muscular backs of hikers.
It's always crowded around Gullfoss, and so there is a funny sign in the shop saying they accept dollars, euros, rubles and other major currencies. But Gullfoss didn't stick in our memories for that, rather for the fact that in the cafeteria, next to a barrel of soup, I saw the miraculous sign "refill included." For those who do not possess my knowledge of American realities, I'll clarify — a refill is a REFUELING, meaning if you ate or drank your portion, they will pour you a new one. And while in the USA this usually applies to sugary carbonated drinks, in Iceland these wonderful letters were painted black on a sign next to the lamb and mushroom soups.
You don't need to persuade us, hungry and poor Latvians, for long, especially considering that the bread and butter were also self-serve style, and I loaded up a full plate of them. When else would such a chance to eat a proper meal present itself!
In the end, I wolfed down a bowl of lamb soup and went to get the mushroom one. The girl didn't want to pour it for me, but I misunderstood her motives, too many of our own realities had piled up in my soul. I thought the reason was that it had to be the same soup, and I started persistently trying to persuade her, arguing that the mushroom one was actually cheaper, which was a direct profit for the establishment. I forgot what kind of country I had ended up in — nobody there really cares about prices, and nobody there will go broke over a bowl of soup, considering that right nearby, German pensioners are forking out fat wads of euros for silly little t-shirts, membrane jackets, and woolen socks. The beautiful-faced maiden was actually worried that I would find it unpleasant to eat from the same bowl, since there were still traces of lamb soup left in it!
How far apart our realities are, oh unknown young Icelandic beauty! I wouldn't even know how to begin explaining the entire abyss that lies between a bear who is constantly craving food from excessive sports activities, but only gets a bowl of porridge with canned fish, and a sweet young lady who surely wouldn't put an extra bite in her mouth, thinking about her figure. When the misunderstanding cleared up, I received the coveted bowl of white brew, and didn't forget to grab some more bread too. And when I polished that off as well, Andrey also didn't miss the chance to visit the source of life with my bowl. When we were leaving, I also sent him to grab about ten little butter packets — and very prudently so, because at the campsite in Landmannalaugar it already cost 45 santims apiece, and porridge with butter, as everyone knows, tastes completely different than without it.
The soup, by the way, was top-notch, and the mushroom one was even tastier, probably because of the creamy sauce.
Having lifted our spirits with such a wonderful and sublime ritual as shoveling food fuel into the furnaces of our stomachs, we moved on, since both our cultural and everyday needs were satisfied in the best possible way.