Day 8 - Iceland (day 4)

Started the morning early leaving at 7:30 to avoid the big group that was staying at our hostel. I has a room to myself lat night which was fun :D (watched a bit of YouTube). My room was good except that my blinds were crap so there was quite a lot of light in my room (24 hour sunlight in Iceland at the moment) which meant that I had to go to sleep with an eye mask. The drivings going well (dad is good at keeping on the right) and we have discovered how to connect my iPod  with the car via Bluetooth. I have a great series of books on my iPod which I am plowing through with great excitement. Mummy is enjoying the book i brought (which i haven't read yet) We had a nice chat with a family from holland last night which was nice, they had heaps of things to recommend to us. We saw this family at another hostel earlier in Iceland.  (Hey Kate just a side note the guy from this family looked like Dello :P.  ) ummmm.... I think that's all the random news so on with today. So yeah left early and headed off to see how much a puffin watching boat trip was (this was one of the things the Dutch family had recommended) turned out the first was at 11 which was far to late for us so we decided to go look for them our self which turned out....... Well lets  say it was interesting. We stopped on a little road near the main road. So we went through an open gate into a paddock and began walking toward what we thought was a cliff (it was actual a very steep slope) it turned out that the paddock we were walking through was a huge nesting side for heaps and heaps of birds and they weren't happy.  We got swooped a lot and they didn't actually touch us. Mum found this amazing, I found it petrifying!!! I saw a baby arctic tern and we almost stepped on some eggs as well. Anyway the bird we saw were: arctic terns (they were the main ones attacking us), ptarmigan (a very rare bird) and lots of other that we don't know the names of. Anyway no puffin in sight though.  once we finally got back to the car after jumping a barbed wire fence we headed off to another puffin bird stop were we found no puffins and I lost one of the binocular lenses covers.  then we headed off to Asbyrgi were we had our first coffee and hot chocolate and went for a walk to a little lake in a box cannon. It was nice and it was the first actual forest I've seen in Iceland (which was very nice) 

while I'm on that let's talk about the Icelandic landscape. Iceland as a majority is made up of generally flat green valleys (with no trees) and big flat topped mountains covered in snow. Then you get the flat desert like plain covered in black sand ash and dried lava from the volcanos. Also there is a very little bit of mars like terrace with lots of steaming volcanic things. So really Iceland is very lacking on the tree side of things. 

So yeah anyway fourth stop was dettifoss which is a bloody enormous waterfall it was pumping. This one was simply huge nothing pretty about it. Also while we were there it poured down and was really really windy, our full water proofs bennies and gloves got a good work out. Next stop was a toilet and lunch stop and then went to a small farm where we all has another hot chocolate and a traditional Icelandic twisted donut. Then we drove lots until we reached a magnificent waterfalls where dad and i ran to the top of the hill and got close to it where mum stopped a little way down and took pictures (I'm so unfit its not funny) anyway there were magnificent waterfalls all down that valley. Ok so after that we got to a major town and went shopping (shopping was a bit expensive this time). So yeah that's where we are up at the moment because I am writing this in the car like a cool kid :P chicken curry for dinner which should be nice. I hope everyone is happy wherever you are. 

P.s please leave a comment if you can because it would be nice to see how many people actually read this thanks :D

Alastair