Iceland II: all Foss all the time

Many waterfalls (foss).

Many of which Sameer tried to enter:

Iceland is known as the ‘Land of Ice and Fire’. But that’s a massive disservice to the Foss* Of Iceland. Of which, there are over 10,000.

*I realise I don’t know how to pluralise Foss, so let’s just hope that it’s like sheep.

10,000 is A LOT.

And I know that it’s hard to unit-ify ice or fire- particularly when the former is sprawling across the land like an overfed white cat who is loved too much, and the latter is largely contained underground…..

But these Foss aren’t little piddly Australian ‘oops we came to see it in the dry season’ trickles.

They’re big and roaring and wide and plummeting.

Ice, Fire, and Fall?

Ice, Fire and Fossy Fury?

We’ll work on the branding.

Although in fairness, this particular Foss doesn’t need any help with its PR. Our guide joked that it’s basically illegal in Iceland to print a stamp without this waterfall on it.

This, is Gullfoss.

One of Iceland’s most famous waterfalls, fed by the Langjökull glacier an pumping an incredible volume of water across a 20m wide shelf to plunge 32 metres into the Hvítá river canyon below.

The waterfall is set up for tourist access, so that you can see it from all angles- including right up close next to the spray.

As you can see from the 8000 shots I took, I was particularly in love with the steamy spray….

If you look closely, you can see a sheen of ice on the grass, where the water has frozen on contact with the ground.

While the waterfall is now state owned, it used to belong to private owners, who at some point planned to industrialize the fall to generate electricity.

There’s a story that the daughter of one of the owners, Sigríður Tómasdóttir, threatened to throw herself over the fall if the waterfall wasn’t preserved.

It’s unclear how true the throwing part is, and in reality, Sigríður also took legal action and staged protests against the development, and is seen as Iceland’s first environmental activist.

(It’s nice to remember narratives where women can contribute beyond threatening self harm).

It seems her legal work wasn’t itself overly successful, but the plans to industrialize the falls anyway failed and her protest did rouse popular attention. Eventually the falls were sold back to the government.

We left Gullfoss, and headed to another cluster of waterfalls.

The first of which involved this:

Gljúfrabúi (aka Canyon Dweller), is a waterfall inside a small rift.

It was a bit squeezy to get in, and both spray-y and slippery once inside, so I didn’t manage to take very many photos.

.. but here’s a nice series of both Sameer and my camera getting progressively more wet:

Back through and slightly more drowned rat-like, we headed a few hundred metres down the road, past some more falls, to the Fall Spectacular itself, Seljalandsfoss.

Seljalandsfoss is about 60 m high, and very nice and splashy and all. But it’s special feature is that you can walk all the way behind it.

^That bride must have been absolutely FREEZING.

Sameer really liked going down the bottom of the fall.

“Tegan, why isn’t anyone coming down here?, don’t they know they can come down here?”

I think they know buddy.

But we all make choices in life.

Back on mostly-dry land, we briefly bounced around in a rainbow bubble:

And bought some terrible coffee mostly to warm our fingers.

And then it was time for one more Foss.

I like how even our travel itinerary describes this one as ‘yet another waterfall’

We first climbed many many steps to see the fall from the top.

Most of our group was not ready for the climb, but I think it was worth it to see the green against the silver-white and black beach from above:

^This is one of my favourite photos.

(A background of glacier!)

And then, once we’d come back down again….

.. Sameer tried really hard to get inside the Foss again.

Damp.

Dinner was arctic char, which was a first for me (after reading a lot of science about the little fellows), and in the evening we tried to look for lights.

But all we saw were stars.