9 July, 2013

Today was mostly a driving day, but with lots of little stops along the way. We visited the arctic fox center in Súðavík, which was interesting, I thought the different colours were summer/winter coats, but there's actually three different base colours too, and _then_ summer/winter versions of that.

We stopped at Reykjanes next, where I had a swim in their ridiculously large hot pool, then went out to visit the Reykjanes Salt Works, which was awesome. They're pretty young, but are expanding rather substantially. We got the tour of a lifetime, before all the safety and scheduled tours and plans and stuff got organised. They were actually laying pavers for a cafe they were planning on opening before the end of the summer, but were just early enough. It's a really neat operation. Salt had been made there in the late 19th century experimentally, so it had some history. They're doing it all with geothermal heat, for concentrating the seawater to getting the heat for drying the salt out at the end.

But we couldn't sit around and eat salt all day, so we hit the road. The weather deteriorated a little bit, just enough to give us some spectacular clouds over the passes as we headed north.

Norðurfjörður was our destination, heading north up a road I'd never been on, going as far as it would take us! It was a beautiful drive, I should totally have been up here before! It's not the same as the rest of the west fjords at all, the mountains are not the same shape, and the fjords are more like tiny bays than the long deep fjords of the west.

We arrived in Norðurfjorður, and after a nice BBQ dinner in the evening sun, we had another swim in the deservedly famous pool at Krossnes. An excellent spot.