Category: Hiking

The weather is sunny – just perfect for the Golden circle route – one of the most popular tourist attractions in Iceland. The hostess suggest another road to the first part of the route. The suggestion turns out to be good. The road goes high near the hill tops and the sights are gorgeous.

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Just after starting to drive we loose the navigation support – the sygic application decides to upgrade some map and refuses to do anything without the internet connection. Luckily we have good old paper map with us.

So we drive the Iceland’s top tourist route in the middle of the season, the weather is excellent. No surprise there are some other people around 🙂

We start exploring Reykjavik from parking place near the Reykjavik concert hall. Walking by the impressive concert hall building we proceed to the old port.

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Here we are welcomed by all kinds of written invitations to join the whale watching and other tours. The offers are many – way select the hour long tour to watch Atlantic puffins.

We put on all warm clothes we have and take a place in very front of the top deck.

It is cold even with three warm jackets each of us has. The guide Rodrigo suggests not to fall in water as it is rather cold (8C).
Puffins live in Lundey island and fly around it. Looks like large bees or small penguins. They have short wings therefore have to flap them around 400 times per minute to fly. Rodrigo says he haas tried  to flap (arms?) but has not succeeded to make more than 100. Puffins are very good at swimming, diving and catching fish. Back from the fishing they return with a bunch of fish pending from their beak.

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While North American and Eurasian plates slowly drift apart, magma fills the gap and this forms the Mid-Atlantic Ridge – a mostly underwater mountain range. Iceland is the highest part of the ridge and stands partly on both plates.

Iceland is one of the globes most active volcanic regions. Near the Iceland coast in 1960ies during the volcanic eruption has formed one of the planets newest islands – Surtsey. Many people could remember the eruption of the  Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010 creating havoc in ir traffic.

Congost de Mont-rebei was suggested to us by our lovely hosts – Silvia and Mark. It is a picturesque gorge on a river Noguera Ribagorzana on a border between Catalunia and Aragon (congost is gorge in Catalan). The only road through the gorge is a mules path partly carved in the cliffs. The gorge walls are up to 500m high, gorge is as narrow as 20m in some places.

Our plan for today is to have some walk in mountains of Maladeta range. This is were the highest summit of Pyrenees Aneto (3404m) stays surrounded by ice and snow. We have no helmets nor other useful equipment to climb Aneto thus we just stroll around here.
The track starts near Embalse de Llauset basin. We get there driving 10km of very bumpy road from Aneto village. The road is located more than 2km above the sea level and goes by pastures for sheep and goats. One of the sheep herds is transferred between pastures exactly by the road we are driving. Sort of a traffic jam:-)