Travels in Ice and Fire Day 6 - Chasing Waterfalls in Seydisfjordur

I woke up this morning to see the ship pulling into port and the sun was shining. I feel like I haven’t seen the sun in a year.

Seydisfjordur is a town of about 700 people.  Our ship was the only one in the port.

                                                      

We left the ship at mid-morning for our tour of the local waterfall trails. We didn’t have to go far. A bus took us to the other side of the fjord to the base of the mountains.  Here we found remains of a settlement that used to be on this side of the fjord.  

For the past few days I have almost become numb to the beauty around me.  When I look at the fjords from the ship or from the roads, everything looks like big green hills with trickles of water running down them.  The fjords are nothing more than bodies of water surrounded by those hills.

When you climb up there and see the waterfalls up close, and see the fjords from the top rather than the bottom, it’s a whole new perspective.  Today I looked at Iceland with fresh eyes.  It’s all so majestic.

We returned to the ship for lunch. Then I left Kevin for the afternoon and took a trip to the Vok Nature Baths.  There isn’t much geothermal activity in the eastern fjords, but locals noticed this lake didn’t freeze in the winter and the hot springs feeding the lake were revealed.  This is a small facility. It’s not as big as the famous Blue Lagoon, but I liked the intimacy of it.

You enter the baths from the locker rooms so you don’t have to immediately walk out into the cold day in your bathing suit. There are three pools here. The one you enter from the locker room is the coldest one. The next two pools are successively hotter.

I settled in well.

The views from the pools are lovely.

You have the option of swimming in the surrounding lake as well. The temperature of the lake that day as around 10 degrees Celsius. I was intimidated by the temperature when I merely reached over the edge of the bath and stuck my hand in the lake. But bathers kept braving the cold and going in. Some swam a few feet from the ladder. I gave in and decided to try it. The first time I tried it I went about two steps down the ladder and jumped out when the water reached my chest. I tried a second time a little later deciding I should be braver. I manage to stick my head under for a half a second, but I couldn’t stay in any longer.

The pools have a swim-up bar. Did you know basil gimlets come in bottles? I had to try one.

After two hours in the pools it was time to go back to the ship and clean up for dinner.

Dinner was the The Grill. In the daytime it’s the casual pool bar. In the evening it changes into a dining venue where you eat steaks and chops (or fish or tofu) and cook them yourself on a hot stone at your table. 

I had a mozzarella and roasted vegetable salad, followed by cooking my own pork chop with some onion rings.  I finished it off with an apple tart.

We called it a night after dinner and watched movies on our cabin.