Iceland's Ring Road - Hvolsvöllur and Heimaey (Day 3)

UPDATED: 1/16/2023

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From Landeyjahöfn to Heimaey

First thing in the morning, I woke up to a text from my sister announcing that she had her baby, and I had a new niece, which is a great way to start the day!

After a quick run to Hvolsvöllur for some basic groceries at Krónan, a grocery store, we headed to the shore to catch a ferry from Landeyjahöfn to Heimaey, the only inhabited island of the Vestmannaeyjar (Westman Islands). We had purchased our electronic tickets online the evening before but you might want to book further in advance to be safe. The ferry ride, run by the company Eimskip, was about 35 minutes long on a day that started gray and only became grayer, colder, and windier as it progressed.

After arriving on the island, we crowded in to a very packed restaurant called Gott, where we had delicious meals in a family-seating sort of setting. Due to the crowded nature of the restaurant, our threesome ended up paired with an Italian woman traveling solo. She had already been to Akureyri and so gave us some travel tips. She was not a driver so was using a combination of small airplanes (which some travelers to Iceland use to get to main parts of the island faster) and buses as her transportation. We briefly spoke about the latest in Italian politics with the election earlier that month of Conte as a populist-style Prime Minister. Let’s just say I am pretty certain we would not have agreed with her on politics.

While we had been warm inside, the weather outside had gotten worse - the wind had picked up and some rain had settled in over the island. So we bundled up in our hopefully rainproof gear and took off on foot through the main part of town to Eldheimer, the volcano museum, to immerse ourselves in the island’s history.

The sheer amount of volcanic tuff (rock) is incredible.

In the middle of the night in January 1973, without warning, Eldfell volcano, which had not previously existed, emerged and erupted. Islanders fled the island on rough seas to safety, most ultimately housed elsewhere in the country and many never returned home to the island. Over the course of the 5-month eruption, 400 homes were destroyed, and people worked on the island around-the-clock to try to save houses. Amazingly, only one person died over the entire period due to the noxious gases.

Eldmeimer, the volcano museum we visited, sits in what appears to be a field but used to be a street running parallel to those next to it. The entire street was covered in the initial eruption. At the core of the museum is a home that has been excavated and can be viewed as you follow the museum around it. It is both eerie and fascinating to see personal affects strewn throughout the rubble-filled house, exactly as it was left when the family fled to safety over 40 years ago.

The museum itself offers an audio tour, which you follow around the outside of the house and through the museum. It is a very in-depth overview of what occurred on the island, the 5-month fight of man vs. volcano with movies, video clips, and contemporary news to bring the struggle to life. For a small museum on a small island, it was quite impressive. Also covered in the museum is the volcano that brought the island of Surtsey into existence in 1963. Surtsey is off-limits to the public and therefore has allowed scientists to study the creation of a new mass of land as wildlife and plants have emerged. The island is expected to remain to about 2100 before disappearing back under the ocean as it continues to lose height and mass.

This was much larger (and harder to climb) than it looks!

We spent several hours in the museum and then left in the cold, gray rain. We hiked up the path behind the museum with our sights set on climbing Eldfell, the volcano, itself. The climb up the side of the volcano got progressively worse as wind drove both dense fog and rain into our faces. The ground was loose volcanic rock made of large chunks that mimicked gravel. Eventually the wind was so strong that it literally swept up rocks and pelleted us with them and knocked my feet out from under me. Being pushed by wind towards the edge of the hillside started to feel unsafe so I finally turned around a bit short of the top. While Dustin made it to the rim of the crater, the fog was so thick that the only view was white vapor!

Used to the barren desolation found in the lava fields of California and Arizona, the amount of vegetation growing after this very recent eruption shocked us. Find out more in our Geologic Features blog here. — Used to the barren desolation found in the lava fields of California and Arizona, the amount of vegetation growing after this very recent eruption shocked us. Find out more in our **Geologic Features blog here**.

From there, we meandered on paths back towards the shore through strewn rock piles which made for an alien landscape, dotted with purple Nootka lupine (while pretty, these are invasive throughout Iceland), checked out the stave church replica, toured the oldest remains on the island - Skansinn, a 15th century fort to defend the island against Algerian pirates, and returned to the harbor for our return ferry ride. From when we left the museum to when we returned to the harbor was about a 90-minute hike. While the weather did not work to our favor, Heimaey was definitely worth a visit. There were other areas on the island that would have been fun to see had the weather been better. Puffins and other sea birds are viewable along cliffs, and we saw them from a distance on the ferry. There are also several hikes around and over the cliffs of the island. The funny thing is that we didn’t realize just how wet we had gotten on our rainy hike until we were out of the rain on the ferry and had to sit in those clothes for the hour plus trek back to our place. Thank goodness for hot chocolate on the ferry.

En route home for warm showers, we made a quick stop at Seljalandsfoss. While you can walk behind the waterfall to see it from all angles, we opted to skip the additional walking in order to expedite parting ways with our saturated clothes. Continue reading about our Iceland road trip here!

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