The votes are in!

It looks like I'll have to get a Lopi cardigan rather than the traditional sweater. I was leaning that way anyway.

This past Saturday turned out to be a beautiful day. I don't think the temperature got above 6 degrees, but the sun shone the whole time which made it wonderful. At 9am, left Reykjavik for Borganes.

Not so long ago, one had to drive around the Hvalfjödur fjord to get there, but since the completion of the Hvalfjarðargöng tunnel 1988, one can take a much more direct route. The tunnel is just under 6km long! In Borganes, I took a short audio tour of Egil's Saga at the local museum. I don't know a lot about the Icelandic Saga's, but now I know a little bit more about Egil's. It was probably written by Snorri Stulurson (more on him later) and tells about Egil's long life in Iceland and his travels to England and Norway. He was spirited and energetic (weren't all vikings?) and most importantly he buried his silver treasure somewhere in Iceland and apparently some are still looking for it. This is the view behind the museum:

After the museum, we drove to a tiny church typical of Iceland. It made me think of Kill Bill, but that's another story. These little churches are everywhere!


Next up was Barnafossar waterfall...



...and then Deildartunguhver, the largest hot spring in the Northern Hemisphere, which pumps 180 litres of boiling water every second. Not only does it provide hot water for the region surrounding it, but also pumps hot water through a 64km pipeline to Borganes and other towns. Here you can see some of it's steam:

The extra water serves local greenhouses from which I bought some tomatoes, yum!

We also visited Snorri's pool - the water was luxuriously warm! This is me trying to get into the tunnels near his pool. I wasn't successful.

On the way towards an abandoned whaling station, we got this view of an old NATO base:

Finally, we stopped at an abandoned whaling station. It closed in the 1980s. The most interesting part of it was imagining the whales being hauled out of the fjord by the huge cables up the concrete ramp. I peeked into some of the empty sheds and found one containing rows of what I thought were hockey sticks, but were actually knives with long wooden handles - the fate the whales met after being hauled out of the fjord. This fjord, if I understood correctly, is where Keiko, the whale who was the inspiration for the Free Willy movie, was captured. According to Wikipedia, he was sold to an aquarium in Iceland and then sold again to Marineland in Ontario, where he developed skin lesions. Eventually he was returned to Iceland but got away and escaped to Norway! On the way home, we took the long way around the fjord and skipped the tunnel. It was worth it. Fjords are so beautiful. The water was calm and the mountains majestic.