Iceland on Film, Part VI
Eastern Regions
Six days ago I arrived in Iceland for the purpose of taking photos with couple of my friends. I only took a 35mm film camera with me. If you are wondering what happened before, you can read the previous chapters of the story here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V.
So we woke up on a camping site in Neskaupstadur, had a nice shower, breakfast, and left — without paying. Not saying I am proud, but as we arrived to the location after the people who collected the fees had left and had to leave before they came back, we just didn’t have anyone to pay to. Only after we had already gotten 50 km and a mountain tunnel between us and the site we realized, we could have just left them some money on the table as the door for the office was open.
So if anyone from Neskaupstadur camping site management is reading this, you can write to me and I will tell you: “I have no idea what you are talking about! I have never been to Neskaupstadur, or Iceland. I am small farmer from Estonia, I never travel anywhere!”
So our first stop was Saxa Sea Geysir. This is what happens if you just check for locations from google maps and don’t really read about them. Although the Saxa Sea Geysir is a real thing, it is not a real geyser. It is just a location where some cliffs in the sea form a channel, which sometimes, with a bad weather, drive water into a tight gap which then sprays it out just a like a geyser.
As you can see from the picture, the weather was not bad at all, so no water was spraying anywhere. Some tourists were scouting out another area nearby as seen from the picture above. What they were looking for, I have no idea.
After realizing the Geysir is not going to geysir at all, we carried on, stopping and snapping pictures where we saw something interesting. Such as this No Pooping sign:
Apparently this is one of the biggest troubles with tourists. Some of them don’t really bother staying at dedicated camping sites, so instead they just stay at locations where there is room to park. But those locations often do not have a toilet or anything comparable available. Most locations have a signs that forbid overnight stays, this one does not beat around the bush (possibly because of the lack of bushes to beat around) and tells straight away what people are not expected to do in the location.
One of the next stops was a small town of Djúpivogur, we visited a local brewery there and tried some local beer. Unfortunately beer was only thing they sold, so we went to search for some food as well. So we visited a diner near the sea. One of the people who worked there immediately recognized my camera and told he is also taking pictures with Olympus film camera. So we had a bit of photography talk. If you are reading this, then know: I still haven’t developed any of my own film, but I have ordered equipment to do it, so soon!
As we drove through iceland in a rental car, we needed some background music. We quickly learned there was not much coming from radio. The FM radio stopped receiving pretty quickly when we left Reykjavik. We did pick up something on AM radio, but the quality was so so.
So we played some music from our spotify playlists. One of them was the Icelandic Indie Music, which did have quite many good tracks. The other one which we listened to was selected by our driver, playlist of “Viking Music“. It had many songs from epic movie soundtracks, some darker folk stuff and all around music, which really was appropriate with some of the landscapes, especially when we traversed the cold northern regions with rain.
This next picture is again one of my favourites from the trip. It is just a fairly standard picture of a mountain… Until you reach the bottom and you notice the truck. Then the real scale of things really hits you.
Just as we saw an interesting three peaked mountain in the distance, I ran out of the roll of Fujicolor 200 film, and switched back to Portra 400. As you see from previous pictures it is fairly decent film, but although it is fairly good, I still think Portra is a lot better film.
Although Portra 400 is considerably more grainy, I just love the colours. I am bit sad I didn’t bring any Portra 160 on the trip, it would have been better for daylight shots with considerably less grain, but then again, it would have given me more troubles in low light.
Our destination was the Höfn. We knew there was a big camping ground and as one of our crew was a passionate foodie, we were also planning to visit one of the highest valued Restaurants in there.
Pakkhus Restaurant is top rated restaurant in TripAdvisor, mostly focusing on icelandic seafood. It was packed to the brim as expected, but we were given table much quicker than anticipated. Food was amazing, the service even more so, but let me say one thing: If you are travelling on budget, steer away from that place, it can really damage your wallet in a major way.
The Höfn camping grounds were as packed as the restaurant, fortunately they were also very big, so there was still plenty more space. Unfortunately same couldn’t be said about the bathrooms and showers. For what we knew, there was just one shower and one toilet for the entire big camping ground.
We set up our tents and went to sleep to wake up early next day to continue our trip with a visit to the glacial lagoons and some other locations with probably the most epic views on the south side of Iceland, but this is a story you can read in the next chapter of this epic tale.
