Iceland Cycle Tour Jul 2021 скачать в хорошем качестве

Iceland Cycle Tour Jul 2021

Emerging from Keflavik’s airport terminal the jumbled lava flows extend to the very edge of the car park and it all seems as bleak as the very name Iceland suggests. But beyond the monotonous piles of dark basaltic Aa lava there are a remarkable range of landscapes to explore. We would have preferred to have arrived on the Smyril ferry, but in a world dominated by Covid the logistics of getting to the very northern tip of Denmark made this all but impossible. Anyway, I had convinced myself that all that driving would make such a journey worse than the admittedly significant CO2 emissions of the short hop down to Manchester Airport and the rather longer hop over the North Atlantic by plane. For most of July we pedalled through a tremendous variety of landscapes. On our very first day the magma of the Fagradalsfjall Volcano erupting high above its crater walls provided a memorable display, a smoking lava field of some of Earth’s newest rocks at our feet. The interior of the island resembles a desert in places with miles of bleak ash fields frowned upon by the dazzling ice caps. To cycle through the midst of this moonscape was memorable, especially seen from almost complete immersion in the steaming hot spring at Hveravellir. We had hoped to reach the Askja volcanic crater, its lake also geothermally heated, but the 110Km access trail proved to be hard to cycle with miles of soft sand that made pedalling almost impossible. Still, we gave it our best shot. Next stop was Dettifoss, which wouldn’t win an award for its beauty, but as a display of raw power all that silty glacial water plummeting into a deep gorge is scarily mesmerising. An ascent of the Krafla volcano rewarded us with stunning views to the wild interior, the vast Vatnajökull ice cap gleaming in the distance, hissing fumaroles and gurgling mudpots on its lower slopes. With five hundred miles pedalled we headed over to the Westfjords to cycle the indented coastline heavily sculpted by glacial ice. The wind became our enemy and on one day when we’d gained just three miles in an hour, we had to use all our reserves to keep going, the blasts blowing us all over the road, right to the very edge on several occasions. The scenery, dominated by basaltic crags seamed with gullies, usually rising into swirling cloud was impressive and we had many memorable camps, the tent tucked away behind bluffs and boulders to escape the wind. Circumnavigating the Snaefellness peninsular provided yet more wind, always on our front left shoulder, whether heading west, south, or east! We even stopped to explore the little hamlet of Setberg. The scenery was stunning with waterfalls tumbling from scree girt volcanic mountains, dominated by the 1446m Snæfellsjökull ice cap. After a day as tourists in Reykjavik we returned to Keflavik for our compulsory Covid test (negative, thankfully) before heading back to Blighty and another expensive Covid test – also negative. We pedalled 1004 miles without any punctures and camped in an array of stunning locations