Empty Iceland

On the long drive from Djupivogur to Myvatn we really appreciated just how sparsely settled Iceland is. There are less than 300,000 people on an island bigger than Belgium, and half of them live in Reykjavik. The other 150,000 or so live in tiny communities scattered across the island, few of them with even a thousand people - the biggest is only 16,000 people. The national Icelandic map we are using for driving includes a name for every settlement, including ones with only a single house, and yet we still drove for hundreds of kilometers without seeing any signs of civilisation beyond the long road ahead of us.

We drove along the fjords of eastern Iceland through the small communities, stopping off at Stodvarfjordur.

Stodvarfjordur is famous (by Icelandic measures) for the rock museum of Steinasfn Petru, collected by Petra Sveindottir and now displayed in her house. Disturbingly her children still live in the house, so as you wander through the collection you see family photos, people having a coffee in their kitchen and bedroom doors open. It must be a strange life.

From Stodvarfjordur we took a short-cut to Egilsstadir through a 15km tunnel under a mountain, had lunch and then drove up over a snowy mountain pass to picture-perfect Seydisfjordur. Seydisfjordur was built from pre-fab houses brought over from Norway, all painted pastel colours and perfectly framed on a blue harbour dwarfed by the sheer mountains of the fjord, very similar to Milford Sound in New Zealand. I particularly liked the pastel blue church built from corrugated iron, with views of waterfalls cascading down the walls of the fjords. As we drove back up over the mountain pass we stopped by the side of one of the waterfalls, enjoying the magnificent power of the water crashing through the granite, with the perfect blue sky and vibrant green of the alpine meadow.