Our first stop in Iceland on the return voyage from Rotterdam to Boston was in Djúpivogur, a small town with a population of 509 people. I can't imagine what it's like to have a cruise ship with three times as many people as your town, stop for the day. But the local restaurants were doing a booming business. I was sorry we didn't have time to sample some of the local fish and chips but the line was just too long.
For Djúpivogur we had booked a tour with the cruise line. The tour was a 4x4 trip to various waterfalls and other sights in the area. Our first stop was at Nykurhylsfoss (Sveinsstekksfoss), a small waterfall off the beaten track a few miles outside town. Definitely not in the same league as Goðafoss Falls, but scenic nonetheless.
Since we'd be traveling mostly on dirt roads in the backcountry, our tour was given in a converted Mercedes van which had been fitted with a military vehicle chassis and various other car parts, such as a Dodge Ram steering wheel, by our driver who was an auto mechanic. This was just one of the dozen or so vehicles in our caravan. Ours being by far the largest and most elaborate, most of the others looked to be around the size of a Toyota 4Runner.
All of the vehicles in our caravan were definitely made for off road driving. They all had tire fittings that allowed them to adjust the tire pressure from inside their vehicles. This allowed them to reduce the tire pressure when going on loose rocky back roads at slower speeds, and then increase the tire pressure when we returned to the paved road, without even getting out of the car.
This was a waterfall we saw during our tour, this one being the most remote of a number of waterfalls we saw while driving up a valley dirt road.
Our final stop before returning to town was at the Eggin í Gleðivík (the Eggs at Merry Bay) sculpture. This work of art created by Sigurður Guðmundsson consists of 34 large granite eggs representing the different nesting birds in the area.
Soon we were back to the marina at Djúpivogur.
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