Námaskarð - Where The Fog Is... (Iceland)

Close to Skútustaðir, around the Northern Icelandic coast, is nothing to see. Literally. Because it is a land of fog. Massive sulfur-sources stink and make a lot of thick air. So if you want to see not to see, get your charter flight to Iceland. And by the way, the exchange rate is excellent these days!

You can take buses and tourist-trips to the golden circle from Reykjavik. But it is quite smart to rent a car and to discover the place by yourself. Iceland is not only covered in snow most of the year. No, within the country it is rather covered with fog! Especially if you take the roundtrip, which is almost obligatory when you do a voyage to Iceland, the golden circle.

On this track you see most of the natural sites of the island, well, as I mentioned before, if you see them. There are many sources of sulphur around there. They make the hot geothermal lagoons possible and it also produces plenty of fog. If you go closer to the hot bubbling mud in Námaskarð you see the very source of all the countries fog. But you should really watch your steps. It is not such a nice experience for your bones to feel hot sulphur and cosmetically it is not so great for your shoes, too. But this is the great thing about this place.

There are no security guards or neither any barriers on the site. So you can do as you wish, but probably the Icelanders are so cool that they don’t even care if you are drowning in sulfur. If the mini-volcanoes are not enough for your desire of wickedness you should take your off road-4-wheel jeep and go over to volcano Krafla. There you have the big version of Námaskarð. It is an amazing challenge to take a picture of clouds inside a cloud. Maybe after you see the results you don’t even recall what you see on the pictures. The fog is of course stronger if it is colder. So winter would be perfect to experience this sensation. But this keeps you pretty relaxed about your travel-schedules, since subjectively winter in Iceland goes from September until May.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A1maskar%C3%B0

written by wil6ka on 2009-02-23 #places #fog #location #skutustadir #iceland