8/16/2017 – Akureyri

Today we were in Akureyri which is the 4th largest city in Iceland. It was a small town but they had a dock big enough to accomodate the cruise ship, due to what looked like a lot of shipping traffic coming into the port.

We left the port of Akureyri and travelled to a Botanical garden close to the harbor. First a view of the harbor as we pulled in

View from the ship

The botanical graden was created by the housewives of Akureyri so that people had a place to go and relax and enjoy the scenery. It will always be free for everyone. There are tall trees here in the garden, but you don’t see many tall trees in Iceland. In fact there is a saying in Iceland that if you get lost in an Icelandic forrest, please stand up. Mostly the trees are less than 3-4 feet tall.

Flowers at the Botanical gardens

We could also see the ship from the Botanical Gardens

Conrad found this cool wooden bench at the Botanical Gardens

Flowers at the Botanical gardens

Flowers at the Botanical gardens

Flowers at the Botanical gardens

After the botanical gardens we crossed the fjord on a bridge and headed off to the waterfall called Godafoss. It is named after a member of parliment from this area who was the deciding representative when Christians first came to Iceland. The religion in Iceland at that time was Pagan, but they decided that they needed to have one recognized religion so the parliment met and this representative decided that they would have Christianity as the religion. When he came home from the parlimentary meetings, he threw all of his Pagan idols over the edge of the waterfall and so it was called Waterfall of the gods.

Conrad at the river below the falls

Shawn by the falls

Godafoss (falls of the Gods)

River below the falls

After we left the waterfall we headed to an old farmhouse at Laufás that has been preserved in the way that they originally built homes, from stone and turf. The roofs were turf like they are in Alaska. We also finally got a close up view of the Icelandic horses that are everywhere as we drive, and saw an old church on that site that has the traiditional red roofs that many of the buildings and churches have.

Laufas turf houses

The church at Laufas

Icelandic Horses with Shawn

An Icelandic horse who came to see us. The Icelandic horses are very interesting. They have 5 gaits where most horses only have 3. They can run with only one foot on the ground and they can also run with both right feet forward, then both left feet etc… They are very strong, and resillient. No other horses are allowed in Iceland, and if an Icelandic horse ever leaves the island of Iceland they can never return because they don’t want to introduce diseases. When we got back to the room Conrad was determined to get a picture of the Puffins that he had been seeing fly by. They were very far away and it was cold but we finally got a few pictures that are not very good but you can at least tell that they are puffins.

Puffins

Puffin