Iceland 2025

June 18th, 2025 - Snæfellsnes Peninsula

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the weath­er was­n’t kind to us today either. It was­n’t sup­posed to get any bet­ter in the com­ing days. We had actu­al­ly planned to con­tin­ue on to Látra­b­jarg in the West­fjords, where count­less birds nest in the high cliffs, but we can­celed that due to the bad weather.

Instead, we drove on to the Snæfell­ness penin­su­la. That was anoth­er veeeeeeeeeeery long dri­ve, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the road conditions:

The trip was great fun, though. How­ev­er, after a short while, the camper dis­played an engine warn­ing mes­sage and instruct­ed us to vis­it a repair shop immediately—which was­n’t so easy here in the mid­dle of nowhere. But my wife found a garage in Patreks­fjörður on Google Maps, which we then visited.

There, the error was read out and we were told that only the diesel par­tic­u­late fil­ter was clogged and that there was no imme­di­ate dan­ger to the engine. They poured some kind of sol­vent from a small bot­tle into the tank and rec­om­mend­ed that we dri­ve at high engine speed for a while so that the fil­ter would be blown clear again. How­ev­er, this did not hap­pen dur­ing the rest of the jour­ney, but we were reas­sured that there was no major dam­age and we could con­tin­ue our journey.

Here, by the way, is a pic­ture of our motorhome after many kilo­me­ters on grav­el roads:

Then we con­tin­ued our jour­ney from the West­fjords to the Snæfell­snes penin­su­la through a tru­ly untouched and wild land­scape. In the mid­dle of nowhere, we dis­cov­ered anoth­er church: the Breiõabólsstaõarkirk­ja – very easy to pro­nounce. These pret­ty church­es are found all over Ice­land, just stand­ing there in the landscape:

After a total of 6 1/2 hours of dri­ving, we final­ly reached our des­ti­na­tion and stood in front of one of Ice­land’s most famous land­marks, Kirkjufell, a 463 m high penin­su­la with a char­ac­ter­is­tic shape. Here, I used my drone again to cap­ture some panoram­ic shots. Although the sum­mit was not vis­i­ble at the time, the pic­tures some­how have a myth­i­cal qual­i­ty don’t they?

Then we drove a lit­tle fur­ther to the Kirkjufell­foss water­falls, a very well-known and pop­u­lar pho­to spot. The park­ing lot was busy again, and we had to pay the usu­al 1,000 ISK via cell phone. From the park­ing lot, it was only a short walk to the pho­to spot. Pic­tures of Kirkjufell from this per­spec­tive have been tak­en many times before - but not by me 😉.

This time, a lit­tle more of the moun­tain was visible:

As it was already get­ting late, we drove on to our planned camp­site for the night, Helis­san­dur Camp­ing Ground. On the way there, we dis­cov­ered anoth­er pret­ty white church with a red roof, Ing­jald­shól­skirk­ja. It was pic­turesque­ly sit­u­at­ed behind a large field of lupins:

Since the weath­er showed no signs of improv­ing, we drove to our accom­mo­da­tion for the night, the Hellisan­dur camp­site “Tjaldsvæðið á Hellis­san­di.” Let’s see what the weath­er has in store for us tomorrow.

Speak­ing of tomor­row: The nights here were short at the end of June, not to say non-exis­tent. On June 19th, the sun set at 12:34 a.m. and rose again at 2:39 a.m. In between, there was only twilight.