Iceland 2025

June 13th, 2025

After a pleas­ant night, we real­ized in the morn­ing that the show­er was­n’t get­ting prop­er­ly warm. Well, the gas had run out. And we’re such warm show­er lovers. So we switched to the sec­ond bot­tle of gas and, after fill­ing up and emp­ty­ing the camper, drove to the near­est gas sta­tion oppo­site the camp­site to exchange the emp­ty bot­tle for a new one. This was also a first for us, but it went smooth­ly thanks to the friend­ly assis­tance of a gas sta­tion employ­ee. Gas isn’t cheap in Ice­land either; we paid about €40 to exchange the bottle.

Then we con­tin­ued on to Hengi­foss. First we drove along the fjords, then we took a short­cut through the moun­tains (a grav­el road and very bumpy) to Lake Lögurinn and then crossed a bridge to the oth­er side. The route was beau­ti­ful, again so com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from the south coast. In fact, the land­scape here changes very fre­quent­ly, con­stant­ly offer­ing new impressions.

Final­ly, we reached the park­ing lot at Hengi­foss, where we had to pay the usu­al 1,000 ISK by cell phone. The entire trip took us about 2 3/4 hours.

Der Fußweg zum Hengi­foss führte recht steil bergauf, man kann ihn auf dem ersten Bild schon oben in der Ferne erken­nen! Zuvor gab es noch einen kleineren Wasser­fall, den Lit­lanes­foss:

Like Lit­lanes­foss below, Hengi­foss is fed by the Stekkalækur Riv­er, a branch of the Lagarfljót. Its water plunges from the high plateau 450 meters above sea lev­el down into the val­ley. Behind the water­fall, strik­ing red, grainy lay­ers of clay can be seen in the lava rock. These were formed from deposit­ed vol­canic ash (tephra) and owe their char­ac­ter­is­tic col­or to the iron oxide they con­tain. It is the fourth high­est water­fall in Iceland.

After climb­ing about 250 meters and an hour of “moun­taineer­ing,” we could final­ly see the Hengi­foss water­fall high above us.

We think it looks pret­ty impres­sive. The col­or­ful striped rock for­ma­tions are par­tic­u­lar­ly beautiful.

We then con­tin­ued along the fjord via Egal­stadir towards Bor­gar­fjörður eystra, a fjord in the east. There is anoth­er large puf­fin colony. It is also said to be the home of the elf king. The dri­ve along the fjord was beau­ti­ful, and we final­ly crossed a pass to the east to reach the coast. There is a camp­site in the small vil­lage of Bakk­agerði, but first we want­ed to see the puffins again. We had already seen the elf house as we drove past, so we decid­ed to take a look at it tomor­row before we leave.

We there­fore drove on to Bor­gar­f­jarðarhöfn, about 5 km away. As we had hoped, the cliffs there were full of puffins, busi­ly fly­ing back and forth to feed their young with fresh fish. Here, too, the lit­tle birds were not shy at all; we were able to get very close to them and they were not dis­turbed by the large num­ber of tourists. We spent a good two hours there in per­fect weath­er, and I took almost 4,000 pho­tos. Here is a small selec­tion of them:

After­wards, we drove back to the nice lit­tle camp­site in Bakk­agerði.