Day 07: Bakkagerði

It stays light late into the evening, and it’s already broad daylight at three in the morning. It’s absolutely crazy. But we sleep well. And the morning turns wonderfully warm and cozy – the sun is shining.

We meet up with Edmund and Paul here again, and David from the UK joins us too. Naturally, we chat about past and future travels. And Becky earns praise once more for the setup.

We explore the village. There’s a general store, a hotel with a spa, a brewery, and a café – which apparently serves excellent fish soup, as it’s owned by the same person who runs the fish factory. Local sights include the church and the first historic "turf house," which was gifted to the municipality in 2019 and is no longer inhabited. The campsite—like many in Iceland, presumably—has somewhat limited facilities for the number of guests. So, we take advantage of the completely empty midday period to cook a wonderful stew in the communal kitchen. Perhaps we should adopt different cooking and eating routines for this trip anyway.

Then we head to the area’s main attraction: the puffin colony Hafnarhólmi. We decide to walk there – a journey of about an hour. It’s just a walk along the road, but we do want to get some exercise, after all :-)

And it’s worth it: we see many different birds that we’ll surely identify more precisely and take photos of later...

The puffins are enchanting – beautifully marked with striking eyes. They’re just a bit clumsy on their landing approach sometimes. Though that’s hardly surprising, given the wind.

The birds are here from roughly mid-April to mid-August. Almost entirely monogamous, pairs reunite year after year to hatch a single egg. The chicks don’t leave their nesting burrows until mid-August, shortly before heading out to the open sea for the winter. A puffin can dive to depths of up to 60 meters! And the oldest bird known is 41 years old. Wow. We realize we still need to find our rhythm a bit: we forgot to charge the camera batteries sufficiently, and we also forgot to adjust the time on the camera – after all, we’re two hours behind here. But: we’ll figure that out...