Veronica Baker: Road Trip 5: Vestfirðir and Aldrei fór ég Suður

On Good Friday, we enjoyed the bright sun and lack of precipitation by exploring a few communities in Vestfirðir - the West Fjords. This is shown in purple on the map from the first post about the trip! First thing to note is that they have different electrical outlets than the rest of Iceland. We didn't know what to do until we found a drawer full of converters, thank goodness! Silly Iceland and its surprises.

We started our day by heading to the tourist info centre, where a nice man helped us plan out our next couple of days. We started by heading down to the Ísafjörður harbour. There were lots of cats wandering around, which got loads of attention from us. There were 4 buildings (one of which houses a museum) that make up the oldest building cluster in Iceland.

Then we went to the church in town, which had beautiful wall art of birds flying away, all different from each other! After that, we parked the car and walked around the town for a bit. The buildings all have the date in which they were built on them. There were a lot from 1898, and 1986.

Our first stop was to go to Suðureyri. It is a tiny fishing town, with a population of only 312. We drove around (which took all of three minutes), and noticed that the most common buildings were fish-drying huts. The air smelled very fresh - to me! I love the smell of the ocean and of fish... Kris did not share this opinion. In our brochure, it said that in 1995 an avalanche caused the entire town to be moved 1.5 km, but we couldn't really find any evidence of that. We had an "Icelandic Picnic" (sitting in the car with the windows rolled down far enough to hear the ocean but up high enough to shield us from the wind).

Then we drove to Bolungarvík. This was another fishing village, but with a population of 888. We wandered around the community centre, which was absolutely packed. We saw a huge group of people returning to a farm on horseback. Not sure if it was a group of tourists, or the community out for a sunny Good Friday ride?

Upon our return to Ísafjörður, we went swimming (surprise!). The pool was very small - one pool and one hot pot - and the locker room didn't have lockers, only hooks! It was very relaxing though, as always, and there were lots of balls to play catch with, which was nice since they are usually rare in community pools here. After that we had dinner at a seemingly very popular pizza place.

Friday night was the first night of Aldrei fór ég Suður - I Never Went South, a musical festival held each year to showcase local artists among Icelandic artists who have become more well known. The festival was in a warehouse which had been cleared out, and a stage put up. At first we though it was strange, but then we realized it was probably the most logical place in a small town to hold that many people!