Voyage North - a photo essay: (4) Eskifjörður

Eskifjörður is a port and small town in the east of Iceland. There's nothing very much in the town (except fishing and fish exporting) but I had booked onto a scenic tour of the surrounding area, where there is very lovely landscape . . . but we arrived during a foggy, dripping, murky day. Our driver kept on apologising that there were beautiful mountains just over there . . . that we couldn't see . . .

This photo was taken from just across the width of a road and even that close, the mountain tops and start of the waterfall are shrouded in fog.

We stopped by the side of a tributary fjord where there was a stand of conifer trees. There is currently a concerted effort to re-forest parts of Iceland. Trees don't grow there unless they're planted and tended by people.

Clambering down the side of the fjord - where everything was dripping and I got wet feet and legs! - I photographed these plants growing wild:

The wild lupins (first and last images) were originally imported into Iceland from Alaska, because they are very tough and would survive in Iceland's hostile volcanic soil - there was a need to stabilise this soil with plant roots to prevent it eroding and silting up rivers and fjords. But they have naturalised so successfully that they are now considered to be verging on being an invasive weed.

We also visited Petra's Collection. This was the private collection of the late Ljósbjörg Petra María, who began collecting stones at age seven, particularly decorative rocks. The collection began in earnest in 1946 when she bought a house and had room to store her rocks.  She collected most of them by exploring the countryside on foot, often trekking through areas that nobody visited; her part of Iceland was very remote and had few roads until 1962. Today the collection is huge, thousands and thousands, in all sizes, and is managed as a visitor attraction by her children. It's both quite extraordinary and rather obsessionally bonkers! But it does attest to the geological uniqueness of Iceland. Here are just a few close-ups of sections of some of the more spectacular large pieces: