You only have to click through to the Waterfall tag on this site to work out that we either like waterfalls a lot or we just end up in places where they exist, and the truth is they’re both correct. Of course, “just ending up” in a place with waterfalls isn’t quite accurate when you consider how many times we’ve visited Norway and Iceland over the years, and the simple fact of the matter is that if you do visit Norway or Iceland, particularly on a cruise ship, then you will very probably find yourself in sight of a waterfall at least once, and likely many more times than that, because a lot of the excursions you can book on a cruise will inevitably – and correctly – assume that people like to look at them. They are very pretty.
We were on a Sky Princess Cruise to Norway and Iceland that had reached Iceland and the port of Akureyri, and we’d taken an excursion that had already seen us visit the very nice Laufás Turf House. The second part of this day’s exploration of this part of northern Iceland brought us to the waterfall you quite possibly searched for before ending up at this page: Goðafoss.
Let’s start with a handful of photos of the Icelandic landscape as seen from the bus window en route to our tour destination. If you’ve read the previous post in this series then you’ll know my feelings about photos from bus windows already, and yet here I am, doing it again. That’s Iceland!
We had options when we arrived, of either heading to the visitor centre (i.e. the café or toilets) or coming with him along the path towards the waterfall, or exploring on our own with a set time to head back to the bus. We were told it was possible to walk around the falls but that we wouldn’t have time to do that. We opted to follow the guide, but were we to visit here again we’d likely head off on our own for a very good reason I’ll explain a bit further on.
Summer in Iceland meant blue skies and green grass. Considering that our previous visits to Iceland had both been in the winter, it was lovely to see so much greenery on the Icelandic landscape as our previous experiences had all been more cold, dry, dark, desolate, and moody. It’s a fabulous country for your eyeballs no matter when you visit Iceland.
We’d been hearing the increasing roar of the waterfall as we traipsed along the trails from the car park area in the direction of Goðafoss, and we’d caught glimpses of the spray rising into the air over rises in the ground as we got closer and closer to the waterfall. It wasn’t too long before Goðafoss appeared.
Goðafoss, like most passengers at the end of a nice cruise, is around thirty metres wide, and water from the Skjálfandafljót river drops about twelve metres over it. The name of the waterfall is a little contentious, with some people claiming it’s derived from the word for gods, and others claiming it’s derived from the word for a chieftain. As luck would have it, a tale purporting to be about Iceland’s move from pagan worship to Christianity involves both idols of gods and a chieftain throwing them into this waterfall after an Althing in order to discourage Norway from invading. While the characters involved did exist in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, the part about throwing idols into Goðafoss first comes to light in the nineteenth century and is almost certainly untrue.
I mentioned that if we were to return to Goðafoss and if it were on a tour like this one with Princess Cruises, then we’d opt to explore on our own, and I’m going to explain why now, even if you don’t care – and maybe especially if you don’t care – because this site, if it’s not clear, is a mixture of travelogues and a stream of consciousness sometimes. It’s what we used to call a blog back in the days, where we wrote for ourselves and didn’t worry about whether or not someone read it. Which was lucky, because hardly anybody did, and even fewer do now. I do feel for those who try to make money from static sites these days, spending so long on getting pages listed on increasingly useless LLM-powered search engines that they’re now incomprehensible to humans, and trying to earn so much from advertising and subscriptions that any humans who do find the pages can’t even find the content the search engine assured them was there somewhere between the flashing imagery and under the popup and partly three pages down the screen now that a video embed has appeared out of nowhere. See what I mean about the stream of consciousness thing? Where was I?
Half-decent photographers – the sort of photographer I aspire to become one day – might already be looking at these pictures of Goðafoss and sucking on their teeth and saying things like “Well, it’s framed fine, of course, but the exposure’s all wrong there, washing out the colours of the sky, not getting enough detail in the foreground.” And they’re right. I know it. I knew it then. The problem was one of location and local conditions and timing and time at the location. The problem, obviously, is that it was bright and sunny on this mid-morning visit to the waterfall. And the car park was to the north of the waterfall. And the path we were on with our guide headed south. And south is where the sun was. And the spray from the waterfall was shooting up into the air. And the contrast between the shadows of the black, volcanic rock of Iceland and the bright whiteness of the clouds and spray and foam was extreme.
Look to the left of the photo below, though, and you’ll see people on the other side of the river. Those people don’t have the sun in their eyes, and if we’d been on our own we could have opted to head across the river near the car park early then walked down that side to capture pictures of the waterfall without the difficult photography conditions we encountered. Or, if we’d had more time – so if we were visiting without the sort of constraints that a cruise tour necessarily imposes – then we could have walked a complete circuit around the falls and given ourselves plenty of chances to compensate for any type of weather. But, you just can’t really tell ahead of time. To be fair, it’s only the second time I can recall where we took a tour and I thought during it “Well, the sun is going to be a right bugger here, isn’t it?” The important thing is the experience, of course, but it’s something to bear in mind for those who like to take photos when they’re travelling.
We headed back towards the car park along a slightly lower trail that afforded closer views of the still-turbulent water downriver from Goðafoss waterfall as well as some of the local geological formations on the hilly sides.
Close to the bridges over the water, there was another section of waterfalls with a lower drop and width but still some impressively fast and thunderous water crashing through. This was Geitafoss. Because we could get in amongst the rocks and because we weren’t affected by the position of the sun anywhere near as much, I thought the pictures of this part of the river’s couple of falls produced some more interesting photos, if perhaps not quite as impressive thanks to the scale.
The final two photos here show Geitafoss in the foreground and the spray thrown up in the distance by the larger Goðafoss upstream.
So, come to Goðafoss and get Geitafoss for free. Two waterfalls for the price of one. As I mentioned at the start, Iceland is one of those countries where you will find it very easy to satisfy your waterfall habit.
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series I might not head off on a rant about the state of blogging but who knows what sort of things will pop into my head when I write up about our far-too-brief visit to Akureyri Botanical Garden ahead of some free time in the town.