Icelandic travel recommendations

Several people have asked me for recommendations on things to do and see in Iceland. I've answered them each in turn, but I thought I might as well write down a comprehensive post and link to it. Well, here we are, 7500 words after that thought.

If you’re reading this because you’re actually planning to travel to Iceland, all I can say is: lucky you!

FTTN: A ballad for the Israeli complainer

A small sample:

- “Fuck these guides, they should let us climb at our own pace. What are we paying these fucking Chileans for?”

- “Do you think we’re going all the way up to the crater? It must be dangerous up there...”

- “What’s this shitty descent all about? They said it would be fun, sliding down on our ass and all that…”

- “Me, on the way down, every single Israeli I see, I’ll bum him out, tell him ‘it’s a really shitty climb’, ‘it’s super hard’, ‘it’s not worth it at all.’”

That’s the high-quality group of people with which I climbed the Villarica volcano.

Puyehue, Pucon and Villarica- end of March, early April 2008

From Bariloche I went to Parque Nacional Puyehue, to do a 4-day trek to the Puyehue volcano and its surroundings. I did the trek alone with 11 more people, which means I met three people on the highway going into the park, and 8 more in the first night's refugio. By the way, 9 of them were Israelis- apparently this is a highly Israeli trek, for some reason. 

The trek goes like this: you go up 1700m in 7 hours, to reach the crater of the volcano, which is inactive, filled with snow and has a great view of the area. Up there we made the obligatory "black coffee up on a viewpoint", and saw a group of condors flying high above us. Then you go down (only the last 500m, not the whole 1700...) and walk for half a day in a desert interspersed with basalt, obsidian and other volcanic rocks, sand dunes and multi coloured hills. Amongst my favorite sights on the way: a mass of jagged, shiny black obsidian that looked like a petrified dinosaur's tail jutting out of the yellow-white sand; a pretty big cave (probably 3m high and about 30 across) that had basalt boulders for a floor and a mini-glacier for a ceiling; and ice hiding beneath desert sand.