The Half-Ring Road: Part 2, The South

We arrived at our airbnb fairly late, but thankfully everyone was still awake, including a very nice family from Spain. They informed us that tonight might actually be a good chance to see the northern lights, and that midnight seemed to be the magic hour. Or at least it was when he was in the Westfjords.
Well sure enough, ladies and gents, we stepped outside right at midnight...and there they were. My poor phone couldn't capture it, but Ashlen has much better pictures on her fancy camera...which we're still figuring out how to transfer to a device. So I guess words well have to do for now.
There's a reason everyone says you should see them before you die. What filled the sky before us was a line of shifting green and yellow. This sometimes alien creature with a head and a tail that would swim towards us only to move away, while sometimes swimming over itself to reveal a gateway to another world hidden in the light.
In short...see it before you die.

In the morning we made our way out to explore the south. We knew we wanted to reach the black sand beach of Vik, which had been recounted as one of the best sights to see. The glacial runoff further along towards Höfn called to me, but it was an additional two hours or so past Vik and we just couldn't squeeze it in.
At first, the weather wasn't so bad. Cloudy, but still enough light to see the sights like Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano that erupted and stopped all air travel in Europe, in the photo above. We also saw a waterfall that seemed to be quite popular right of the road and stopped in to find a gorgeous fall that you could actually walk behind.

Needless to say, it was pretty cool. But other sights kept stopping us on our way to Vik as well. Old ruins of houses, caves, and simply the beautiful scenery around us had us stopping often to snap a photo.
This unfortunately meant that by the time we got to Vik, the road looked like this:

"

And Vik looked like this:

Still impressive, with silky black sand as far as the eye could see and roaring waves to rival the Oregon coast, but after just a few minutes our pants were soaked through from the rain. We took shelter inside the local eatery and bought our first hamburger and fries since arriving. Slightly disappointed and very wet, we drive to the church on a hill to get a look at the sodden city. We can see how beautiful it would be in the sunlight...but for now, all we can feel is this:

On the drive back we try to catch some of the sights we passed along the way:
Some ruined houses built into the rock,

a cave with ferns for a roof,

and another small cave hidden behind a fenced-in playfield.

We tried to get a good look at Skógafoss, a waterfall we had passed, but the rain was simply too much to withstand for us to get anywhere close to it.
So overall, the south actually was a surprising disappointment. Having researched it before, and hearing testimonies that the south was the best, my expectations were high. And admittedly if the weather had been better, it might have lived up to them. There were several points where it was quite obvious that in the summer it would look great, or even in winter with snow covering the mountains. But in fall, it's simply not that interesting. The only things we haven't seen elsewhere were the old ruins and the fern-roofed cave.
So if you come to Iceland in the fall, I would instead recommend the place we only got to spend a couple hours in and highly regret not having at least a day for: the Snaefellsnes peninsula.

To be continued...