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Despite being home to the country's largest forest, rolling farmlands, and dozens of small fjords, islands, natural harbors, and fishing villages, the East of Iceland doesn't receive as much attention as the other areas. In the summer months, the area becomes a creative hub for artists and young people from around Iceland and abroad, but it’s well off the beaten path of tour buses. Unfortunately, we only gave it a short amount of time ourselves on this trip, but we thoroughly enjoyed our brief visit to this part of Iceland. We stayed in the picturesque and charming town of Seydisfjorour. It is built around a harbor sitting at the head of a long, calm, deep fjord that twists and turns for 17 km from the sea. Multi-colored wooden houses, some of the best preserved in Iceland, line a lagoon where the river Fjaroara empties after its journey down from the mountain pass. Seydisfjorour is surrounded by snowcapped mountains and cascading waterfalls, and it is a friendly place with a community of artists, musicians and craftspeople It is reached by a road that offers splendid views as it passes beside snow-covered slopes and along a river filled with dozens of small waterfalls. Just before the final descent to the town, Nedri Stafur rock stratum offers an exceptional view of Seydisfjordur fjord and town. We arrived just as the fog was lifting and the sun was setting, offering beautiful reflections of the mountains in the lagoon. A nice welcome to Seydisfjordur!

While in Seydisfjordur, we took a late evening walk to Tvisongur, a concrete sound sculpture implanted in the mountainside above the town, in a quiet area with a breathtaking view of the fjord. The sculpture consists of five interconnected domes of different sizes. Each dome acts as a natural amplifier for one of the tones in the Icelandic musical tradition of five-tone harmony. With views of the mountain peak above and the fjord below, the setting offers both tranquility and inspiration.

After leaving Seydisfjordur, we drove back over the pass and then along the Ring Road all the way to our lodging in Hofn, just before Skaftafell National Park. We We took the Oxi Pass Shortcut (Route 939), a gravel road that is steep and curvy, but that offers some amazing scenery. We stopped dozens of times to admire the view or take a short walk to fast flowing streams. At Oxi pass is a small but gorgeous waterfall that appears from below to be spouting from a hole in the cliff.

As we worked our way along the Ring Road, we stopped at several places to take in the view or take a short walk, but our final stop of the day was at Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon. It’s a surreal scene, with hundreds of luminous icebergs drifting through the lagoon and out to sea. Some of these are lovely ice sculptures, and in the late afternoon they reflect handsomely in the still waters. The icebergs come from an offshoot of the Vatnajokull glacier, crashing down into the waters of the 18-sq-km lagoon, which is growing rapidly as the glacier melts. They drift in the lagoon until the current of the Jokulsa river (Iceland’s shortest) pulls them along to the Atlanta ocean, where some of them wash up on the black sand beach at the mouth of the river. It was one of those fantasy-world experiences that happened often in Iceland.