Woke up on time and drove a couple minutes into town for our Gentle Giants whale watching cruise. We were all prepared with our Antarctica gear but it turns out we didn't need our waterproof ski pants or jacket since they provided us with waterproof overalls. Our boats held 12 people but were much fancier then the Zodiaks we had in the Southern Ocean. These had seats for the tourists in the front in a triangle shape and an enclosed cockpit. Our guide was a marine biologist who started the day by asking everyone if we had seen the aurora the night before. Apparently it was so amazing that even the locals went outside to see it...unfortunately, we missed it since we had pretty much gone right to bed and didn't think to look.

We left the harbor and started our whale search. After about a half-hour, our guide found a pod of white-beaked dolphins (which are technically whales). The pod stayed by our boat for a little bit and then we sped off. We saw a few Arctic Terns circling the boat which were very similar to the Antarctic Terns we saw on the other side of the globe a couple years prior. Our next sighting was also familiar -- a minke whale which we had also seen in Antarctica. The Minke Whale could stay under water for up to 45 minutes so they only surfaced a couple times and we gave up waiting for them.

There were several boats from this tour company and a large boat from another tour company that had gone out at the same time. We were all searching for whales together and would take turns viewing them. As we were starting to get disapointed that we didn't have more sightings like the brochure where the whales would come right up to the boat, we start a huge family of Long-finned Pilot Whales. Our guide told us that they don't normally come this close to shallow water and that they must be lost. He had also never seen such a large pod before... there were probably 50 of them all together which would surface one right after another. Whales are super challenging to photograph because by the time they break the surface and you point the camera at them, they're already under water again. You don't quite get those shots like they have in Free Willy, but with my zoom lens on my SLR, I was able to get a few shots of their fins.

We headed back to the harbor. Jeremy and Jillian took a short nap while we had lunch at the Salka Restaurant, right next to the harbor. I had a french fry pizza which was one of my favorite meals of the trip.

After lunch, we hopped back in the RV, on to our next destination. This was another 2.5 hour drive and I wanted to get my stand goal, so we stopped at a little rest area where the road forked off to one of the F-roads (4x4 vehicles only). The highways are amazingly smooth and look brand new which I was consistently impressed by, despite the Iceland safety video which warned you about the dangerous gravel roads. What they called gravel roads were really just blacktops that weren't that bad at all. But when we turned off Highway 1 on to a dirt road, then it got *really* bad. There was hardly any gravel but instead, the road was ribbed from the tire tracks of the tractors when the road must have been muddy. It was hard to drive any faster than 10mph and even that wasn't fun. We finally arrived at the Stuðlagil Canyon parking lot. I'm guessing that all of this land had once been farmland but then the government offered a subsidy to turn it into a tourist attraction. They installed a trailer with pay toilets and built a huge steel staircase on the side of the cliffs down to an observation deck. We hiked down and took some pictures.

Jillian and Jeremy wanted to continue on to a cute town to walk around but I wanted some exercise after being stuck in the RV, so our group decided to go to the other side and do a hike. We heard differing views of exactly how long the hike was but it didn't seem that far, and it looked like we would get some better views based on the people we saw on the other side of the canyon.

We drove back down the road a bit and crossed the river on a single-lane bridge and then parked. We walked along a trail to see the other side. This canyon is one of the largest collections of basalt columns in the country which you could really see from this side. There was a small island in the middle of the river that Harris and I walked down to as well. At some times of the year, the water is turquoise but when we were there, it was a dirty brown. As the light started to fade, we headed back to the RV. The round-trip for the hike turned out to be exactly 3 miles which wasn't bad at all.

We happened to join up with Jeremy and Jillian back on Highway 1 as their excursion to the town took just as long as our hike. We still had about 4-5 hours of driving to go and it was already getting dark. That drive was a little rough as it had been another long day. We stopped a couple times to stretch our legs and look for the aurora, despite the fact that the Aurora Forecast website said our chances were about 2/10. It was very dark and the clouds from the previous few days were clearing. We think we saw the Milky Way but no aurora. Got into the Skaftafell Camping Ground pretty late again. Couldn't find our assigned lot so we just picked anywhere, plugged in, and went to sleep.