Dettifoss, the Myvatn area, Husavik and Godafoss. Days 7-9

Morning of July 20. This was only our second hotel stay since arriving in Iceland. The first one had been right at the beginning, so now we had a lot to do: charge all our devices, take a proper shower for free, sit by a power socket with a laptop. While doing that I booked our next place, three nights in the Lake Myvatn area. Three nights because I knew it was going to rain a lot, so we were unlikely to manage much in a single day, and there were plenty of places to see there. We packed up, loaded the car, dropped the key into the box, and drove on.

We went along some mountain road high under the sky. The scenery there looked empty and almost Martian.

On the way we stopped at Dettifoss.

By then we were already on the northern coast of Iceland. There we visited a beautiful place, but a light rain kept us from fully enjoying it. The photo does not really convey how unusual it felt. It was a place where you stood as if inside huge walls stretching far away, with no obvious way out unless you knew the path.

And that was it for the day. Heavy rain started, so we headed to our booked guesthouse in the town of Laugar. On the way we drove through Husavik and roughly figured out where the whale watching boats left from.

When we arrived, we realized we had been lucky. For the same money as the previous night we got much better conditions: a nice room, and the toilet and bathroom were shared but only between two rooms, ours and another one that stayed empty the whole time. There was also a shared kitchen, but the guesthouse had few guests, and no pushy Chinese around. Instead there were French travelers from Montpellier. They came into the kitchen while we were cooking, and we chatted a bit about their country, mentioning that we had passed through their city a year earlier. They asked us about football and the World Cup.

There were no proper supermarkets in that place, only a tiny little store with almost nothing in it, so we ended up buying sausages.

Then a minor disaster happened: I accidentally pulled the room door shut behind me while the key stayed inside, and it was not clear what to do because the manager seemed to appear from nowhere whenever she showed up. In the end we went to the second floor, found her, and asked her to open the door. After that we went to bed so that the next day we could try our luck in the area. We had marked a lot of points, but we doubted we would actually see much because rain was forecast for several more days.

Morning of July 21. We woke up, ate, and tried to decide what to do. Rain was pouring outside, and we did not know whether it made any sense to go out. After a while we decided to drive anyway, and it turned out to be the right decision, because the rain was only where we were staying. Apparently that was completely normal there. In the places we drove to there were clouds but no rain yet. First we went to look at a crater. The whole area smelled strongly of hydrogen sulfide.

I saw an interesting thing not far from the road: a shower standing right in the middle of an open field, with warm water heated by the earth flowing from it.

All forecasts said it would be a rainy day, but we were lucky. From that shower we drove to see one more smelly Icelandic wonder.

Here is a bathing pool with warm water, but swimming there is forbidden because it was recently filled with rocks.

And here is another fault. One side of the plate has dropped where there was empty space underneath, so now the land level on one side differs from the other.

Here we are climbing up into a crater.

After that we went to look at a lava park. Long ago lava flowed there and then hardened into strange shapes.

Later we stopped at a park with craters and then drove back to the guesthouse for lunch.

After lunch I spent a long time choosing what kind of boat we should take for whale watching. In the end I picked a trip on a beautiful old sailing ship, but it was leaving in half an hour. I decided we should at least try to make it. We packed up and rushed 30 km back to Husavik. Of course we did not make that exact departure, but we arrived just in time for the next trip on a regular ship. You can watch whales either from the deck of a fishing-style boat, which is cheaper, or from a fast boat, which is more expensive but quicker.

On board they gave us special warm gear.

We were free to walk anywhere on the boat. There were speakers everywhere, and the guide kept telling us where to look whenever he spotted a whale. It took about an hour to reach the whales, and then they started showing themselves.

As the guide said, we were very lucky because on that trip alone he saw more whales than during all his trips earlier that same day.

As an extra bonus we also saw puffins simply floating on the sea. And on the way back dolphins started playing with our boat, leaping out of the water and splashing down like sacks of wet sand.

This is what our ship looked like.

That was basically the day. Evening was approaching, and we returned to the guesthouse. We had done everything we had planned in that area except one waterfall, which we left for the next day. We had dinner, did the usual chores, and went to sleep.

Morning of July 22. We woke up. It was raining, and we did not feel like going anywhere at all. We ate a lot, lay in bed a lot, and recovered from eight intense days of traveling around Iceland. In the middle of the day we still decided to drive to the nearest attraction, Godafoss, but it did not impress us much because by then we had already seen a great many waterfalls.

After walking around it in a light drizzle, we went back with a stop at a small shop, bought more food, and returned to the guesthouse to relax. It was a lazy, slow-moving day.

Yes, in the end we decided to skip the Blue Lagoon-style bathing place there because the weather was simply too poor for it.