Day 34 – 12 August 2023 – Siglufjordur to Lake Myvatn, Iceland

A very pleasant start this morning as we were invited upstairs to have breakfast with Helga, the owner of the Herring House, & another guest from Germany. The views over Siglufjordur are even better than our room. We had a nice breakfast & a very pleasant chat with both ladies, we felt like family. We highly recommend the Herring House for accommodation, it is the best we have stayed at in Iceland. The sun was shining brightly & it looked like a very nice day in front of us.

The drive back through the three long tunnels seemed quicker this morning, however, the sky was clouded over & the temperature dropped as we headed towards Davlik. Police roadblocks were set up on the outskirts of Davlik to keep cars out of the centre of town for the Fish Festival being held today. The town seems even more crowded than yesterday with more campervans & more people. The diversion took longer than expected as I followed some other cars, thinking they knew the way to go. Wrong, I had to backtrack a bit to find the way out of Davlik, the Police had not done the detour signage very well at all. In fact Iceland isn’t good for signage to indicate special things to see. On the road out of Davlik towards Akureyri was flooded with cars headed toward Davlik. I can’t imagine how crowded it will be in Davlik for the festival as we were there at 10 am, very early for Icelanders.

Akureyri traffic was quite this Saturday morning with two new cruise ships in, though there were plenty of people on foot staring at maps with a puzzled look. We drove through town & headed east toward Husavik, passing through a 7 kilometre long tollway tunnel under the mountain range. Our first stop is at Godafoss, a big volume waterfall that was named after old Norse religious artefacts were thrown into the waterfall after Iceland was converted to Christianity. The falls are around 30 metres wide & has a drop of around 12 metres with a thunderous roar & plenty of water spray in the air. There are loads of cruise ship & tour buses at Godafoss this morning plus heaps of cars so there were plenty of people there, however, we had no trouble moving around. The paths are level & well maintained.

Husavik is our lunch stop on the Tjornes Peninsula. Just our luck, a cruise ship is moored offshore & this small town is packed with cruise ship people. Whale watching tours are also conducted from this small port & there are also busloads of tourists from the cruise ships in Akureyri in town as well. We find a crowded café to buy some lunch at & have some local savoury crepes (big pancake is made on the hot plate & ham, cheese & a raw egg, the pancake is folded over & cooked on the other side) was good. The church in Husavik stands out & has some real character, it looks good from the street & also inside is striking with its simplicity. The poor Vicar or Priest is busy vacuuming the carpet in the front entrance, so many cruise ship people have walked into the church. She should have put out a box for donations.

As we drive around the tip of the Tjornes Peninsula we start coming across lots of old lava fields, amazingly farmers are using every bit of ground that is not lava to grow their hay. Asbyrgi is our next stop & this place has some striking geology, a huge canyon in the loose shape of a horseshoe, with the walls short at the open mouth gradually rising to around 100 metres at the end & about 4 or 5 kilometres long inside. Legend has it that this mark on the landscape is from one of the hooves of the eight legged horse that the Norse god Odin rode.

Next is the nearby amazing looking Hljooaklettar rock formation, these are large odd-shaped basaltic rocks with interesting mosaic like patterns on them formed when a volcanic fissure opened along the glacial Jokulsa River. The formation runs for around 6 kilometres but we only walked around a kilometre of the track, the small flies here were very annoying, first time we have experience flies in Iceland. We have never seen anything like these amazing rock formations before.

The road on to Detifoss is like new, it is a pleasure to drive on such a good road. Dettifoss is an extremely big, fast flowing & noisy waterfall with masses of spray flying into the air. The river is in flood & dirty brown water is rushing over the drop. The walk to the falls is a bit over one kilometre through a moonscape type environment, no trees or plants, just rocks. Detifoss is around 100 metres wide & has a drop of around 45 metres & is fed from the largest glacier in Europe, Vatnajokull. It is spectacular, the closer you get, the wetter you get from all the spray in the air.

Selfoss is a few hundred metres upstream from Detifoss & is beautiful, though not as spectacular as Detifoss. The Selfoss falls are also around 100 metres wide but only have a drop of eleven metres, still very noisy & still lots of spray. It was an easy walk there & back & we took it slowly over the rocky parts.

The next part of our drive was like driving through a moonscape, the lava fields are extensive & no vegetation exists on them. We pass some smoking fields plus a largish geothermal power station, with pipes & steam. A few volcanoes are standing sentient over the landscape. We then pass by the shores of Lake Myvatn, formed by a volcanic eruption only 2,500 years ago, still very new. More volcanoes standing around & more lava fields, it is all so spectacularly beautiful.

Our hotel is standalone out in the middle of nowhere, I had to pull over & check that I was still travelling in the right direction, it was only a kilometre ahead, that lonely looking building on the next rise. It is a modern dark coloured big hotel. We check in & make a dinner reservation for 15 minutes time, there are two busloads having dinner in the restaurant tonight. The food on the menu is either fish or lamb, what a surprise, so fish & lamb it was, both delicious, both very well cooked, it was enjoyable eating it. The fish was Blue Ling which I had not tried previously. After dinner we chatted to some fellow travellers from Australia for a fair while before retiring to our spacious room with its own big modern bathroom, how exciting!!!! Another good day.