Return to Iceland - Lavapalooza or: the true value of a good pair of shoes

Just a bit of warning—this is a long one since I skipped a day.

The day started with a quick trip to the nearby grocery store, a discount chain called Bónus. I wanted to try to limit my overpriced meals to one a day, so I stocked up on sandwich stuff, snacks, and skyr. I munched on a bag full of pastries that I swear the cashier said translated into Marriage Boats, but the closest name I could find is Hjónabandssæla which is Marital Bliss and they don’t sound even close. Anyway, they were good and gobbled it and some skyr as I drove to Detifoss, which was roughly 2 hours. From what I was told, the east side of Detifoss is the more attractive side. I really wasn’t sure how to get to either one specifically, but as luck had it I ended up on the east side. Detifoss is touted as the most powerful waterfall in all of Europe, and the term “The Niagara of Europe” was tossed around a fair amount. To get down to view the falls it’s a steep descent on somewhat slippery rocks. I’ve mostly been dressing for either the rain or the cold, and as my luck would have it I was geared more for rain. Unfortunately it was a very cold, very windy rain and I was quickly shivering and ended up cutting my stay at the waterfall rather short. Although not the plan, I pulled the shitty tourist and snapped some pics and left. It’s a very nice, powerful waterfall but it certainly ain’t no Niagara. It’s definitely worth the trip down and back, but short of the sheer volume of water going over the edge I’ve already seen much prettier (and would see an even better one the next day).

On the subject of weather. Any place I’ve ever spent more than a day or two—domestic and internationally—I inevitably hear someone say something along the lines of “If you don’t like the weather just wait 30 minutes and it’ll change.” It’s become a rather trite thing to hear when traveling. In Iceland, if you don’t like the weather just wait 30 minutes and it’ll change—really. The bitter cold rain and wind that drove me away from Detifoss ended about the time I got back to my car. Whether I stayed or left I would’ve been cold and wet for the exact same amount of time. Driving really shows off how much the weather can change. In the course of a single day of driving it can start and stop raining more than a dozen times. It will clear up, cloud up, rain, clear up again, and repeat this cycle endlessly. It really is best to dress for rain regardless of how sunny it is, and just expect the temperature to go up and down 10 or more degrees multiple times a day. And it’s almost always windy to some degree.

After Detifoss I headed to the Lake Mývatn area about an hour away. In the course of exploring the area I ended up backtracking multiple times, taking the road between points of interest and where my room for the night would be several times. It was mostly a case of poor planning, not realizing how close some things actually were, and returning to an area because of the fear of having missed a really good opportunity (I was right, by the way). Coming from Detifoss the Ring Road descends dramatically into the Mývatn with a small geothermal field called Hverir full of boiling mud pools and sulfuric steam-spewing fumeroles as soon as the road levels out. It’s a relatively small area, but it’s cool to see (and smell) the small pools of bubbling mud and a pair of what look like a giant anthills made of softball sized rocks spewing steam.

Immediately after leaving Hverir there is a road with a sign that just says Krafla. I looked it up quickly and it was supposed to be a lava field with a caldera so I took the long road up the hill. The first thing you see as you drive is the large Krafla geothermal plant. It’s a very modern, tidy looking operation that kept making me think it would be the kind of power plant you’d build on mars. There are large steel pipes that lead to a half dozen little geodesic-domed sheds, a few large buildings, and a pair of massive three story-ish trapezoid-shaped turbines. You drive through the complex and under a series of pipes that rise up and over the road to create a sort of tunnel. The road then goes up sharply and ends at large crater. You can climb up and around the rim of the crater and look at the deep blue lake in the middle. It was pretty, but it was disappointing and not at all what I had read about Krafla. Coming back down and out there is another parking area with several cars, but I couldn’t really see anything but a walking trail so I passed and continued back toward Hverir.

It was a little early, but I wanted to go ahead and check out my room and get setup because the place seemed pretty small and I didn’t want them locking me out before I ever checked in. It’s about a 30 minute drive from Mývatn, but I wasn’t in a hurry so I didn’t mind that I would end up driving back. It’s a nice drive but I couldn’t find my hotel. I followed the directions, but the road it lead too was just residential. There was gas station with a restaurant nearby so I went there and ended up eating lunch there despite my bag full of groceries sitting in the car. I had a pretty good, hearty “Icelandic meatsoup” that was full of lamb and root vegetables. I asked the girl at the counter about my hotel and she told me it was actually in one of those houses—it was an older widow who ran a B&B out of her home. I followed the directions again and pulled up uncertainly to the house. The owner, Helga, greeted me at the stairs up to her house and immediately made me feel a little better about my choice of lodging. Helga was really talkative, I think a bit lonely, and showed me around and let me get setup. She mentioned a thermal bath back at Myvatn that I should check out so I added it to my mental list.

The whole time I was driving to where my room was and back to Mývatn, the disappointment of the Krafla lava fields kept nagging at me. I read up some more on the area and everything pointed to the fact that I never saw the main attraction. It turned out that unsuspecting parking lot and trail was the whole point. So I drove back up the hill, through the power plant, and pulled into that boring looking parking area. I headed down the little walking trail and happened to overhear a girl telling another tourist that it was just a quick 15 minute hike until you reached the end and had to come back. Maybe for young, spunky, athletic girl it was 15 minutes but it sure as shit wasn’t for me and it didn’t end where she seemed to think—it was actually a loop. Only nobody else seemed to be taking the loop. You first go up a small hill and end up walking along a boardwalk that leads to a small, steaming aquamarine pool at the base of a small hill of brown rock. The trail continues and enters a lava field created from the last eruption of Krafla in 1984. The ground is black, jagged, and uneven. A sparsely marked trails goes through the most manageable path toward the caldera, but even it is broken up by fissures that appear to have opened since the trail was originally marks. Off to the sides are large, jagged shards that shoot up, larger rifts, small vents with much of it oozing steam. The caldera seems rather small for what you would think would create the vast field of lava, but it turns out that’s the tip of the tube from one of the previous eruptions. The entire caldera is 10km in diameter and the entire lava field that I was in, the deep blue lake, and more are within the caldera. I didn’t know that at the time I was walking around, but it was still very cool and surreal.

After what I thought was the caldera the trail continues on through the lava field and begins to climb up. At one point the trail splits and you can hike further up and end up overlooking the aquamarine pool that I had seen earlier. It seemed that everyone else that went up ended up coming back down and retracing their steps back to the “caldera” and back to the parking area. But the trail continued on past that point so I continued to follow it. For a very short period it continues through lava field, but not too far on and you leave the lava and return to normal, solid ground. This part of the trails runs around the back side of the large brown hill until you cross a rift and then reach a gravel path that eventually runs back into the path I took coming up. Round trip was about 2.5 miles—15 minutes my ass.

After Krafla, the steep climb up the crater, and the steep climb down and up from Detifoss I was exhausted. It was then I decided to hit up that thermal bath Helga had mentioned. It wasn’t as big or stylish as the Blue Lagoon and it didn’t have the really nice algae and silica mud that you can put on your skin, but it wasn’t near as crowded nor was it 300 miles way. I floated around, got as close to the hot water vents as I could stand, cooled off, and repeated for about two and a half hours. By the time I returned to my room about 30 minutes away I was too tired and too relaxed to do anything but go to sleep. The next morning I woke up at 8 to have breakfast and ended up sharing the table with a pair of older couples from Italy. The two women were both judges in different towns, one of the men was a retired judge, and the other was an electrical engineer. They were chatty, but one of the women did most of the translating as the two men spoke little to no English. Helga repeated some of her stories she had told me the day before, and somehow the topic ended up in politics. To say the least, and to keep it apolitical, it’s interesting being an American abroad in the age of Trump. Breakfast was simple but did the trick and I left to start the day.

There was one more thing back in the Mývatn area that I wanted to see—a vast lava cave called Lofthellir. Unfortunately it’s not a cave you go into by yourself, all the tours to the cave leave very early in the morning, and it involves some rather claustrophobic spaces before you get to the good stuff. It’s also something that costs $200 or more, depending on which tour group you go with. Instead, I settled for a small geothermal cave called Grjótagjá that was apparently in the show Game of Thrones where Jon Snow has sex with Ygritte. It was a popular spot for locals to bath, but a rise in geothermal activity in 1975 made the water too hot to bath in. It’s a tiny cave with two small entrances that have limited space to move around and stay out of the water. In all honesty it wasn’t worth another trek back to the Mývatn area, especially since I had to return back toward where I had spent the night to continue along the Ring Road.

The next stop was a lesser known waterfall called Aldeyjarfoss. It’s a bit out of the way, taking you about an hour off the ring road to get there. You actually turn off where the much more popular Goðafoss is. If I weren’t already more interested in Aldeyjarfoss, the half dozen tour busses and parking lot full of cars would have dissuaded me. Considering you can get a really good view of the falls from the road, there’s not much need to deal with all the people. Everything I read about Aldeyjarfoss said you could park just before you got to one of Iceland’s seasonal roads (called F Roads) that require a beefy 4x4 to safely navigate and it was just a 10 minute walk from there. After driving the hour down the road I crossed a bridge and found a small parking area with signs about the area that said the roads ahead were for 4x4s only. It was a fucking lie.

The actual parking area is a mile and a half up a steep road where there is a single, small sign that says you can’t go further without a 4x4. To make matters worse, I tried to make the walk shorter by cutting across the terrain. Any time I might have saved taking a shorter route I more than lost navigating ravines, climbing hills of loose soil, and walking around ridges to avoid the deeper ravines. I was absolutely exhausted by the time I got to the real parking area. At that point it really is only a 10 minute walk down a somewhat steep trail. My trek took almost an hour. But even then, the hike was totally worth it. Aldeyjarfoss is absolutely beautiful. It has the same hexagonal basalt columns that Svartifoss had, but it’s a much larger fall in a much more beautiful area. Much like when I went to Detifoss it began to rain shortly after I got to the fall, but having learned from my previous experience I just waited it out and was rewarded. The hike back up the 10 minute trail was a little taxing, but the full 1.5 mile walk back (of which I stuck to the road the entire time) was so easy in comparison that it was actually enjoyable. By the time I got back to my card I was tired, but quite happy and stuffed my face with a sandwich from my bag of groceries.

After Aldeyjarfoss I continued on the Ring Road with only a vague target of an interesting geological feature along the coast of the far north. I reached the city of Akureyri long before I reached my destination and decided to call that the end of the road for the day. I’ve made a lot of progress around Iceland in the last few days and even if I weren’t tired I wanted to slow down a bit. I’ve been to Akureyri before, when I visited in 2011 and it was a snowy city. Akureyri is considered Iceland’s “second city” after Reykjavik and it’s grown a good bit in the 7 years since I’ve been. In my neverending search for cheap places to sleep I ended up renting a “sleep capsule” at a hostel in the center of town. I’ve never stayed in a capsule, but it looked cool and it kinda solves the main issue I have with hostiles—other people. Finding the hostile was a bit of on ordeal because all the roads in the city center were closed for Akureyri’s annual city celebration to mark the anniversary of its founding. I haven’t spent much time in the capsule, but even my slightly claustrophobic self should be ok. For now I’m going to call it a night and head out to find something to eat and then chill out in my little spaceship of a bed.