Myvatn: Lava, Sulfur and More Waterfalls

Are you sensing a theme to Iceland yet? Before we got here, we read advice telling us that if you stopped to take a photo of every waterfall in Iceland, in a week you'd only make it a few miles. It really is true...we have a whole lot of car window photos of different waterfalls, but we still stop at one or more every day.

Yesterday, we took another lazy morning, for two reasons: the first was that our hotel had the most impressive breakfast buffet (including good coffee) that we've seen yet in Iceland. The second is because we hadn't been able to enjoy this view yesterday, which we got to see both out of our window and out of the breakfast room's window.

Once we finally got going, the first order of business was to head to the biggest (by water volume) waterfall in Europe, Dettifoss. This was a pretty massive waterfall! I made Patrick drive the safe tarred road rather than the gravel road that the reviews complained about being terrifying, since we've driven a few gravel roads in Iceland that were more pothole than road and our nice little rental car looks like we've been taking it offroading through the mudpits already. (The heated seats and steering wheel still work fine, although the backup camera now just shows us a nice view of dried mud...so the priorities are all right!) We had to walk a ways to the waterfall, through this very barren landscape of weird black volcanic rock structures. Interesting looking, but a bit eerie. When we got there, it was to see a giant waterfall where we couldn't see the bottom of the water vapor.

From there, we kept going to the Lake Myvatn area. We drove through such a variety of landscapes on the way here, the most interesting of which was the mountains where the sulfur pits are. We didn't stop, as we heard a few too many horror stories of people whose shoes melted 10 minutes after walking into the parking lot because of someone who had carelessly tracked sulfur across the pavement, but the mountains were bright red with weird yellow and white splotches, and steaming continually. It was a cool sight!

The lake itself is surrounded with a huge variety of scenery, from more weird black rock columns and formations to miles of ground cover turning its beautiful fall colors (imagine a whole Minnesotan forest in October, but all those colors spread across ground cover 12 inches tall) to a little forest that we took a hike through that felt just like being at home, although when we got glimpses of the lake we could see beautiful blue-green water with some of the same cool lava formations sticking out. This lake is famous in summer for having little midge flies that continually buzz you and try to fly in your ears and eyes and nose - we were very happy to be here in mid-September, when they have died off and we didn't have to wear mosquito nets over our heads!

We made a few less impressive stops for short walks in Myvatn, before ending up at our hotel directly across from one of the very impressive waterfalls in Iceland, Godafoss. The water really is as blue - or more - than you see in the photo, even on a cloudy afternoon. It is definitely colder up here in northern Iceland, and as usual the sun went away later in the day, so we took our photos at Godafoss quickly before running back to the hotel for a warm dinner, including "Icelandic meat soup" and ice cream with toppings and a shot of a local liqueur set on fire - great ways to stay warm in spite of the wet and the wind!