After spending the night across the street from Godafoss, we decided to brave the gravel roads down to two more waterfalls on the same river, neither of which I can pronounce: Hrafnabjargafoss and Aldeyjarfoss. The catch was that when we say "brave the gravel roads," it meant about 40 kilometers of regular bad gravel road, followed by what Iceland calls an "F road" - a gravel road that is in theory impassable to all except 4WD vehicles. This might mean it just has a lot of potholes, or it might mean an unbridged river that you need to ford in your car. We chose not to spend four times as much on our rental car, and so had a 2WD vehicle that included in the contract a clause about not driving on F roads. So, we drove as far as we could, pulled off to the side of the road and proceeded to walk about 4.5 miles each way to see the waterfalls - while grumbling the entire way since the roads we walked were no worse, and in many spots better, then the regular gravel road we travelled until we hit the F road.
On the positive side - Aldeyjarfoss is I think my favorite waterfall we've seen yet. It didn't hurt that since we walked there just after the rain and it's on an F road, we were the only people there for the 45 minutes we spent staring. But the combination of the brilliant blue water, the shape of the waterfall, and the rock fixtures surrounding it were just stunning. We've seen other waterfalls with columnar rocks like this around it, but none where the top of the columns looked almost like sculptures like this one.
Hrafnabjargafoss was a very different waterfall. It was beautiful and very interesting, but not nearly as photogenic. Where Aldeyjarfoss is a single, beautiful falls with most of its nice features all kept together, Hrafnabjargafoss is very spread out. It has a little, U-shaped falls right at the beginning, and the water from those falls promptly swirls around and disappears into a tiny cave, to pop out the other side and be joined with water from a bunch of other tributary falls. As I said, it's very interesting to watch and see the water swirling around, coming from and going to so many different places and disappearing into caves - we stood for awhile and just stared.
Throughout the entire walk to both waterfalls, we saw 3 other people, all of whom were leaving Aldeyjarfoss as we arrived - this was about 3 hours for us between the time spent walking. As we left Hrafnabjargafoss, we ran into a group of people, and saw a couple more on the way out, which felt a little strange after so long wandering through the Icelandic countryside without seeing a person, car or even a sheep. But as soon as we finished our long hike back to the car, we set out for a very different cultural experience - we are staying tonight in the capital city, Akureyri.
Akureyri is a cute little city right on a fjord in the north. It's arranged all along the steep hillsides surrounding the water, and it's full of old timey wooden buildings that look like they popped out of 18th century Europe. We stopped at the botanical gardens here - the most northern botanical gardens in the world. They were surprisingly beautiful and full of more familiar flowers than I would have expected.
We also enjoyed some fantastic food (I liked the langoustine so much that I had "surf and turf" sushi with langoustine and local beef), a few more local beers and then headed off to visit "the best ice cream shop in Iceland." The ice cream, sadly, was very, very disappointing - particularly after a few days ago when we had some of the best vanilla ice cream I'd ever had in our hotel restaurant, which had the reputation of being bland and over expensive. But along the way, we got to see a beautiful church up on the hillside!
Finally, we got to end our day properly for an 8.5 mile walking day: our hotel has a lovely hot tub overlooking the fjord, and we soaked our sore muscles in preparation for tomorrow.
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