20 September 2014

It’s a lovely Saturday morning at the lagoon. Sunny and calm, just as forecasted.

Time to pay the usual visit to the beach and capture some diamonds :}

An hour later we are back to the lagoon for a romantic walk along the shore.

The clock is ticking and we better hurry up. It’s a five-and-a-half-hour drive to the Mývatn airport, provided we don’t stop to take pictures of the scenery every few minutes, which is hard to resist, especially as this part of the country is new to us. Hence, I promise to try, as much as I can, to shoot through the window while we are on the move.

When I see a flock of swans chilling in a lake next to the road, though, I ask my man to stop the car.

Further down the way, we reach our first fjord – Berufjörður. Mesmerized by the view, we miss the shortcut at the end of the fjord – the scenic Öxi road – and continue along Route 1.

In the meantime, Route 1, a.k.a. the Icelandic highway, has turned into a narrow unpaved road.

But driving some extra kilometers on steep gravel doesn’t bother us at all. The energy of the day is quite different from yesterday’s. The weather is supreme, the scenery – unexplored, and, although we have to get to our destination by 5 pm, we are not rushing through.

We stop at the gas station in Egilsstaðir to fill up, have a cup of coffee, and check the updates on the eruption, before we take up the next 170 km through the most humdrum part of the island.

After a 2-hour drive across a barren moorland, we reach Mývatn area and head straight to the Reykjahlíð Airport. We have a quick look around the airfield, and, since we are a couple of hours early, decide to check the nearby sights.

It’s such a diverse landscape around Mývatn, one must devote at least 2 days to fully explore and enjoy it. To make full use of the little spare time we have, we decide to hunt up the Grjótagjá lava cave, famous for being used as a popular bathing site and a location for filming the 5th episode of the 3rd season of Game of Thrones. Turns out it’s easily reachable by car via Route 860. There, in the parking area in front of the cave entrance, we find another bizarre creation – the quintessence of life in the harsh Icelandic nature.

Another landmark that catches our eyes wherever we turn our heads is the giant striated black mountain Hverfell. In fact, it’s a rare and particularly enormous example of a tephra explosion crater, one kilometer in diameter. I so much want to go to the crater rim, but the time we have here most probably won’t allow for such a walk. I sigh a long sigh, and get into the cave.

Since, due to volcanic activity in the 70s and 80s, the water temperature had risen to more than 50 °C, bathing in the cave is strictly forbidden now, thus there’s nothing much we can do there besides taking a couple of pictures. We take a short walk along the steamy fissure above the cave and return to the airport.

The best is yet to come…