Lake Myvatn Area

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Last night Frankie had brought her loaf of gluten-free bread to the restaurant staff to refrigerate overnight, as she often does.  When we came for breakfast today, they could NOT find it!  The poor ladies looked for over half an hour, and Frankie had a tour of their walk-in fridges and freezers also looking for it.  By the time they found it, it was too late because we had to leave for our excursion.

It was a balmy 17C today, and not a stitch of rain.  Wahoo!  And we still ended up trudging through snow ha ha.

This morning we drove to Húsavík (House Bay). It took us 45 minutes to drive there from our guesthouse. The bugs on the windshield were so thick it sounded like rain. It is said that Húsavík was the very first settlement in Iceland, when a Swedish Viking landed and built himself a house in the bay around the year 860. He travelled to Iceland because his mother had seen it in a dream. When he left a few months later, he accidentally left behind a sailor and two slaves who settled here permanently. However, they are NOT considered the first settlers of Iceland, because their being here was not voluntary.

When we drove in, we saw a quaint, cross-shaped wooden church.  It was built in 1907 and is said to be the most beautiful wooden church in Iceland. Every piece of the church was shipped from Norway, already cut and painted.  Behind the altar is a painting of Lazarus that is clearly set in Iceland. The painting did not go over well with the townspeople of Húsavík when they recognized their own faces in the painting.

Húsavík is known as the “whale watching capital of Europe”, and we had a whale watching tour scheduled for 9:30 am in. Icelandic waters make a home for around 24 species of whales. Some of them stay here all year round, while the bigger ones come only for the summertime to feed. Tourists arrive at the same time. We took the 2 ½ hour Gentle Giants Big Whale Safari & Puffins tour, which uses an RIB (rigid-inflatable boat) to travel faster and farther in the hopes of seeing more whales. Cruising speed was about 30 knots.  The boat was half empty which was great for us. Everyone crowded to the front seats so we headed to the back and had unobstructed views.

Besides whales, the tour started with a visit to Puffin Island. We saw thousands of puffins (called "The Clowns of the Ocean") because it was their nesting period (May 1st - August 20th).  They are not much at flying, but they can dive down to 50 meters. Wow!  Hunters come out here to try to catch them because they are a local delicacy, but it seems cruel to do that because they mate for life.  Plus, they are so darn cute!

Our boat went out about 4 miles while the normal whale watching boat stayed in the harbour.  Apparently all those boats were clustered around one poor minke whale, the most common whales in Iceland.  We didn't see any minke whales, but we had up close and personal encounters with no fewer than 6 blue whales!  And several blow holes off in the distance.  Blue whales are 20-33m, 110-190 tons, and they are the biggest animals that have ever lived on the earth. Its heart is as big as a car. Some of their blood vessels are so big that you could swim in them.  Our captain could not believe how many we encountered on this one tour.  His quotation when he didn't know which whale to zip to:  "An unusual problem, there are too many blue whales."

We found our way to Ásbyrgi (Fortress of the Gods), a canyon in the northernmost part of Vatnajökull National Park (one of 3 national parks in Iceland). The canyon is 1 km wide and 3 km long. It is divided through the middle by a rock formation 25 meters high called Eyjan ("the Island").  The canyon is horseshoe shaped, and legend says it was created when the Norse god Odin's eight-legged horse put his foot down while travelling over the area. We parked and hiked in the tip of the canyon.  The walls were quite sheer going up all around us.

Legend also says that the canyon is the home of the Huldufólk ("hidden people"), who live in cracks within the surrounding cliffs. Huldufólk are said to be descended from children that Eve hid from God because they were not washed. God made them invisible. Because the Huldufólk live in rocks, they are the reason that roads will be re-routed and large boulders left in fields. It is bad luck to disturb their home. They are to blame for all the tractors and bulldozers that have broken down. Only 5% of Icelanders have ever met one.  They are sometimes called elves.

From the canyon we took a long gravel road to Dettifoss (Tumble Falls), which is Europe's most powerful waterfall. It is 45 m high and 100 m long, and it releases 300-400 cubic m of water per second into the gorge.  The land around Dettifoss is dry and barren plains, except for an oasis created by the spray of the falls.

We continued down the gravel road for what seemed forever, until we got back to the Ring Road.  We couldn't believe it was already 5 pm at this point, and there was still a lot we wanted to do!

This whole area is the Krafla area.  Krafla is a volcano that erupted 9 times between 1974 and 1984, and 29 times in recorded history.  The caldera is 40 km long and 15 km wide.  It is 2 km deep.  Since 1977 the Krafla area has been the source of the geothermal energy used by the Krafla geothermal power plant. The drilling from the Krafla power plant has been blamed for causing all the recent eruptions, since there had been no eruptions since the 1700s.

We drove to the end of the Krafla road and climbed up the Víti.  Viti is a small crater lake that has a diameter of 300 meters and steep sides. Viti means hell, and the early settlers believed that it was one of the openings to hell. The water inside the crater is 100C. 

We then decided to check out the lava field around Leirhnjúkur.  It was a long hike just to get there, on what is supposed to be a trail but right now is mostly still snow. It felt strange walking through snow again.  Yet oddly familiar, sigh.  

The Leirhnjúkur area is a great plain which overflowed with lava during the 1984 eruption of Krafla. The trail begins with some lava covered with moss from the 1700s eruption. Then you hike through more recent lava. There used to be a sign warning “Volcanic Hazard Zone -Do Not Enter”, but this just attracted more people, so it has been removed.  There was steam coming from some of the lava spots.

We were pretty tired and hungry by this point, so we went back to our hotel for dinner, then we drove the road around Lake Mývatn. This is called a eutrophic lake because of its high biological productivity. As far as we could tell, the only biological anything we saw was midges.  Swarms and swarms of midges!  Later, we found out that Mývatn means “midge lake”.

Our first stop as we drove around the lake was Mount Hverfjall. Mount Hverfjall is a large tephra crater formed during an eruption 2500 years ago. That means that the mound was created by the debris of the volcanic eruption.  The crater is about 1 km in diameter and 140 meters deep.  We climbed those 140 meters straight up, phew, and looked down into - a completely barren caldera.  The size of this crater made the other ones we climbed look like anthills.

We tried going to Dimmuborgir (lava rock pillars), but the road was being worked on (at 8 pm!), so we moved on.   

Skútustaðargígar are large craters at the end of Lake Mývatn. They are called pseudocraters because it resembles a volcanic crater, but it is not an actual vent from which lava has erupted. They were created by steam explosions when lava flowed over the wetlands.  We walked up a few to look down, but got chased back to the car by the midges.

By this time it was 9 pm and we still had the blog to do, so we did the circuit of the lake back towards our hotel.  We could hardly see out our windshield for all the dead bugs.  We looked at the gas station to see if they had windshield cleaner buckets, but no luck.  Then we saw a guy who had driven into a cubicle space and was wet-brushing off his whole car.  It's like a hose with a brush attached.  Brilliant!  And no cost!  Way better than back home!