Steam and Sulfur

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We'd planned to meet for breakfast a bit later than usual today, at 8, so Gilat and I went for a short walk in the vicinity of the hotel before we ate. We had a nice walk, not long, and got as far as a little red house with a lawn covered with lawn dwarves. Cute.

Breakfast at our small hotel this morning was nice. I mean, the fare wasn't different from previous hotels but the owners sat with us in the dining room and we had a nice chat. They told us a little about themselves, about living in the remote yet growing town of Eskifjörður, about how they came to open the hotel there. Turns out it used to be a bank. When the bank closed they bought the building and converted it into the hotel, keeping the vault as a wine cellar.

We were soon on our way North. We'd had plans to see the big puffin colony at Borgarfjörður Eystri, in a more Northern fjord. That would take us about an hour off course, and another hour back. Luckily, a couple days ago we heard that the puffins are no longer there. Turns out that the nesting season is in the summer months, so those sweet, penguin-looking birds are only there for three months of the year, and we missed the season. So we saved ourselves over two hours of futile driving! Whew!

We drove through Egilsstaðir, a large town (by Icelandic standards), hoping to find an open supermarket on the way. But they only open at around 10. I guess folks here like to sleep in! Can't say as I blame them.

Anyway, we kept going. Almost imperceptively the road began to rise and the scenery began to change. It became more hilly and the wide open, mossy or grass-covered expanses were replaced with the dark brown autumn nakedness of birch brush. Lots of rivers and small waterfalls and rapids flowed between the hills. When the road was higher in the hills we could still see forever, distant snow-covered mountains or ice fields were clear in the crisp, clean air. I doubt Icelandic even has a word for 'haze'. Or 'dust' or 'smog', for that matter.

We stopped to get a thermos from the back of the car for tea, and noticed that the small puddles were covered in a layer of ice. The brush up here was replaced again by grass, frosted in places. We drove slower here, more carefully. Pretty soon we noticed the ice and a dusting of snow on the road and the surrounding hills. Those snow-covered mountains we'd been seeing for the past hour's drive? Well, here we were. We drove carefully over the icy road for a while, several cars stopped along the road for folks to stretch out and enjoy this new scenery. We were happy to take pictures from the warmth of the car.

A while later the road snaked downwards and the frost disappeared. We were through the mountain pass. About an hour later we arrived at our first stop of the day, Hverir, near the Mývatn lake. This area is littered with steam vents. Hot mud pools bubbling up like a witch's cauldron, steam spurting out from holes in the ground, or just rising up from the heated earth, and a couple of piles of rocks with scorching steam pouring out of them, sounding like jet engines, and about as loud! The whole area smelled of sulfur. In fact, the sign there said that sulfur was mined there at one time. Well, collected from the surface, actually.

We walked around, getting closer (but not too close) looks at the spouting steam, the bubbling mud pots and smoking hills, and even ran through the billowing, smelly steam. Then we headed on to our next stop. Some much needed shopping at Reykjahlíð, nearby. We also had a picnic lunch there. We stopped at the information center there, to see what else there is in the area. Then we went to the Grjótagjá cave. This is a cave in the side of a cracked-up volcanic hill. The cave has a hot spring inside it, so you climb down into the cave (it's just a short climb) and get to a large, crystal-clear blue pool of warm water. Unfortunately bathing is prohibited there. Well, since it is beautiful, and a scene from Game of Thrones was filmed in the cave lots, of tourists go to see it. So maybe it's not so unfortunate after all. Actually it's not one cave but two (that we found) close to each other, and probably connected. My guess is that water flows into one end of the first cave and from there to the second.

We took lots of pictures before heading on in search of the pseudo craters on Mývatn lake. We stopped on the way at a lookout point over the lake just to take a few pictures and enjoy the view. A few minutes later we arrived at the pseudo craters. They're fenced in and the area is used for sheep grazing, but you can still go in, and there are signs explaining the phenomenon. What happened is that when a nearby volcano erupted, the lava flowed over the lake. The sudden extreme heat caused the water to explode through the hot lava at its weakest points, smashing it into small pieces and ash. This debris was thrown out and created the craters. They are called pseudo craters because they were created in one event, and won't erupt again, like a volcano's 'true' crater. The largest of these craters is less than 100 m in diameter, and probably no more than 20 m high. So we walked around and up them (there's a path) and watched the sheep grazing on them.

From there it was about an hour's drive to our hotel in Húsavík. The Húsavík Cape is a nice little hotel on a hill overlooking the port. It's got a large, pleasant dining room-library-coffee corner combination. We signed in, got our rooms and made use of the remaining light to have a walk around town. Gilat, Tamar and I walked down to the port and saw the boats we'd be sailing on tomorrow to see whales. The Grandparents and Ethan had a shorter walk around the old houses overlooking the port and to the nearby shops.

Later, we all had supper and headed to bed.

Tomorrow we're going to see whales!

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