Driving around East Iceland
Today, we would be driving for at least 5 and a half hours to our next destination, the city of Akuryeri. First, we needed to eat a large breakfast to hold us over for a while, so we went to the main house of the guest house for the buffet breakfast:
It was a wonderful spread of familiar items, like bread, jam, and cold cute. But there were some very Icelandic items like their yougurt, called Skyr. According to the host, the Skyr in the buffet was prepared and flavored the way her mother made it. I tried it and it tasted amazing with the granola and fruit. And then there was the caviar in a tube (it’s the blue tube in the lower right hand part of the photo). She said that it's exactly as it sounds, caviar that you squeeze out onto bread or eggs, but it's also delicious on a banana. I wasn't really up for that this morning, so I passed.
We then packed up and started our journey. About 30 minutes in, we stopped at Fauskasandur, a large rock jutting out in the ocean:
We spent like a minute there, 'cuz it’s a rock…
And then it would be another two hours or so to our next destination, the port city of Seyðisfjörður. This would be a much more dramatic drive than we expected.
Our drive started on the high-speed main ring road, highway 1. Well, except that today was apparently re-paving day. And unlike the US where they'd block off a lane and guide traffic around, here you have to just work around the big equipment spitting gravel and tar.
But hey, we got past it without incident and kept on trucking, enjoying the lovely view:
Until we took a shortcut away from the coastline up a steep gravel road with switchbacks. It turns out this is the infamous Öxi pass, 18km of fun, where the first half has blind corners, narrow 1 lane sections, and as much as 17% grades.
Image courtesy Wikipedia since we were too white-knuckled to take a photo
We finally made it to Seyðisfjörður, and made our way to Fancy Sheep, a cute little food truck for lunch. Nick got an amazing lamb burger, and I got fish and chips, and we ate it on a bench by the fjord:
We also noticed a large Viking cruise ship docked at the port, and wondered where they all were because the small city wasn’t that crowded. And then we saw some large groups walk down the ramp and into the small village. We tried to walk into a store, and were told to wait until the cruise passengers left the store before we could enter, so we left. It was hard to avoid them as they were taking photos everywhere, but we did what we could:
On the way back to the highway to Akuryeri, we stopped by Gufufoss, and a monument near the road, which signifies the first time someone driving down the highway would actually see Seyðisfjörður:
And then we drove almost two hours to the area of Lake Mývatn, listening to some podcasts and enjoying some of the scenery along the way. Our first stop was Hverir, an area filled with sulphur vents and geothermal water:
Two things were very immediately noticeable one we opened the door to leave our car. First, it smelled bad. Like, really bad. Like someone ate rotten eggs, let it digest in their system for while, and farted it out forever. Second, the flies were awful. They quickly swarmed us and continued following us wherever we walked. Nick actually was bitten by one earlier in the trip, so ever since then, we’ve been wary of being around them. According to Ragnhildur at our first guesthouse, these flies didn’t appear in Iceland until about 3-4 years ago. But now they’ve appeared in many places on the island.
We didn’t spend too much time here both due to the smell and the flies, but it did look really cool.
We continued to drive around the southern part of Lake Mývatn, and make some more quick stops along the way, mainly due to the constant attack of flies:
Finally, we drove another hour to Akuryeri and checked into the Icelandair Hotel (yes, they have an entire hotel chain in the country). We’ve already had dinner down near the water, and have probably walked through most of downtown, and it’s a cute city with some adorable public trash cans:
Tomorrow, we drive to Husavik. I'm super excited!