Day 3 - Akureyri, Dettifoss, Husavik - 17 August 2011

I had two little problems for my second day in Akureyri. First, the cost of the bus tours was starting to get my attention. The tours were great, and I’m glad I did them, it’s a hassle free way of seeing the country. However, they weren’t cheap. The other problem was that there were no bus tours that went where I wanted to go, that didn’t also stop in many of the same places I’d seen on day 2. So I rented a car.

There are disadvantages to renting a car in Iceland. First, it’s quite expensive. Gas is also quite expensive, about double the price in Manitoba, since there are obviously no oil wells in Iceland. Also, if you go off the main road - which basically means any road outside a town that’s not the perimeter highway - your insurance is void.

I wanted to do two things, mainly - to go to the biggest waterfall in Europe, Dettifoss, and to go to a former whaling town, called Husavik. Dettifoss was on a gravel road, so there’d be no insurance once I turned towards it. I also wasn’t exactly sure how I would get to Husavik without a lot of backtracking. My plan basically consisted of driving to Dettifoss, and then seeing how things worked out.

Pretty well, as it turned out. I took a cab to the airport, picked up the car (a standard) without any significant problems, and headed out of town. I initially took the same route as we had the day before, though there were a couple more photo stops along the way. When I came to Lake Myvatn, I had the choice of going left or right around the lake. Since we’d gone right yesterday, I chose to go left. That was okay, but I should have gone right, and gone back to Dimmubottir, instead. The scenery was pleasant, but nothing breathtaking. I carried on past Namafjall, and then I was on new ground.

One of the interesting features of the route is that it parallels the old walking track. You can often see cairns set in a nice straight line running to the horizon. These were used when people used to walk or drive cattle between villages, and visibility was poor. They have been there for hundreds of years.

There’s also a lot of great volcanic terrain - bare, curved, and broken basalt plains, grassy fields ruptured by sunken lava, boulders scattered across a sandy lava field, really cool. Every time you came over a hill, you might well see something new and unique. I overshot my turn off and came across the river that feeds Dettifoss, Jökulsá á Fjöllum. The river flows in a remarkably straight run north from Vatnajökull glacier, to the coast. I knew I wasn’t supposed to cross the river, so I headed back to the road that I thought wasn’t my turn, and drove north.

The road to Dettifoss is considered to be gravel, but it’s the best gravel road I’ve ever been on, with no loose stones. The parking lot for Dettifoss soon came into view, I parked, and walked along the trail, amongst huge boulders, towards a stony ridge. I crested the hill, and Dettifoss roared before me. It’s a very simple waterfall, a straight drop of about 150 feet across a 300 foot wide gorge. The river runs pretty straight both before and after the drop, so it lacks the picturesque aspect of Godafoss or Gullfoss - instead it just pounds you with power. The water is a dirty grey from the lava it picks up across the valley.

A mile south (ie, higher) of Dettifoss is Selfoss, a more interesting waterfall. It is horseshoe shaped, and because of the shape, you can’t get quite as close. It’s a lower falls, but there’s interesting scenery along the gorge. You can see the layers of lava and pillars of rock eroding out.

As usual, time went by in double time, and the time to get on the road came much too quickly. I had the idea that I wanted to follow the river north, because there was supposed to be some good scenery along the way. The road, unfortunately, wasn’t much more than a track, and I had images of getting my small, low, rental car stuck in the absolute middle of nowhere. However, a couple of other cars preceded me, and another came along behind, so going that way became more viable. I really didn’t want to double back. I drove for about an hour to cover the 30 miles to the coastal highway, but didn’t see any worthwhile scenery - a few nice sights, for sure, but nothing dramatic. I found out later that I would have had to turn east when I came to the coastal highway, and I would have found the scenery I sought, at a place called Ásbyrgi.

Turning west onto Highway 85, I drove across a bridge and then headed north into terrain that reminded me of the Cape Breton Highlands. Along the coast there are some great rolling hills going down to the sea. There are also relatively few guardrails. Husavik is the major town on this road, and it has probably three claims to fame. It was a whaling town at one time, until they realised they could make more money from tourists on whale watching trips. They have an excellent whale (and to a slight degree, whaling) museum. And, they have a penis museum, where they have a large collection from various species. I had rather limited time, and it was already getting late, so I went to the whale museum.

The Whale Museum has a collection of whale skeletons from a wide variety of species. Interestingly, they have the stories on where each skeleton was collected. Some of them are from whaling, but others were beached or otherwise met a semi-natural end. There is some good information about whale life cycle, and a small display on whaling. There’s a baleen display, and a narwhal tusk. It was well worth an hour, and the twelve dollars admission. I wandered around the harbour a bit, and then through the town. The harbour is beautiful, sitting below the town, and looking up into the centuries old buildings.

From Husavik, it was a straight drive back to Akureyri to catch the evening flight to Reykjavik. I boarded the same Fokker 50 I’d come out on, and we flew over central Iceland. The weather was clearer than it was on the way out, and I was able to spot some volcanoes and glaciers on the way. I settled into my much-too-nice-for-me hotel, close to the centre of Reykjavik, on one of the main streets.


Some photos here: http://bit.ly/yBKJSs