iceland: day 6

today was AGONIZINGLY cold.  cold in ways i can’t describe.  we awoke to snow in myvatn and despite our worries about driving, headed out to complete our scheduled itinerary for the day.

we drove down a sketchy gravel road for about 20km to reach the infamous detifoss, iceland’s largest waterfall.  we also saw selfoss, the waterfall featured in the video above.  the hike to selfoss was definitely pretty treacherous with the wind blowing full-speed and hail/snow hitting our faces.  we made it, however, and the weather calmed just as we arrived and we were treated to a pretty incredible view of the falls.

after our hike and the harrowing drive, we were pretty drained.  we stopped for lunch at asbyrgi.  the man who operated the store served us pylsurs (hot dogs) and hot chocolate.  in the corner, his wife was watching tv and knitting icelandic wool sweaters by hand.  it just so happened that she had just finished a black one with grey accents and it was my size exactly.  i took that as fate and bought it right then.  it’s not every day you get to meet the person who made your sweater.  i thanked them both and off we went.

we arrived at asbyrgi a few minutes later.  asbyrgi is a beautiful canyon and featured as one of the locations of a show sigur ros played in their documentary film heima (one of the inspirations for this trip in the first place).  it was raining pretty steadily, and after our craziness at detifoss, we thought it might be best to stay in the car and continue drying out.  we drove around though and took some marvelous pictures of the canyon while we were there.

we then headed back to myvatn.  our first stop in myvatn was dimmuborgir, the most heavy metal place in iceland.  there are crazy lava formations all over the place and it looks like a great place to worship satan, which is what clayton and i did for about thirty minutes.  we took as many pictures as we could, looking as “metal” as possible in front of ridiculous lava formations.

up next, the myvatn nature baths part 2!