On day 4, the end destination of the day was Akureyri, which is the second largest city in Iceland. You can see from the picture above that it was situated in the Eyjafjörður Fjord. It must be so magical to live in a city like this! This day, we drove about 525km / 325 miles, through the beautiful east fjords to the northern part of Iceland. The weather was a little cloudy but that gave us another feel of the fjords.
This is the longest distance we travelled in a single day, therefore we had to adjust our originally very aggressive plan to skip the Hengifoss and the Ásbyrgi Canyon to make it to Akureyri by the end of the day. There are just too many things to see!!!
Dettifoss & Selfoss
This is definitely not easy to get to. I was so happy that we insisted getting a 4 wheel drive for the trip, even without the snow! We drove 28km of dirt road off the ring road and even with a relatively high clearance AWD, I was still quite worried along the way that we won’t make it, but we DID! Absolutely worth the drive, both waterfalls were breathtaking. Dettifoss is very powerful, but if you walk a little further, you will reach the Selfoss, which I think it is quite unique, one of the widest waterfalls I have seen in Iceland. It’s almost like the land cracked open and let the water flow through.
Mývatn - Krafla
This is basically a geothermal region in Iceland. On the way there, you can see steam coming out left and right, it Is pretty cool. Icelanders also take advantage of the natural geothermal energy to generate power as you can see some power stations there. We did not have too much time to explore the area, so we just walked around the Víti Maar (means “crater of hell” in Icelandic), a volcanic crater. Really liking the contrast of ice and fire in Iceland.
Mývatn - Grjótagjá Cave
This is a small lava cave with a thermal spring inside. This cave was used for bathing back in the 18th century. There are still lot of places that is worth visiting in the diamond circle in the Northern Iceland, like Ásbyrgi canyon, lake Mývatn, etc., but due to limited time, we couldn’t do everything! :(
Goðafoss
This is one of the most beautiful waterfalls! The name “waterfalls of the God” came from a story about a member of the Icelandic parliament (Alþingi) in ~1000 AD. He threw away his Pegan statues into the waterfall as part of his conversion to Christianity.
Akureyri
Our last stop of the day is the second largest city in Iceland, Akureyri! We finally had a proper meal after days of cup noodles and campers’ meals. We walked around the city a little bit and saw some interesting architecture. Our journey continued after a good night’s rest here :)
