East Iceland

Well, before we headed to the east fjords, we did one more waterfall and the famous Lake Mývatn area, which are in the north.

Dimmuborgir is a lava field near Lake Mývatn
It has troll caves (they left signs around of the “Yule Lads”) — I’m having lunch
And arches
The walking paths were well marked and easy to get around
And nice views

Lake Mývatn has geothermal fumaroles, bubbling pools, and nature lagoons — which we did not visit. But we did walk around the lake itself. There’a a ton of birds (and bugs) around.

Yeah it was a bit overcast and cold around the lake
I’m surprised the birds aren’t more obvious in the water — they were really loud but shy! The flew to another area when we showed up
There was actually a house in the woods around the lake with narrow paths and a weird tree

Dettifoss is Iceland’s most powerful waterfall, located in Vatnajökull National Park. It’s not the prettiest but was intense.

Things were still frozen and the patterns of the mist that refroze on the side were cooler looking than the falls
It’s not directly on the Ring Road and there’s a bit of a walk to the falls
Selfoss is a smaller waterfall that feeds into Dettifoss — a short walk away

Afterward we drove a few hours to the east side. We went through a mountain pass that was pretty scary — winding switchbacks going up and seriously snowy roads across the mountain to get to Seyðisfjörður. In fact, there was a winter storm the next day that blocked a few of the roads we took. Good thing we just missed the bad parts of the storm (hard to believe it was May 4!).

Seriously. All snow on the way from
Egilsstaðir to Seyðisfjörður
(These were taken from the car)
Seyðisfjörður has another cute rainbow road and I realized — I didn’t take pics of most of the adorable traditional Iceland churches which usually have bright colored roofs — this may be my only one
Once we got to the east fjords the weather was way better. There were many more waterfalls, fjords, boats and mountains
We stopped for a quick aperitif before heading to dinner at the other bar/restaurant in town

We started Day 5 going back on the snowy road to Egilsstaðir and it was actually snowing. We followed a snow plough, thankfully, and the road got a bit dicey in a few areas. It was a good thing we got out relatively early (for us — before 10!) and also that Luca is a very good driver.

You can see the plough up ahead though the snow coming down isn’t showing in the photos – at one point it was almost a whiteout

After the snowy pass, some of the roads were closed in the north that we’d just taken, but our southern direction was good. There were a lot of tunnels too to get through the mountain passes.

The east fjords area has really diverse land — black sand, basalt cliffs, glacier carved hills, wheat colored grasses (as well occasionally some green grass), and of course the sea
It was warmer but still windy

We went to a few glacier parks that evening as we wound our way down to the southeast and south parts of the island but I’ll put them all in the next blog.

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