Think of the smelliest fart you have ever smelled (or dealt). Now mix that scent with more rotten eggs and meat. And make it warm. This must be what satan’s butthole smells like. If yesterday’s theme was wet things, today’s Iceland theme is smelly things. And yet, we still had fun!
After our full day yesterday, we slowly left our small house in Akureyri for the Eastfjords.
Along the way, we stopped at Lake Myvatn, formed by volcanic activity. The region generates a lot of power for iceland and is still very geothermically active. This means two things: the rocks are weird and it is very smelly due to all the sulphur fumes.
The drive around the lake feels like you are on another planet. Rocks jut up from every angle, pockmarked with holes from ancient lava flows. The vegetation is low to the ground where it does exist, and other areas are just flat dirt hills, ranging between black and brown and red.
Tourists naturally love this weird place. This has been the most crowded we have found anywhere outside of Reykjavik. Hisssss.
Our first stop was Dimmuborgir: weird lava rocks, and another lava flow rock named Kirkjan. We wove our way through tourists and took a longer trek to get to Kirkjan, through twisted spires of bubbled rocks and shrubs. This rock formation was a cave you could see through (and climb up into).
We also stopped at a cave someone had done up to look like the Yule Lads’ home. The Yule Lads are local spirits that play tricks on travelers, such as by stealing signs. Their lair featured many stolen signs and some fluffy furs. No lads in sight.
After Dimmuborgir, we stopped at the Game of Thrones cave sex cave (which is really called Grjótagjá). It was a small cave with a hot spring in it. The spring was used for bathing in the 1700s. Now, you can’t bathe in it or camp near it (both expressly forbidden by a sign), but you can bang wildlings in it (not forbidden by a sign). It was pretty cool. Or hot. As you will.
We rounded out our Myvatn day with a stop at the nature baths. They feature several pools of geothermically heated springwater. It was also geothermically scented: the whole place smelled very sulphuric. If you farted in there, you could definitely get away with it if your modus operandi was SBD. The water is pumped from the nearby power plants.
Before you enter the pools, you must take a shower. The lady at the desk was very clear with us – without your swimsuits. Because this is Europe, people don’t care that you are naked in the showers. It’s just a room with a bunch of hot spouts and soap on the wall. I saw some old lady titty. Rhett informed me that he did, indeed, see dongs.
Once you are through the shower gauntlet, you put on your bathing suit and quickly dash to the pools so you don’t freeze in the chilly Icelanic air. People who I presume were locals or at least scandinavian were actually sunbathing. I think the air temperature was about 45 degrees if you included the wind! How are they doing this thing? Why would you not just be in the water?
The water is a silty bright blue, and you can’t see anything about 18 inches below the water. The bottom of the pools is covered in rubber mats and small black rocks, and you would be none the wiser to the black rocks if you were just looking from the surface. The two pools were warm and coolish, and they also had hotter water in a small tub and a sauna. You could peer over the red martian plains from the edge of the coolest pool.
All while smelling the farty water.
Fortunately, the fart water smell doesn’t stick with you – it’s just in the fumes. After enjoying our soak, we headed out (quickly! cold air…) and jumped back into Bjuster for our final stop of the day: Hverir.
Hverir is a field filled with boiling mud pots, boiling water, and hissing columns of steam, all of which are very smelly. And not just sulphuric hot spring smelly, actually bad smelly. Smelly so bad that some people were running around with pinched noses.
From the red martian sand spring deposits of many colors. We of course caugh pokemon with a hellscape for a background and toured all of the boiling, gurgling, smelly pots. The sand in the pots combines with the acid in the pots and burbles up constantly, splashing mud nearby. Yes, we smell what the rock is cooking. It smells bad.
Despite the sink, it was definitely worth the visit. The nearby mountains were steaming, and there were warnings to not stray from the path or you would risk walking onto ground that’s about 80-100 degrees celsius. How is this on Earth? Only in Iceland…
We had our fill of smells and fled back to the car to drive the remaining few hours to Fáskrúðsfjörður, on the east coast in a fjord.
The scenic along the way grew more dramatic with each turn of the road as we drew closer to the fjords. Waterfalls cascaded from the peaks of the mountains around us. Along one road, we passed by a particularly stunning many-tiered waterfall cascading down the mountains.
We also saw a bajillion sheep, including one herd being moved along the road by a dude on a four wheeler. After a larger town before our fjord, we passed through a 6km-long two-way tunnel blasted straight through a mountain.
At last, we arrived in our air B&B, tucked up a hill and around some road construction. There is no internet here. We are forced to actually interact. Ah!
Tomorrow, we are exploring some nearby fjords and hopefully eating some reindeer 😀