This was both the best and worst day of the trip. We started out wonderfully with a lot of time in my new favorite town, Seyðisfjörður, where I finished the Iceland Day 2.2 post in the Hotel Aldan restaurant and had my first taste of reindeer, which was delicious. We kayaked for a couple of hours and met Mr. Hlynur Oddsson, our guide (the kayak guy, as informed by a waitress at Hotel Aldan) who was as kind and as funny as he was educational. Mr. Chokkattu was also able to wash our car for free, which is good because our little 2×4 was definitely begging to get clean after being covered in mud and dust from our drive. We also got to sing in Tvisongur, which we were told means “Double song/singing” and Mr. Chokkattu lent his lovely bass to the environment and I pittered out my minimally trained alto as accompaniment.
Later on, we had a delicious dinner at the Skaftfell visitor’s center, which also housed some interesting local art I recommend checking out if you go. Our super sweet greeter/cashier/server forgot to save us a piece of some ginger bundt cake for dessert, but instead ladled us some fresh, hot apple crumble and didn’t charge us for it. This was also the first time we really noticed the amount of rainbows, specifically drawn on the cheeks of some of our servers. For a while we couldn’t tell if it was a gay pride symbol or they just really liked rainbows because Iceland has a ton of them, but we were later informed when we were back in Reykjavik that it was definitely for gay pride. Gay pride week in Iceland, Reykjavik specifically, happens around the second week of August, which, obviously, is when we visited, and though we seem to have missed any outright celebrations, we did see lots, and lots of rainbow flags.
Moving on to the more unfortunate part of the day, which in retrospect was more my fault than I care to admit, we ran out of gas. And we didn’t run out of gas because we just didn’t stop to get any, we ran out of gas because we used a faulty pump and I convinced Mr. Chokkattu that it was a car glitch and that it wouldn’t be a big deal until the light started blinking on the way to Dettifoss (which has absolutely crap roads leading to it.)
We got to Dettifoss fine, and afterwards we two several groups of very nice people, one also facing car problems with a flat tire, who led us to the nearest gas station in Asbergi where we were able to get gas, and the group with the flat was able to replace it. We also met two young Icelandic women who convinced us to give Myvatn a chance the next day (and to skip the Askja Caldera) even though our schedule had to be changed because of our car issues.
Our time at Dettifoss was unfortunately plagued with worry, but it is a beautiful and mighty waterfall, and the rocky terrain is a hard contrast to the previous waterfalls that were full of greenery. Definitely watch out for those roads though; the group with the flat tire had theirs pop on the way to the waterfall.
Pomelo girl thoughts 