We woke up to find a river flowing just beside our cottage. We just loved all our cottages, but we didn’t get much time to enjoy the surroundings there, as we were moving from one place to another everyday. Nevertheless, waking up in the morning is quite an exciting thing just to see what is around our stay. We particularly loved this cottage as this was very big compared to others and it looked like a proper house instead of a cabin.

This animal skin on the top was the scariest part of this house!! I think this was Reindeer skin, we spotted this animal on the road yesterday which looked like a bigger version of the deer.

We started our journey to Mývatn geothermal area. Today’s journey would be mostly around volcanoes and lava.

Just before entering the Mývatn area, we took a detour to visit Dettifoss, the most powerful waterfall in Europe.

The landscapes on the way to Dettifoss, looked amazing, like the surface of the moon.

We could have hiked a little bit to go near the waterfall, but it was too windy and cold there, that we just saw it from a distance and came back.

We then moved on to Hverir, a geothermal spot, located at the foot of the Namafjall volcanic mountain.

The geothermal area has a lot of fumaroles, large mud pools, steam vents and red barren landscapes. It gave us a feel of being on a different planet, may be Mars, the Red Planet 🙂

There were a lot of hiking paths there with marked trails and warnings around. As soon as we stepped out there, we could get a strong sulphur smell (from the mud pots), which was a little unpleasant to bear, but we just managed it and got used to that smell in sometime. The excitement dominated the unpleasant smell of the place :P.

The mud pools looked so dangerous with bubbling hot water.

The steam vents continuously generated fumes of sulphur around. Luckily, the strong cold winds around pushed these fumes away from us quickly.

There were a lot of steam vents and mud pools in that region, along the trekking path. The barren landscape added more super-natural feeling to the place.

During the late medieval times, half of the sulphur Europe needed to fuel it’s increasingly gun powered wars, was mined here.

After spending some time here going around all the vents, we started our journey to Grjótagjá Cave.

Grjótagjá is a small lava cave, famous for a beautiful geothermal hot spring inside. People used to bathe here earlier till 1970’s, but due to increase in temperature of water  because of multiple volcanic eruptions around, it is not used for bathing and it is just kept open for visitors to look at it.

From here, we moved on to Dimmuborgir lava fields. We could see a lot of small plants with fall colors from this location, with Myvatn lake behind.

Dimmuborgir means Dark fortress. It contains a very large area of unusually shaped lava formations. It looked like we stepped into a fairy tale.

There were several cave like structures in between and the formations looked so unique and special.

From there, we moved on to Myvatn Nature Baths (geothermal swimming pool) to spend some time in the geothermal pool. Finally after coming to Iceland, we got a chance to step inside water in the hot pool. We saw a lot of tourists at that place. It is similar to the Blue Lagoon near Reykjavík. It has an entry cost of 5000 ISK per person.

The Mývatn Nature Baths are centred around a large lagoon, which has a temperature of about 36 to 40 degrees Celsius (97 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit). The water here contained lot of minerals which is supposed to be good for respiratory and skin problems.

Iceland has a lot of natural hot springs and bathing in hot springs has long been a part of  Icelandic culture. The hot springs have also been dubbed by some publications as Iceland’s secret to happiness, making Iceland one of the happiest countries in the world.

There was a big store there, which sells various skin related creams and products. We spent around an hour in the pool. It was so calming to spend time in a hot pool amidst cold winds. We felt very relaxed and rejuvenated by the time we came out of that pool.

We started our journey to Ólafsfjörður, one of the northern-most towns of Iceland for our night stay. We planned to stay there for two days.

On the way, we crossed Akureyri, the second largest city in Iceland. It looked so vibrant and lively. We planned to visit this place tomorrow.

After crossing Akureyri, there was a 3km big tunnel to Ólafsfjörður and as soon as we crossed that, we reached the town.

A very long and exciting day!!  The two things that changed as we came to North are the temperature and the winds, it felt much more colder and winds were stronger.