What a day!
After breakfast in the dining room (great view of lake Mývatn), we headed off out. First to Höfði, a peninsula into the Lake. Mývatn was made following several lava flows overlapping each other – leaving lower areas of land that have now filled with water. So, lots of inlets and a very raggedy edge.
Höfði was on such, a great place for a wander, looking at bizarre formations from made by the lava flows. Next, it was on to Skútustaðagígar, with its ‘pseudo-craters’ – formed when hot lava flowed over wetlands.
Following lunch – the first time I’ve ever had lavabread (cooked in lava, apparently), lava tea (herbs that grow on lava) in a cafe with a window to the milking parlour, we headed for hell.
The Stora-Viti (aka Hell) is a crater on the Krafla Volcano. It’s a highly geothermal area – you have to drive through a powerplant (including under a vast pipe), to get to it. We arrived in a downpour – albeit a sunny one, so got to see a wonderful double rainbow. There’s a walk round the crater, at one point we dipped down to another smaller area, one that had remnants of the snow & boiling mud within 10m of each other.
Next, we headed to Námaskarð – for more steam, boiling mud, volcanoes. Finally, to the local hotsprings – the sort you can actually swim in.