With over 500 kilometers to be covered in one day, this was by far the longest leg in our trip. Accordingly, we planned on leaving Hofn around 8 am in order to make it to Husavik by a decent hour. Plans never work as they should, and by the time we were actually able to leave it was close to 9 am.
Travelling along the Easter edge of the country, one encounters a lot of nothing. Huge expanses with no towns, no houses, no farms, and very few cars. Makes one feel very alone, and a little worried about what would happen if we had car problems. But don't worry, they Icelanders have a way of dealing with that. As their roads climb up the mountains, with sheer drops along the side, they make sure the roads have no curb, and guard-rails. This way, if something happens you will meet with suddent death and no need to worry about how to get help. They do make up for that by putting pretty waterfalls all along the way; and swans, lots and lots of wild swans. So if you die, at least you get to die with a beautiful view.
There weren't many stops along the way. We refueled in Stodvarfjordur and then went on to Eglisstadir, the fastest growing town in Iceland. It was our first encounter with an actual town in a while, and it seemed big. We had one stop there, to visit what was billed as Iceland's equivalent of Loch Ness, ????. It was a lake. Pretty, but just a lake.
Back on the road we kept travelling north, until we hit our first actual, real, bona-fide attraction, Dettifoss. This is, as expected, another waterfall, billed as the biggest in Europe by volume. Getting there meant walking for about 1/2 mile through trails meandering around huge lava rocks, with no waterfall in sight until you hit a bend and find yourself looking down upon it. A beautiful spectacle indeed and well worth the hike. It was also a very polite waterfall, and chose not to dampen us as we walked around admiring it from different heights and angles.
Back in the car, we decided to head for our hotel in Husavik, as it had been a long day and we were tired. Following the GPS to the hotel took us through our first long stretch of gravel road, an almost straight line going up and down hills, some of it steep enough to make me wonder if our 2-wheel drive car would be able to make it back this way. After about ten kilometers of this we were back on gentle paved roads and soon found ourselves at our hotel where we were able to check-in without a problem. There was an interesting quirk, though: this hotel was part of the chain where we had spent the previous night; in the previous hotel the reading lights had no bulbs, in this one we had no reading lights at all.
We went out in search of dinner and tickets for whale and puffin watching the next day and found both at the same place. We talked to the owner, who seems to be the local entrepeneur. He owned a restaurant, a coffee house, an ice-cream parlour and the whale watching tour company. And if you bought the tickets with him, you got a 10% discount at his eateries. A nice dinner of cod, and we were retired for the night, ready for the next day's adventures.
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