Welcome to day 6! Are you ready for more waterfalls? Of course, you are!
We decided to sleep in today and woke up later than usual at around 10 am. We ate a simple breakfast and then hopped back on the road.
Our first stop of the day was Dettifoss. It was only about a 30-minute drive north of our campsite, and a quick 10-minute hike. Dettifoss is said to be the most powerful waterfall in Europe or maybe 2nd, there seem to be conflicting claims, but oh boy can you feel its power. Fans of the movie Prometheus might recognize the waterfall since it was featured in the movie! I was pretty blown away by its power and I’ve been to Niagara falls, this one just seemed so powerful but it could be because we were so close.
A quick 1km upstream is Selfoss, another beautiful waterfall but definitely nowhere near as big and powerful as Dettifoss. Perhaps if we had visited Selfoss first and worked our way up, we wouldn’t have been more impressed.
Note that these are views from the west side of the falls. You can also view them from the east side. If we had more time or woke up early, we probably would have driven further north to Ásbyrgi canyon and then looped around to the east side. Nonetheless, we decided to head to our next destination to save some time.
From Selfoss, it was about a two-hour drive to Stuðlagil canyon and half an hour of it is spent on a dirt road. Unfortunately, we lost a lot of time because google maps brought us to the west side viewpoint and you can’t access the canyon from the west side. You have to find the east side parking lot (<— You can click here. I’ll also have the google maps link below) and then walk a few miles to the canyon itself. I think the hike took close to an hour and by the time we got everything sorted out, it was almost 6pm before we finally reached the bottom of the canyon. The result was so worth it though. I think this was the most picturesque and unique canyon I’ve ever seen. The canyon is so special because it contains the largest number of basalt rock columns in Iceland. The blue-green river that runs through it is so beautiful, and COLD! If you plan on jumping in like I did, just know that it’s colder than jumping in lake Michigan in late spring/early summer.
After fun times in the canyon, we decided to head west to the nearest city, Egilsstaðir. It was about an hour’s drive and we decided to stop in town to gas up and grab some dinner at Askur Pizza. Gas is pretty expensive in Iceland. Luckily our small diesel camper van is pretty good on gas so we’ve only had to fill up twice so far on our trip.
At this point, we could have stayed in town but we weren’t super tired yet so we decided to head to Borgarfjörður Eystri which was about an hour northeast, and stay there for the night since google maps suggested that there was a good puffin viewpoint there. The drive there was pretty amazing since you have to go through a mountain so near the top, we were above the clouds. We decided to stop the car and just watch the clouds roll by for about half an hour before arriving at our final destination and sleeping for the night at the campsite in Borgarfjörður Eystri.
That’s it for today! See you tomorrow!