Friday 1 July 2011

Third part of the third day.


Víti crater lake in panorama. Still the third day, oh yeah. See those little dots on top of the mountain, they're people, and that's where we climbed to take those photos.


Driving down the road from Víti. I'm not sure what that factory does but a good guess is "hot water from the ground".


Some riders have more epic routes than others.


Then we visited a small-ish national park by the lake. This is where we really found out about the name of Mývatn (= mosquito lake). Previously we had been to higher, dryer ground which doesn't meet their breeding demands but thickets by lakes... whooo boyyyy...


This place had many paths spreading out at all direction from the main path, lovely patches of trees, and an absolute rule that you had to stay on the marked path.


A view from the edge of the bay. Mývatn is large but surprisingly shallow lake and apparently good for fishing trout and salmon.


The other side. The little Finn in me was beside herself at seeing a scenery like this. I mean look at it, remove that mountain and add trees and it's just like home...


See, real actual trees! Spruces, even! ;^;


So pretty! But it was absolutely teeming with mosquitoes.


A lonely mail box in the middle of nowhere.


Bird!


Moar bird!


This is a place where you can see those famous rock formations that are on every single Mývatn postcard. It's not a long walk but prepare for them mosquitoes.


I'm not sure how these came to be... I know I read about it but I can't quite remember...


In any case they're so alien and strange and beautiful I could have stayed there watching them all day.


Moar. Btw there is a reason I would never have been able to spend a day there, let alone full five minutes. The mosquitoes. 


Every step sent up hundreds of them, and eventually we even ran to get away from them. However, I did manage some fairly nice photos of the rock formations so our bravery wasn't for nothing!


Birds! Shut up I like birds!!


BIRDS!


Strange hill formations. They're like round dents in the ground, or like tiny craters that are completely overgrown.


There's a very popular walking route to them, and it's even possible to walk around the whole lake if you're up to it. We weren't, not after walking through Dimmuborgir, Hot Springs, Hell, National park, Rock formations area etc. but I'm sure it would have been awesome if we had had any strength left.


There's a cute little cafe near the start and end of the route where we had meat soup and a hamburger. I can happily recommend the place, and their meat soup (unless you don't like the taste of lamb).


Afterwards, queuing for the loo I started randomly chatting with an American tourist lady who had just been to Helsinki a couple of weeks ago and told me stories of how beautiful the city was and how the weather was sunny etc. and I had one of the worst hits of longing for home I've had since I moved here. Helsinki is my home, I was born there and have lived there perhaps the longest in my life.


Oh well. I guess Iceland isn't such a bad place to live in either.
(If it only had more trees...)

10 comments:

  1. Aren't there mosquitoes in Finland? It looks pretty watery on maps.

    Iceland is gorgeous. Never been there, never wanted to go there, never knew anything about it other than that's where Icelandic horses come from. Just today I found out it's gorgeous.

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  2. We have plenty of mosquitoes, enough to host a yearly mosquito killing championship, but Mývatn was still far worse than anything I have ever experienced before. The amount of them was unreal - they were like a thin curtain hovering midair. Nothing I have ever seen before could have prepared me for that. -.-

    I agree, Iceland indeed is gorgeous. For some reason I hadn't found this country either until a couple of years ago, even though travelling between the Nordic countries is made as easy as it can possibly get. Now I'm really happy to live here! :)

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  3. Mosquito killing! Both weirder and more practical than wife carrying. Thanks for posting the pictures! Just realized there were a few more posts I hadn't looked at.

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  4. I disagree! Wife carrying is a tried and tested traditional way of moving wife from point A to point B and there might be her weight of beer in it too if you win! :DDDDD
    For more entries like these, just click the travelling -tag. :) Less talk about street fashions, more talk about birds!

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  5. Sadly, I have no wife. I'd totally be down with dressing my husband up as one for beer, though. Or, you know, in general. But I doubt I'd get very far carrying him. And I doubt he could be motivated to carry me for beer, dangit.

    It is now time for me to research Finnish beer!

    Travelling, of course! I will do that. Loli isn't really my thing. Gotta admit some of those dresses are fabulous, though. I love the blue and white one!

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  6. I you would ever visit Finland I would recommend a restaurant called Teerenpeli. They own a brewery and make some of the best beers I've ever tried. Another place worth visiting is called Harald, a viking style restaurant. Their cinnamon- and tar (I'm not kidding) beers are dellisshusss!

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  7. Cinnamon and... tar? What's that like? Tar? O.o

    I'm trying to think of a good excuse to visit Finland! ...In the summer, and maybe I have to bring my own food. ;-) And then I'd have a good reason to learn Finnish! Except that has a reputation for being difficult and maybe impossible for adults to learn.

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  8. They're luckily two different types of beer, sorry I'm being confusing about it. :D Tar is like - tar tastes like it smells like. Perhaps an acquired taste, I'm not certain, so it might be best sampled in some other form first. F.ex. in tar flavoured candy or ice cream.

    Finnish is not really as impossible as we Finns like to think it is. Ok, so we have a fair amount of cases (min. 14) but there are no genders or articles and the spelling is very straight-forward. Pronunciation is perhaps the worst bit but the beer might help there, no matter which flavour, and not so much in helping the foreigner gain better pronunciation as bringing the Finns to the same level of it.

    Ahem. Finnish is definitely easier than Icelandic! Just ask me, I could speak Finnish when I was three years old and now I'm over thirty and I'm still not fluent in Icelandic. D:

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  9. OK. Ok. when I think of tar, I'm usually thinking of coal tar, but this is pine tar, right? *hopes* I'd try it. Once, anyway. In ice cream. If that went well, maybe I'd try the beer. I'm all over that cinnamon beer, though.

    I don't have working speakers for this computer, so I don't really know what Finnish sounds like, except that it's pretty when sung. I looked at a pronunciation chart, but it didn't help much when I wasn't sure if the English examples were american English or not. Heh. So, better if I only try to speak it with drunk Finns...

    Ohhh, in that case, English must be the easiest language ever! Yours is excellent, BTW. Better than mine.. that's kind of depressing.

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  10. Pine tar! Pine tar! XD I didn't even know there are other types, boo me! XDDD As for English, I can only say I'm doing my best... and that I have lived in Birmingham, UK, once upon a time. :D

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