Day 6 - Akureyri, Husavik, Myvatn

This morning we got up at 6:30am as we had to catch a flight to Akureyri, northern Iceland at 8:30am.  After a quick breakfast and a chat with a rather verbose taxi driver, we arrived at Reykjavik airport with time to spare.  We almost caught the wrong plane, the person at the counter had cleared us when she spotted my ticket.  Good thing too, we would've ended up at the Vestmannaeyjar (westman) islands which is far off from where we wanted to be.

What's Akureyri like?  Well we left Reykjavik with this plane...

Which ended up like this...

Yes it's snowing in Akureyri.  Almost looks like a different country.  Our plane was very small and the flight to Akureyri had some incredible views.  We had some coffee on the plane which was nice as breakfast was rushed.

Here's a picture of what I took from the plane.

We arrived at about 9:30am, got our jeep (free upgrade, which is what we needed!) and drove to the city.

Our jeep.

Akureyri is a lot smaller than Reykjavik.  Here's a short video of me walking in the snow in the central area.  Quicktime is required.

It was freezing!
Walking in Akureyri

We had some coffee and cake, stopped over in the bank, went to the Viking souvenir shop where I purchased a hand knitted icelandic made beanie and souvenir pin.

After that we took the jeep and drove to Husavik which is a northern town near the coast.  It was a bit confusing at first but we got our bearings right.  It was a long drive and there was a lot of snow and incredibly pretty scenery. Almost like completely different country compared to Reykjavik. It's the first time we have seen this much snow!

Some snapshots on the way to Husavik.

Arriving at Husavik we were going to check out the Icelandic Phallological Museum (yes, very interesting I know, a museum of animal penises!). But it was shut unfortunately.

Husavik photos.  This photo was taken near the boats.  Lots of fishing boats here.

Downtown Husavik.

Lauren's never seen before "rocket launcher", guess where this was taken?  Worth the drive I think.

The "special" museum.

There was a whale museum but that was shut too, seems like museums here are shut during winter, so we ended up getting some groceries, toilet break then headed towards Myvatn a town to the south of Husavik where we will spend the night.

Going off a random tangent, Lauren is having much fun .. driving. She is a bit scared actually. At times the road literally looks like a white sheet of paper. Visibility at zero!

At times this is what we had to put up with.  Driving from Husavik to Myvatn for kilometres and kilometres.

Checkout this video too.  Quicktime required.  It's very very awesome and yet scary at the same time.
Where's anybody?

This is what our jeep said very often.   Check out outside temperature!

We finally made it Myvatn just before night.  Good thing too, the visibility is pretty bad.

About an hour ago one of the hotel workers told us that the Aurora Borealis (northern lights) were here, we caught a glimpse, not a lot but a glimpse, probably a few minutes.  My camera caught a lot more.  There's some light here so it's hard to see the lights but we should be able to get better views within the coming days and possibly next few hours.

Here's what my camera caught, I had to set the shutter speed to 60 seconds.  Note that I was not able to see this without the camera, by the time I had set up the camera I could not see the lights.

Expect more in the coming days!

Dinner was boiled steam trout which was excellent.  I feel like I'm on another planet and civilisation seems eons away.