ICELAND EDITED: DAY FIVE

Day Five began where Day Four ended, on the shore of Lake Mytatn. Although our trip was a guided tour one of the great things about was that Anna our guide and Sigi our driver really worked hard to give us the best experience that they could. Because we were experiencing such great weather we make an unscheduled trek to Yrrifloi bay, a shallow bay that was home to many kinds of ducks and old lava rock well covered in vegatation

From this tranquil lake setting we travelled into some truly dramatic Icelandic landscapes. Hverfell is a black cinder cone formed by a massive volcanic explosion some 2500 years ago. There was melt water in the middle of it and some fringes of snow. The snow appears dirty, that's from the ash of recent volcanic activity.

Our next stop was Leirhnjukur, a long valley in the Krafla volcano, essentially a volcanic cone that collapsed in on itself thousands of years ago. This was where they brought the Apollo astronauts to train for the Moon

It is a spectacular landscape with black lava verging on golden sand overseen by a high hard blue sky. There are wooden boardwalks that snail through the area and it's advised that you stick them, in some areas if you stepped off, you could actually burn your feet from the geothermal activity

Next we were on to Namafjall Hverir (rolls right off the tongue doesn't it) an area with some incredible boiling mud pots and natural rock cones where steam hissed out of in long streams

There is sulphur wafting out of these pots, so the entire place was filled with that rotten egg smell. It's a smell you get used to in Iceland though our guide told us that this spot was so potent even Icelanders found it difficult to take

After we got a good glimpse, and a good whiff, of one of Iceland's versions of Hel, we made our way to Vatnajokull National Park. The glacier for which the park is named is the largest ice cap in Europe and covers more than 8% of Iceland. We would go up the glacier on a later trip but today we had another objective in mind.

We got to experience one of the great thrills of Iceland, a variety of geographical features so rich that they can combine in sometimes shocking fashion. Siggi drove us to this amazing canyon area, bleak basalt and other volcanic rocks really did seem like it could belong on the Moon

As we made our way through this bleak landscape the last thing we expected to come across was not one, but three major waterfalls

The waterfall that we visited was Dettifoss, the most powerful waterfall in Europe. More water pours across these falls than any other in Europe, at high flow about 500 cubic meters of water per second that smashed down into a miniature Grand Canyon

Awesome is a word I overuse when describing Iceland but this place was more than worthy of it. To just stand there and watch that incredible volume of water flowing over this 50 meter tall drop was pretty astounding. The sound was huge and the mist that if flung into the narrow canyon towered higher than the falls themselves

The colour of the water was almost a dun grey, shaded by the vast amount of silt resulting from a volcano eruption just a couple of weeks before we arrived. With my luck, how that eruption didn't happen while we there, I'll never understand

Iceland is a country of  contrasts. Giant volcanic calderas that exist beside long deep fjords fringed by the greenest vallies you've ever seen that in turn border arid rocky canyons that lead to tonnes of pouring water.

In Iceland though, that no matter where you go will find two things: Waterfalls ..

... and churches

Note about the video: Normally I post the videos in HD but this was a big day for us and by the time I finished the edit, the size of the video file was more than twice what Vimeo can handle, so I'm posting the SD version instead