Akureyri and The Diamond Circle

We docked in the north Icelandic town of Akureyri yesterday to swap out some crew, and I got to enjoy two days in Iceland to recalibrate for round two of the mackerel tokt. Akureyri is the second largest city in Iceland with a population of 18000.

To kick off my layover in Iceland, my co-worker Adam and I decided to take advantage of the great weather and headed up the local mountain called Súlur. It towers 1200m above sea level and the hike was approximately 6 miles round trip. We decided to take a taxi to a parking lot at the start of the hike to save a little time. The terrain transitioned from grass to large rocks and finally to basalt gavel at the top. We held a good pace and got to the top in less than 90 minutes. At the top we slammed down a Snickers bar before running back down. It was a fantastic hike and we were proud of completing the trip in 2 hrs and 18 minutes when we were advised it would take 4 hours.





The next morning my other coworker (Merete) and I rented a car for a 12 hr road trip on one of the routes in north Iceland called "the Diamond Circle". Our first top on the route was Goðafoss, 45 minutes away from Akureyri. We had fun for over an hour taking photos and video of the waterfall before continuing the drive.

Lake Mývatn had the rest of the highlights on our trip, so we didn't have time to do the entire Diamond Circle route. Mývatn earned its name for the amount of flies that swarm in the summertime (mý in Icelandic, mygg in Norwegian). The highlights included pseudocraters, lava formations and geothermal areas with boiling mud pots. The weather was fine for the most part, just scattered showers and wind. I got back on the boat by 9PM to head out to sea for two more weeks.

Merete and I above Goðafoss


Pseudocraters

Dimmuborgir lava formations

Hverir hot pots/ geothermal area. Bad smell, but gorgeous!
Namafjall in the background.

Krafla volcano

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