Day 10-11: Around Lake Myvatn

An aside: the English name, "Lake Myvatn" is redundant - the word for lake or water in Icelandic is "vatn". "My" means midge, and refers to a fly that teems in this rich lake.  Luckily, the midges were not out in force during our stay.  Perhaps the very cold north wind that blew during the two days we were there kept them in their midge-houses.  The temperature hovered in the low 40's that day and the wind was really howling at the top of a crater that we hiked, so we were wishing we had stayed in our midge-houses too. Oh, and did we mention the rain?

Myvatn lies atop another geologic hotspot, which has created many of its interesting features: the Hverfell crater, the tortured lava formations of Dimmuborgir, Asbyrgi, and the "pseudocraters" formed by subsurface water exploding through a lava flow.  Yup, we enjoyed them all.

  

After having hiked around all of these places in the cold wind, we treated ourselves to a dip in Myvatn's version of the "Blue Lagoon" thermal baths (Reykjavik's Blue Lagoon was made famous when it appeared in one of the seasons of "The Amazing Race" TV show).

Besides the midges, Myvatn teems with birdlife.  We were successful in our "hunt" of the elusive and beautiful Harlequin Duck, which breeds in this area.  With Oskar's help, other birds sighted were Barrow's Goldeneye, eiders and other ducks. We saw these birds at a distance, but couldn't get any decent photos of them. Conveniently enough, we could see a variety of birds just outside our hotel vindow. Here's the view from the balcony.

Here are some of the more common birds we encountered during our trip. From left to right, Red Shank, Fullmar, Kittywake. We also saw lots of elegant Arctic Terns, Snipes, Phallaropes, Black Faced Gulls, and of course Puffins.  

Perhaps its most interesting denizens (to us, anyway), are what is known as marimo balls.  These are baseball-sized spheres of green algae that occur only here and in one lake in Japan.  The algae balls migrate from deep water to near the surface daily to perform photosynthesis.  When the sun disappears, they sink back to the depths.  We didn't see any in the wild, but we spotted some in an aquarium at a local restaurant.  We were so taken with the little buggers that our only souvenir purchase of the entire trip was a wool felt version.

Another only-in-Myvatn purchase was some bread that they call hverabraud (hot spring bread) which is baked in old washing machine drums buried underground and heated geothermally.  It was sweet and very dense, but we had to try it.

Images and text (c) 2005 Pete Zivkov