Day 5 (June 24, 2025)

Well, I am a day behind! Which is kind of ironic, because the last two days have been the most “chill” days of the trip.

They haven’t really been that chill at all.

On day 5, we were quite tired from our day of glacier hiking and kayaking, so we decided to take it easy with a four mile hike into an amazing canyon. The four mile hike was our longest single activity of the trip so far. But I’ll get to that.

We started off the day in Egilsstaðir, which I did look up, and found it used to be a boarding school. Apparently back in the 50s and 60s, there were a number of boarding schools in the larger towns, where Icelanders would send their kids to be educated in the colder months of the year. During the summers, those kids would return to the family farms to work. Someone eventually had the idea that they could use these empty schools to make some money off of tourism in the summer. That idea end up being more profitable, so they eventually just made it into a hotel.

Anyway, we woke up, and went to Netto, the third major grocery store chain in Iceland. Netto had a surprising pastry selection. I’m not sure they were baked in house, but they were actually alright. My favorite was a caramel frosted donut that had caramel filling inside.

Once we were fed, our plan for the day was to look at more waterfalls, but again, we were super tired from going hard the past few days, so we didn’t want to burn ourselves out hiking up to the waterfalls for a closer look. So we chose a few waterfalls that we thought were relatively close to their parking lots, but unfortunately, we were quite wrong about that.

We started off going to Fardagafoss, which was about five minutes from our hotel. Or at least, the parking lot was. We could see the waterfall distantly from the parking lot, and opted not to hike up to it. We thought we’d have better luck at Hengifoss and Litlanesfoss, which were about half an hour away.

It was an even longer hike to those two, so we ended up driving back to Egilsstaðir to grab a coffee and get on the road to the thing we actually knew we wanted to do that day, Stuðlagil Canyon, which was fairly far out, and that drive was mostly on gravel roads.

Stuðlagil Canyon was the site of our four mile hike. It was a long walk along a mostly flat path, where you could kind of see into the canyon, but not well enough to be impressed. But we believed we’d find something amazing at the end, and we certainly were rewarded. Stuðlagil Canyon was my favorite thing we’ve seen so far on the trip. It’s a canyon where the walls are made up of these hexagonal basalt columns, which are formed when lava cools quickly (thanks PlanetGeo Podcast for the knowledge). At the end of the trail, we were able to climb down into the canyon and get some photos that are frankly nothing short of amazing, and I can’t wait to share those with everyone.

We then drove to Dettifoss, which is apparently the second most powerful waterfall in Europe, and the second largest waterfall in Iceland (but first in my heart (not really that actually goes to Skogafoss I think but we’ll keep that quiet)). It was a truly massive waterfall, and like most things here, has to be seen to be believed.

We then continued on to our destination for the night, Húsavík. Húsavík is a really cute town, and was a major location used in the Eurovision movie with Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams from 2020 (we watched the movie after being in Húsavík though). I think Húsavík was my favorite town we’ve been to so far, it had a lot of charm to it, even though there wasn’t much to it. We had dinner at a popular local restaurant called Naustið. Naustið was our favorite meal of the trip so far. We had a burger and fish and chips, as well as an Icelandic fish stew. I know burgers and fish and chips don’t sound that amazing, but we’ve had a real rough go with the food here in Iceland, and even with that, I felt these dishes were pretty well done. Also, fish and chips can be found almost everywhere in Iceland, but they actually put some work into making it stand out.

Finally, we went just a few minutes outside of Húsavík proper for tonight’s bed, which was at Saltvik Farm Guesthouse. Owned by the Saltvik family, the farm is apparently well-regarded for their horseback tours of Iceland, and recently converted an old cattle barn of there’s into a guesthouse with about 7 rooms. We liked Saltvik more than any other place we’ve stayed so far on the trip. The room was pretty spacious and really comfortable, and we had a great view of the water from our window. It was also well out of the way, and though Iceland is fairly quiet as a whole, Saltvik Farm felt like a whole different level of peaceful. If you’re ever going to Húsavík and need a place to stay, we’d recommend looking them up. We crashed pretty easily on the farm, and were happy to end our day there.