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withabackpackandcamera · 3 years

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June 30th, 2021

Day 5: A Day in Myvatn… And A Night in Myvatn…

Having a home base in Akureyri the last few days was amazing. It’s always so nice to be able to stay somewhere for more than just a night. You get to spread out, get comfortable, drive less, and not have to keep moving your stuff. So this morning, it was slightly disappointing to have to pack all of our stuff again and pack the car for the long road trip ahead to Seyðisfjörður, where we’d only be staying for a single night before packing up and leaving again. But before leaving Akureyri, the family and I walked downtown to purchase some pastries and baked goods for the road from Kristjan’s Bakari. We briefly walked through downtown and took some photos before we turned back toward the house to grab the car and start our very full travel day.

The first stop on our itinerary for the day was the Myvatn geothermal area, a place I had visited very briefly the last time I drove around the entire Ring Road. We stopped by the pseudocraters at Skútustaðagígar and briefly hiked in to see the windy views from there before driving on and making quick pit stops at the Myvatn Panoramic Viewpoint and Dimmuborgir. At Dimmuborgir, we actually left the car for a short stroll down a paved walkway through the lava rock formations before circling back out to the parking lot to continue our drive.

Next, we accidentally drove out to Hverfjall, an old cone volcano, because the GPS led us there thinking the area was the stop for Grjótagjá, a hot spring cave that is famous for some love/sex scene in Game of Thrones (which I have never seen). But after finding the right location for Grjótagjá, we turned out of the Hverfjall area (without hiking or doing anything memorable) and drove over to the original destination of the hot spring cave. The Grjótagjá cave was a pretty neat area to see. The cave was dark but had lots of little cracks for lights to seep through. The scene created by the incoming streams of light in conjunction with the blue-appearing spring water in the cave was pretty cool. Minh and I spent some time here trying to take photos of the cave but gave up before long as all the photos started to look the same.

As we approached the mountain pass out of the Myvatn area, I took my family over to the Myvatn Nature Baths to give them a brief window tour of the bathing area that I enjoyed with some friends back in 2017. Because we were short on time and no one was particularly excited about paying to jump into a hot spring, we decided to skip soaking in a hot bath this trip and reconsider it again if we had time later on during the trip. But it was a good thing we didn’t bathe today because the wind was crazy and that would’ve made for a subpar bathing experience.

After we left the Myvatn Nature Baths, we made one last geothermal stop at the Námaskarð Geothermal Area, an rotten-egg-smelling area well known for its geothermal activity expressed in the forms of colorful landscapes, bubbling mud, and natural vents of sulfuric gases. Because it was so ridiculously windy and sandy in this area, we didn’t stay for very long. At first, the family wanted to skip the area and move on with our trip given the wind conditions. However, because of the uniqueness of the site, I made a very real effort to get Cynthia and my dad out of the car to quickly view the area. And I was successful in doing so. With the wind howling and throwing sand and dust everywhere, we quickly ran through the area as we shielded ourselves from the violent wind and the sand it was pelting at us. But it was worth it as my dad and Cynthia got a chance to see some very unique sights. It wasn’t long before we ran back into the car to get away from the elements and braced ourselves for the start of the long leg of the day’s travels: the 3.5 hour drive to Seyðisfjörður.

With a big dust storm slowly blowing across the landscape in front of us, we drove for about 10-15 kilometers from Námaskarð before the unthinkable happened. Our car started to go haywire before breaking down completely… in the middle of the road… in the middle of nowhere.

So, let me paint the picture of the situation for you. About 30-60 minutes prior, while driving, I noticed that some random warning lights (namely an A symbol with a circle arrow around it) on my dashboard had started blinking and I couldn’t figure out why that was the case. So after some quick troubleshooting (and not figuring it out), I didn’t think anything of it and continued to drive. Then, after we left the Námaskarð area, I noticed that the engine light had turned on, which is a very, very strange occurrence for a brand new car with just over 2000 kilometers on the odometer. And that was slightly concerning. But after consulting my handy-man dad, we carefully continued our drive.

Until I started hearing not-normal sounds coming from under the hood of my car. Something that sounded like it was not spinning the way it should under the hood of the car. Like, in the engine or something. At this point, I got very concerned. And things only got worse when, in conjunction with the weird spinning sound, I saw more dashboard warning lights start to light up and blink. Not good. That then quickly spiraled into an actively malfunctioning car. First to completely go nonfunctional was the gas pedal. Oh no, not good. Because the gas pedal died while we were cruising at a speed around 70kph, the car just slowly and surely lost its speed as it kept rolling along on the highway. 70…60...50...40...30...20...10… Zero.

At one point, as the car was slowing down due to the road’s friction and its nonoperational gas pedal, I looked out to find a safe gravel turnoff to steer the car into. The first turnoff I noticed was slightly dangerous and not ideal given that it was sloped down from the road into the lower area beside the highway. Wouldn’t want to get a dead car stuck facing downhill. So I pushed our luck and kept waiting, since we still had some momentum left. But eventually, the car died JUST before we reached a safe, spacious gravel turnoff/lot that was a much better option for parking a dead car. Because we didn’t make it there with just our momentum, my dad and brother had to quickly jump out of the car and push the car 20-30 meters while I steered it off the road. Once we were situated in the gravel lot, the car, for the most part, died on us. The engine no longer worked and the steering wheel no longer turned.

But the family and I stayed very calm under these distressing circumstances. Everyone kind of knew what needed to be done. We briefly checked under the hood of the car to see if there was anything we could diagnose. Nope. Then Cynthia quickly called Blue Car Rental with our (luckily strong enough) 3G cell signal to notify them of the situation and get directions on the next steps we should take. All the while, the dust storm in front of us was blowing by and, fortunately, not toward us.

Once the rental company was contacted and our screenshotted location was emailed over to them, all we could do in the car was sit there and wait for a mechanic and tow truck to make their way out to us in the middle of nowhere next to a dust storm. And given combination of the protocol of needing a mechanic to first diagnose the car problem, the lack of a Blue Car Rental office anywhere outside of Reykjavik/Keflavik, and the fact that another car could not quickly be made available to replace our car, we weren’t sure how long it would take to get things resolved so that we could hit the road again. So we sat there. We waited in the car. We briefly spoke with one random passerby who had stopped by to make sure that we were OK. We took some hilarious modeling photos with the car. And we watched the sandstorm blow by.

Then, Martjin the Polish Mechanic came to our rescue! And it was unexpectedly fast! Within about 30 minutes of our initial contact with Blue Car Rental, they were able to get in touch with Martjin, who works/owns a car shop (Six60?) on the edge of Myvatn near the Myvatn Nature Baths and was contracted by the car rental agency to help out in these situations, and send him over with his excessively huge (and fittingly American) Ford truck with a tow bed behind it. It was while I was photographing Minh modeling next to the dead car that we saw the big truck and big, burly mechanic approach.

Once he was out of his car, we introduced ourselves and I explained the situation to him. And the first thing he (basically) told me as he was assessing our red 2021 Kia Sportage was….”This is the fourth car of the same make and model from Blue Car Rental this week alone that I have had to tow for similar reasons.” It was the fourth car that he had towed because the car (a brand new Kia Sportage in all instances) had died all of a sudden despite a full fuel tank, good oil, and with everything else checking out OK on initial investigation.

It was only while he was preparing to tow our car that he received a call from Blue Car with the answer to the car problem he had been stumped by for the last week. The crankshaft sensor in the car was not working in these models and that it was a manufacturing issue, an issue he himself could not figure out, solve, or fix with his mechanic skills alone. With that new information, he pulled our car onto his tow bed and loaded us into his car to take everyone and everything back to his shop.

Along the 30 minute drive back to Myvatn, he presented us with several options (some doable, some not so doable) for how to proceed with our situation. Normally, Martjin has two spare Blue Car rentals at his shop for these exact situations. But unfortunately, given that this was the 4th issue this week with Blue Car Rental, there were no spares left to offer. So that wasn’t an option. The other options were to try to get a car rental here as soon as possible (and it wasn’t going to be that soon since Blue Car had to find a replacement car, load it up, find a driver to tow it out to Myvatn, which was 6-7 hours away) to continue the trip later this evening (but actually, in the wee hours of the morning) knowing we had an AirBnB already booked in Seyðisfjörður OR to stick around the Myvatn area for the night and restart our trip in the morning with a new rental that would be towed ALL THE WAY from Reykjavik and arrive by morning. After he made some quick calls to assess all other options and my family and I had discussed the options, we ended up making the safest decision, which was to stay the night in a hotel in Myvatn, take it easy, and make up lost ground once we had our car delivered tomorrow morning.

Once that decision was made, Martjin made a ton of calls to all of his contacts and quickly made a three-room booking with the relatively fancy and expensive Sel-Hotel Myvatn for the night. We made a pit stop to pick up his “little blond devil” of a son from the nearby kindergarten and then stopped by his shop to wait for him to finish up some things before he dropped us off at the hotel. While waiting at the shop, we met a nice couple, Will and Mary, from Miami who had also run into some car issues and were also on their road trip around Iceland but driving in the opposite direction of us. We had a nice conversation with them and even shared our trip experiences and trip tips as we passed the time.

Before long, Will and Mary were ready to hit the road again after their flat tire was replaced, and we were ready to head to our hotel with Martjin. A short ride later, we were dropped off at Sel Hotel Myvatn, where we spoke with and checked into our hotel with the very nice and welcoming front desk lady named Kate. After we were given the keys to our three rooms, we moved upstairs to our rooms to get situated and get Cynthia ready for her work day. We hung out for a bit in the hotel rooms before heading down for a relatively early dinner in the nice hotel restaurant downstairs.

At the hotel restaurant, we treated ourselves to a nice and relatively expensive dinner (assuming that we’d get reimbursed for it by the rental car agency as part of the hotel stay). We ordered their Northern Diver Pizza with bacon, ham, and pepperoni, tiger shrimp scampi style scallops starter, lasagna, trout dinner, and pulled pork sandwich. It was so yummy! Though I wish we had gone haywire and ordered even more yummy food to fill up on! I guess we did the responsible thing… for the car rental agency, hahaha.

With stomachs filled with delicious food, we went to chill upstairs while waiting for our hotel sauna shed/room to be prepared. It took about 30 minutes for the hotel staff to ready the sauna room but once it was ready, the family minus Cynthia sat in a steamy, hot, humid, and very uncomfortable indoor sauna for about 30 minutes or so. My dad and I were the first to exit since we couldn’t deal with the heat and steam anymore. I guess it was slightly cleansing… Once everyone was done with the sauna, Minh and I headed to the hotel lobby to play a couple games of pool before my dad and I did the same. And funnily enough, in-between games with my dad, a little Iceland kid on his way to the Westfjords with his family wanted to jump in and get a game with me. So we played a couple of turns before he had to leave with his mom. Funny kid. By this point in the evening, the family was getting tired. So everyone except me and Cynthia headed upstairs to turn in for the night and get some much needed rest.

As for me, I hung out downstairs with Cynthia while she worked before going out and exploring the area right across from the hotel that we had briefly stopped at earlier called Skútustaðagígar, where all the pseudocraters were located. I left the hotel around 10pm and hiked along the different paths leading around the pseudocraters before I came across a nice wildflowery slope with the sun setting in the background. With very few, slow-paced moments to do landscape photography on this trip, I wanted to make the most of this particular scene. So I ran back to the hotel to grab all of my photography gear and headed right back out to the flowery slope where I spent an hour watching the sunset while attempting to capture a photograph worth writing home about.

After freezing outside in the Myvatn wind for an hour or so, I headed back into the hotel to clean and wash up before going to bed. Cynthia wasn’t yet done with work by that time so I went to bed first because I knew that recharging for tomorrow would be a smart thing to do given the ground we had to cover due to the unfortunate circumstances we ran into today.

Looking back at today’s debacle, our impromptu back-up plan wasn’t too bad! But here’s to a more reliable car and a more productive day tomorrow!

5 Things I Learned/Observed Today:

1. The Myvatn area is named after the large lake in the area and there is no associated town called Myvatn town.

2. Lake Myvatn is a bird-watching haven for tons of tourists. If you see heavily-armed photographers with huge lenses and camouflage, they’re probably there to take photos of birds.

3. Much of the Myvatn area is formed from the interaction of lava and water. For example, the lava rock formations at Dimmuborgir formed when lava spilled over water-filled depressions or marshlands forming a lava lake. Due to the overlying magma and lava lake, the sub-surface water layer heated up and created steam that escaped to the outside through vents that eventually became surrounded by solidifying magma. Over time, the results of this process were lava pillars, columns, and ridges like the ones at Dimmuborgir, which are the remnants of the steam vents of old. Similarly, you have the pseudocraters of Myvatn which were formed from a similar process. When molten lava flowed over water or wetlands, water became trapped underneath the lava field and started boiling. The pressure caused explosions where the steam escaped to the surface. Over time, the repeated explosions ripped apart the lava, which piled up around the steam vent, forming a pseudocrater (per the infographic sign at the site).

4. Brand new car rentals are not fool- and fail-proof. Always be on the lookout if your engine light turns on randomly and unexpectedly. It’s never a good sign for a new car. And when things like that happen and the car company needs to send a mechanic out to inspect it and tow it, it’s really expensive for the car rental agency. Per Martjin, it costs about 1000 Euros to send him to check out and try to diagnose the car issue at hand. So that’s for the service. On top of that, it costs approximately 3000 Euros to tow a rental car from Myvatn back to Reykjavik. VERY VERY EXPENSIVE. Luckily, if it’s a manufacturing issue, it’s not on us, the customer, to pay any of that. Thank goodness!

5. Lake Myvatn is considered the land of midges. They are everywhere. And they are a nuisance. Luckily, when it’s super windy outside, they pose no problems at all because the wind sweeps them away. Per the hotel, if the midges fly into your rooms due to open windows, just leave your windows open as they will attempt to fly out right away, thus causing little issues. An issue only occurs when you close your windows and they’re trapped inside.

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