Day 9 - Hit the road Jack, ahm Christof
Today's trip from Myvatn to Egilsstaðir was among the longer ones of this journey, so there wasn't room for many activities along the way (there would have been one or two opportunities but nothing that would have allowed me to arrive at my next destination at a civilized time.
However there was one activity right along the way that was definitely worth the detour. Dettifoss is another one of Iceland's famous and impressive waterfalls. It also holds the distinction of being Europe's most powerfull waterfall (it's neither highest nor the one with the largest water flow but the former multiplied with the latter is unparalleled).
To give some numbers, Dettifoss is 100 meters wide and the water plummets 44 meters. As for the amount of water going over the edge, that's 193 cubic meters per second (or to put it into another useless number, this will fill an olympic swimming pool in 13 seconds; I said it would be useless)
Dettifoss also has a smaller brother, Selfoss which is quite a bit narrower and has a lower drop. While also being an impressive sight (it's the same amount of water as with it's bigger brother that has to go somewhere), it's dwarfed by Dettifoss that much that the Wikipedia article for Selfoss, after saying the water drops eleven meters, goes on to state the numbers from Dettifoss (as seen in the paragraph above). Poor Selfoss.
After unsuccessfully trying to get to the next waterfall downstream (damn you snow) I made my way back to the Ring Road. Today's trip showed impressively how sparsely Iceland is populated (in big parts due to the fact that more than half the people live in or around Reykjavik).
Upon leaving Myvatn I had set the GPS to my next hotel address (Dettifoss was easy enough to find so I didn't bother) and up came a somewhat incredible instruction from the GPS "in 156 km turn left", no roundabouts, no ambiguous intersections, just the Route 1 and the occasional turnoff left or right. This was paired with a street sign right after leaving Reykjahlíð (the largest town in the Myvatn area with a stunning population of 300) that stated "no gas station in the next 122 km". As it turned out, the stretch of Iceland along these 156 km really had the emptyness, to match the 156 and 122 km numbers.
Therefore I really can't write much more than that I arrived in Egilsstaðir two hours after leaving Dettifoss (including two stops to try to capture the empty landscape on photo).