Lavatastic

It was up and atom and off we went, further out west seeing lava sea arches/bridges/funnels/stacks, then off inland to a lava cave, which I'll come to, then Barnafossar waterfall which was furious... so much water squeezing through a tight gap and under a lava bridge, and Hraunfossar waterfall just downsteam a bit, which was just beautiful, water streaming down from the lava fields across a wide area into the river from Barnafossar.

So the lava cave... a volcanic erruption around 1100 years ago, sent lava down the valley and a tunnel was formed through it where lava continued further down. When the source of the flow finished, the lava emptied out of the tunnel at the end, leaving it empty. Vikings had arrived 100-200 years before and did not know what the tunnel was, so named it Víðgelmir, which means Wide Worm. there is about 1.6km of it left open, with one entrance. Although not the longest tunnel in Iceland, it is the widest.

We descended into an open crater and into the tunnel with our guided tour. One of the first sections had lots of ice stalamites formed from water dripping from the ceiling. Continuing through we passed lava stalagmites & stalagtites, chocolate lava which was trails of lava down the walls which was produced towards the end of an erruption, sulphuric acid tide marks high on the walls that were released from the lava, and bacteria formed on the walls that Nasa are also looking for in the lava caves on Mars as a sign of life. We alked about 600m down the tunnel and at the end rockfall blocked it, it is the centre photo. 

I have to say, this was all absolutely fascinating and felt the closest we got to lava since we've been here. The water in this tunnel, via the ice stalagmites that melt each year, flows down into the waterfalls we saw, but takes years to get there.

We squeezed the most out of this last day with the car, all planned the night before without really knowing what we would see, but again Iceland turned up trumps.

Finally we begun our drive down to Reykjavik, sorted out our accomodation and dropped the car off. Looking forward to the more cultural part of our trip over the next few days.

Extras added.