Aurora!

Akureyri / Húsavík

We had a whale watching tour booked at Húsavík about an hour and a bit away. Tip if you’re driving in and out of Akureyri don’t take the expensive toll road tunnel. It only adds about 10 minutes to your trip and you get to drive along the stunning scenic, free route. Think about it - would you take the ocean road or pay $15 to drive through a tunnel?

The weather was perfect, beautiful blue sky, no wind and 18 degrees. The water in the bay was smooth and we had a stunning trip out to the see the single humpback whale that was spotted after an hour or so.

The whale put on a good show with a couple of nice tail dives. We noticed that Iceland doesn’t seem to have the strict protocols that other countries have regarding whale protection. They do have a “code of conduct”, but they only follow it loosely it seems, and it felt to us that the tourist boats were chasing a whale that was trying to get away from them - not sure that would happen back home.

The sky was still clear as night fell, so we decided we had a really good chance of an aurora sighting. After checking our aurora app (yep, they have those!) we looked out the window of our apartment to see a very faint aurora, in the last place we'd have expected it, as we weren't facing north and there was a bit of light pollution.

We jumped in the car to head out of town, we eventually found an area to pull over and from there we could see the glow of auroras all above us. They were still faint but quite obvious, green in colour, and they changed shape and moved around the sky. So we can finally say that one of our greatest objectives of the trip was achieved, yes we have seen the Northern Lights!