Akureyri is Iceland’s second-biggest city and I’ve never found anything particularly interesting about it before. Well, I still haven’t!

For such a busy campsite, it was surprisingly quiet overnight. I started my day with hunting for fuel and food (turns out, despite Google Maps, I could have got fuel at the supermarket instead of driving halfway across town) and then parked at the swimming pool, which is free and pretty close to town.

The church, the main attraction in Akureyri, had a funeral in it. At 10.15, the doors were already closed and the sign said it would be open again at 2.15. Big funeral, I guess.

So I walked down into town, had a croissant and orange juice at the bookshop cafe, wandered up the Main Street, out to the harbour and realised there really isn’t much to see or do in Akureyri. Google Maps suggested walking a couple of hundred metres to a pink lamppost so I did that. And that was about it. I went back to my van for lunch, then walked back down to wait for the funeral to finish, which gave me plenty of time to look at what people were wearing to it. Mostly just the conventional stuff but there was one woman with a pale pink shirt worn like a beach cover-up over her black bodycon dress and trainers, one woman in a lime-green dress with an orange linen beach-style shirt over it and the queen of funerals was the woman wearing three-quarter length jeans under a hot pink knee-length dress under a bright red knee-length cardigan. They were still pouring out at 2.20 so I went back down to look at the bookshop, where I knew it was overpoweringly hot to get out of the cold wind.

The church was nice and interesting and I could not have done other than wait but was it worth the wait? Well, I enjoyed some of the stained glass, and it turns out the windows behind the altar actually didn’t come from Coventry Cathedral as we have all always believed.

Then I went off to the Forest Lagoon, which is very nice but you do gradually realise it’s just the world’s most expensive swim-up bar. It’s just packed with people sitting at the little tables along the fjordside edge drinking Aperol Spritzes. The Forest Lagoon has its own signature cocktail – greenish-blue in its alcoholic variety and radioactive blue in non-alcoholic, which is an entire can of 7Up mixed with blue slushie. It loses its novelty very quickly.

When I’d finished at the Forest Lagoon, I drove up the mountain and through the tunnel and appeared at Systragil, a smaller, quieter campsite in the woods where I stayed the night before my birthday two years ago. It’s still a bit busy (three toilets are not enough; and one of those is new in the last two years) but at least your neighbours aren’t literally on top of you and it’s all green and surrounded by mountains.

At about quarter to eleven last night, I heard a van arrive next to me. “There’s really not room for another between me and my neighbour” I said out loud. Later, hearing odd noises, I decided to open the front curtains and see what I could see out the side. Open the curtains – “You are joking!” They weren’t parked up next to me. They were parked directly in front of me, in violation of the sacred “all vans in a circle around the perimeter of the field” by shoving between my van and the perimeter and they’d done something beyond weird.
Two women in a van like mine – a small panel van, a Clio estate with a mattress in the back instead of more seats and a boot. I barely have space for me and my luggage but there were two of them. And a full-on garden chair (not a little umbrella-folding camping chair), a three-shelf camping cupboard with a massive glass demijohn of water on top, a cool box, several bags, two smaller chairs, rugs laid out on the grass in front of both doors, more clothes than I’ve brought with me draped over every inch of the van and the front seat piled with soft stuff. I couldn’t imagine where you’d fit all that in even when you’re not sleeping in the back. Oh, and a tripod filming the whole thing – in landscape, so not even for TikTok. Is the plan to spend half an hour every night putting it all out? What if Iceland does what Iceland does and rains? Then they went off to the hot pools. I heard spots of rain on my roof so I brought in the swimming stuff and shut myself in.

It rained and the wind howled all night. I heard them come back and make a faff but I couldn’t figure out what they were doing with all the stuff, except that they seemed to have left the back door open.

I slept badly and woke up at 7.25am to the discovery that they’d left everything out to get rained on and left the back van door open all night. As they still hadn’t moved by the time I left at 9.15, I sort of wondered if they’d died of hypothermia.

Anyway, I got up and scurried to Grettislaug where I managed ten minutes alone to take selfies before other campers turned up. I stayed in for an hour and then breakfast demanded to be eaten.

My only real plan was to get to Hauganes for the beachfront hot tubs (one is shaped like a boat!). That was about a two hour drive – 45 minutes back to the Ring Road at Varmahlið and then an hour and a quarter to Hauganes. I extended it by finding a nice canyon to stop at and finally made it to Hauganes about lunchtime.
Bad news: the boat-shaped hot tub is cold. The three black plastic hot tubs are hot, though – the closest one is hottest and the furthest one is coolest but they’re all about 35-40°. For the first hour there were at least three families and they all had 2-4 children. Taking selfies while kids leap around is hard. Then suddenly they all vanished and I had the place to myself for ten minutes!

Lunch in the van on the harbour front and then a 40 minute drive to and through Akureyri to the busiest campsite I’ve ever seen. I booked two nights but I’m not queuing to get through the gate when I get home from the Forest Lagoon tomorrow, not driving around and around looking for a van-sized space. I’m going back to Systragil.

I decided, having found a tolerable space, I wasn’t giving it up so instead of driving in Akureyri for the afternoon, I walked. I went to the pool. Sat in the warm pools and swam 30 lengths of the lane pool. Had to get out by 7.30 – it’s an hour walk back to the van. I now know I walked 9km just to preserve this space. And of course, I came back to find myself surrounded. I knew it – I knew how busy this campsite was going to be.

It’s a Skátarnir campsite – the Icelandic Scouts and Guides. I thought the symbols on the flags looked familiar but as I was walking out, I spied a Skátarnir flag. Fleurs de lys and trefoils on the campsite flag and on the gate down by the main road. Well, they’re not camping here this time of year with so many tourists crowding on.

I thought I’d wait and see what it was like when I got back from the pool before deciding what to do tomorrow night but packed in like sardines and the constant noise of children either screaming or grizzling is not the way I want to spend my birthday. So drive into Akureyri tomorrow and then take the tunnel to the little campsite in the woods after the Forest Lagoon.

I can already hardly remember what I did today. I started at Hverir, the campsite on the tomato farm with the greenhouse-common room and the polytunnel tent shelter. I knew I wanted to wend my way north, to arrive in Akureyri either Wednesday evening or sometime on Thursday, and take a bit of time to explore the north instead of ploughing my way straight across it, so the original plan had been to go to Blonduos, which is a bit of a service centre with a river flowing through it. However, that was only two hours away from Hverir and there wasn’t a whole day’s worth of interesting things to see on the way.

Interesting thing number one was Grabrok a trio of roadside volcanoes. Stora Grabrok has steps and a boardwalk around it so you can walk up to the crater and then all the way up and around the rim. I’ve done it twice before but the novelty of casually climbing a volcano by the side of the road doesn’t wear off.

Stop two was at Thingeyrar – there are benefits to typing this on an actual keyboard but I can’t make the special characters, like the thorn that Thingeyrar actually begins with. Once upon a time, the bishop promised God he’d build a farm and a church here if He’d end a famine and when the famine ended, the bishop built a whole monastery. The monastery isn’t there anymore; only a black basalt 19th century church, which is usually locked (the key holder was lurking outside last time I was here but not today). However, monasteries being historically centres of learning and intellect and whatnot, this is allegedly where a lot of the sagas were written. Written down, I should say. They were passed on in the oral tradition for hundreds of years before being written down, apparently by these monks (and Snorri Sturluson of Snorralaug, which I mentioned yesterday, who was definitely not a monk).

Third stop was indeed at Blonduos. I’d run out of juice and plastic cheese slices and I needed more cheese before all my bread goes out of date tomorrow. This was lunchtime. No point in stopping yet. I carried on, the long way round, to Varmahlid. Not much to say here, it’s a little junction of the Ring Road with the road that heads up to the fjord, but it’s another small supermarket if you need one. I bought chocolate here once. I continued up the fjord. I had a plan by now. I would go up to Glaumbaer, a traditional Icelandic turf house and farm. These things look a little bit ridiculous – a row of pointed houses built out of turf with wooden fake fronts on them, like life-sized elf houses, but this genuinely was how they were built. Iceland has been short on wood ever since the first Icelanders came over in the 10th century and cut down all the trees for houses and boats and discovered too late that they don’t really grow back in these conditions. So turf houses. This one dates back to the 18th century but was used up until the 1940s. Some of the doors open onto small self-contained rooms – the smithy, store rooms etc, but the last door hides an entire house, connected by dark turf corridors.

I’d been thinking that ever since I left Hverir and the valley between Borgarnes and Husafell, the tourists had basically vanished. There are “undertaking” lanes at junctions and down south, these have “do not stop here” signs on them to tell clueless tourists not to park in them because they’re not stopping places. Those signs vanished ages ago. Well, it turns out all the tourists are at Glaumbaer. I want two seconds in each room to take a photo of the room but you can’t get it clear of tourists for long enough. I stood in the Back Door (mill/store room etc) for months as first the Polish tour group milled gormlessly around, then the Italian one (who grabbed everything hanging from the wall, despite the two rules being “don’t touch anything” and “don’t take flash photos”, and then the French. Two seconds.

My plan was to drive up to Saudarkrokur, which is the next biggish town, up to Grettislaug for a dip in a Saga pool and then back to Saudarkrokur to camp but as I made my way up, I realised there’s no point. I spend my days realising I don’t need this much time to get to Akureyri so why not save the 20km drive for tomorrow and just camp at Grettislaug?

Grettislaug, as I said, appears in the sagas. Grettir the Strong was on the island out in the fjord, for reasons I’m unclear on right now. He swam the 7.5km back to the mainland and was so exhausted he needed to sit in the hot pool to recover. My kind of Saga hero. The hot pool is now two hot pools and there’s a campsite right there, with a little cafe/indoor space that’s open until midnight. So I sat in the pools for an hour or two, went for my walk around the cliffs to see the black sand beach and now I’m taking advantage of the wifi to write this. I might go back in the hot pools later on (although it’s 9.30pm right now) or I might go in them early in the morning.

Actually, let’s write it. I found a space. I climbed into the back and read a book and had an early dinner of bread and cheese. Then a van pulled up next to me. In a large field with less than a dozen vehicles parked in it, it parked six feet away. Are you joking? I said. But I ignored it. Then the next time I looked up, they’d put up an awning and were pitching a tent underneath it and the guy ropes for that awning were literally under two feet away from my van door. What I should have done was stumble out and accidentally trip over them all. What I should have done was drive away in a fury ensuring that I snagged their ropes on my wing mirror as I went. What I actually did was employ my best bad language and slam all the doors pointedly as I left the van, went round to the driver’s side and removed myself to the other side of the field. I do make a point to head for the cafe via the path right next to them and literally step over their ropes to get there, though.

I don’t know exactly what my plans for tomorrow are – to Akureyri or near Akureyri, depending on what it’s like at Hauganes, I think.

I got up in quite a leisurely way today, trying to get my swimming stuff dry-ish in time to be waiting at the activity centre for 10am. It’s only a five minute walk but I drove – I wasn’t sure what time they’d want me out of the campsite so I thought it would be best to move the van just in case.

There were six of us loaded into the minibus and driven to the top secret location of the Canyon Baths. Apparently some tours park a little way down the hill and make you hike up to the gate as well as 64 stairs down into the canyon but Freyr took us right to the gate. There are some rustic changing rooms with warm showers (pull the rope to start the water) but no shampoo, conditioner or soap is allowed because the only drainage is back into the river.

There are two baths. The upper one is about 37 degrees and is called Hringur (inspired by Snorralaug, 20 minutes down the road at Reykholt and during the conversation in which Freyr wrote down these names for me, we established that I have read Snorri’s Edda – for interest in Iceland, I was secreted a little cube of obsidian from the canyon. You’re not allowed to take rocks but I think you can be given them). The lower one is called Urdur, which is one of the three witches past, present & future but I don’t have enough internet to find out which one she is right now. Urdur is 38-39 degrees, although I think it was actually a bit warmer than that.

Then there’s the glacier pool, where the river pauses in a little pool before continuing down and out of the canyon. If we were brave, this is probably about 8 degrees this time of year. I think most of us dipped in it and one person actually swam in it. I did three dips. My first was about half a second, the second about a second and the third I stayed in long enough to bob up and down a bit. The baths are literally in the canyon – a narrow basalty scree-y canyon too narrow for the sun to reach Urdur before about midday even in July, so no more sunburn! We had about an hour in the pools and then it was time to return. Left to my own devices, I could have stayed twice as long but it was enough to not feel like it had been a flying visit.

I had lunch in the van back at the car park at Husafell and then dithered what to do next. My half-formed plan was to camp at Varmaland but that’s only about 45 minutes away and it was only about 12.30. Ok, maybe I’ll start making my way north a little way ahead of schedule. I’ll meander my way up, stop at Bifröst to climb a crater and see how far I fancy driving. Stop just down the road at Deildartunguhver because you can never see Europe’s biggest hot spring enough times. And then I talked myself into spending three hours at Krauma, the baths fed by Deildartunguhver. Hands up who didn’t see that coming? Yeah, everyone except me.

By the time I emerged, it was raining. Well, I wasn’t climbing any volcanoes in this. Do I go back to my original plan and go to Varmaland? Or go to Borgarnes, which has a nice swimming pool and some big supermarkets, since I’m almost out of plastic cheese slices already? I looked at reviews of both campsites. My previous experience of Borgarnes is that the campsite is literally just a field. The toilets have never been unlocked when I’ve stopped there, which is why I’ve always ended up moving on. Varmaland’s reviews weren’t a lot better, although the village swimming pool is right next door. And then… why am I dithering? Literally across the field is Hverir, where I’ve camped twice before. It’s a tomato farm and restaurant and one of the greenhouses has been converted into a really hot common room for campers. I could dry my swimming stuff, sit inside, pop into the restaurant for a Fanta and otherwise escape the rain without going to a campsite that has, at best, mediocre reviews.

So here I am, getting gently toasted by the hot pipes in the common room (the other end was a greenhouse last time I looked), drying my swimming stuff next to rather than on the pipes (the pipes are just too hot to put anything directly on) and occasionally playing with the black cat curled up on a chair behind me. She likes the warm pipes nearby and she loves to have her ears scritched. She’d clearly been out in the rain – she was definitely damp around the edges when I arrived but she’s nice and dry and soft now and fast asleep with all her legs stretched out in different directions.

Tomorrow I go north to Blonduos. It’s just a small town with a small supermarket and I’ve stopped for fuel plenty of times and vowed to camp there. Admittedly, every time I’ve driven through it, it’s been a sunny day and it looks like a little bit of soft green Icelandic paradise, so I hope the rain stops by tomorrow.

I got up far too early, because I was awake, and went back up the road to Geysir. I’d failed last night to get there after the tourists so let’s try to get there before them. For the record, they really start to appear around 7.30am. I got some pictures of Strokkur without a ring of people, at least.

Breakfast wasn’t really breakfast – a piece of Toblerone to keep me going at Geysir and the remains of the star crisps when I got back, just while I waited until it was allowed to drive around.

I drove the ~2km up a gravel track to Hauladalur’s church and then strolled down to Kualaug, the little roadside hot (warm) pool. Only 2km from a few hundred tourists who had no idea this was here, sitting in the warm water, listening to the birds – the only peaceful private pool I’m likely to find in the next two weeks.
My plan to drive to Laugarvatn to get some proper breakfast was delayed by a detour up a rougher gravel road to Bruarfoss, which is quite a spectacular waterfall. Somehow a canyon has opened up in the middle of the river, which now pours down into it from both sides. The canyon continues once the water has fallen – a split level canyon! The water in the lower canyon is a spectacular bright turquoise. Tourists, meanwhile, have interpreted the multiple multilingual “DANGER! DO NOT GET TOO CLOSE TO THE WATERFALL!” signs as “please feel free to paddle in the shallows”.

I got cereal and a baguette at Laugarvatn and ate half of it as a late lunch before heading to my 1pm booking at Hvammsvík. It’s lovely on a quiet winter morning and it’s nice now but I definitely prefer it when there aren’t 20 people in every single pool. On the other hand, they don’t bring out the paddle boards in winter. Because the water was so calm, I was allowed to paddle all the way out to the little island – nervously, though, because there were a lot of jellyfish.
When I’d had enough of Hvammsvík and eaten the rest of the baguette, I drove to Husafell, which meant two rough gravel roads over the mountain and then much confusion at Husafell – it’s a kind of country estate, Icelandic-style, which means the hotel runs everything, including the campsite.

Travel blog written on a phone in the back of a campervan so I’ll keep it short.

Train out of London 9:05. Back to the car park to pick up my luggage and then back to the airport – on the fifth bus! The first four were three drop-off only and one pick-up bus that was too full to stop. Bearing in mind I had to get the bus to South Terminal, the monorail to North, check in an enormous bag before going through security and time was ticking, I was grumpy about this. Step out in front of the bus until it lets me on, that kind of grumpy.
I finished at check in by 11:01, after waiting around ten minutes – everyone in front of me was slow! On the other hand, I got to, though and out of security in three minutes flat (thank you, fast track!) then I had 55 minutes to wait for gate announcement. Naturally it was at the other end of the airport.

Flight was uneventful except that it was too cloudy over Reykjanes to know if we even went over the volcano. Luggage was waiting for me as I approached with my trolley – actually, I had to run before it got away.
Van pickup required me to go to the rental care shuttle point even though Go wasn’t on the board. We were shuttled down to the office and then… things were slow.

I drove my van past the eruption, stopped at a handy place on the old road that’s now a scraped-out car park for curious tourists, continued along the south coast, saw the volcano erupting on the horizon (including orange fire!) as I approached the Fagradalsfjall car park. Onwards to Hveragerði for food shopping and then another hour to Geysir, all the better to see geysers without the bus loads of tourists.