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.