On the one hand, yay, wifi that reaches the van! I can write my blog on an actual keyboard! On the other hand, the phone keyboard makes the special Icelandic characters so much easier.

Anyway, I woke up in Vik to find no one had parked right behind me after all, although half a dozen vans had braved the thick muddy edge of the unflooded bit of the tent field. I planned to get some more juice and some fresh bread and head along the south coast – slightly complicated by the fact that the supermarket doesn’t open until 9am. So I walked on the beach and watched the waves crash. Then, juice aqcuired but no bread (I thought opening time was the best time for fresh bread!), I went round the headland to Reynisfjara. This is the most dangerous place in Iceland. Latest death here: less than a week ago. I wondered why – how do you not see or understand the forest of signs? Well, it’s because the forest that was here in 2018 (at least six signs along the path from the car park to the beach) are all gone. A few weeks ago there were two signs here and there are still broken stumps showing where the second one was but the dangerous beach is down to one solitary sign, and the Facebook group is right, it is confusing. It’s a system of lights. Green light = walk around the beach cautiously. Amber light, like today: stay within the yellow zone (no zones marked anywhere). Red light = do not proceed beyond this sign. Given that there are no zones, you just have to interpret yellow as be careful.

It was early enough that the beach wasn’t as overrun as it would be later but most people were keeping a reasonable distance from the crashing waves. It’s a beautiful beach – a huge cathedral-like basalt column cave-like scraping in the cliff, a wall of columns and then a proper cave around the corner, with the spiky troll rocks out at sea. There’s plenty to keep your attention away from the sneaker waves but I found it hard to look at anything else. When they pull back, you can see how steeply the beach falls away and so when they roll up, they’re enormous. They wash further up the beach than you expect and they roar the whole time. You’d think anyone with half a brain would take one look at that and decide to keep their distance without need of any warning signs or lights.

It’s also hard to linger at Reynisfjara out of fear that someone will be stupid and you’ll witness something that will ruin the entire rest of the trip for the rest of your life. So I moved on to Dyrholaey, the Icelandic Durdle Door, which is at the other end of the beach. From up here, you can’t even see the tourists and the expanse of beach between the cliff and the pinnacles is beyond vast. The waves break two or three times before they hit the beach. It’s amazing. There are also puffins up here, posing nicely for the forest of cameras pointed at them and I can now confirm: puffins burrows stink. There’s no other reason for the smell of bad fish up on the cliff here.

Stop three: Skogafoss, a big square cataract. You can paddle a little bit in the stream to get a slightly diffferent view and if you’re willing to get a bit damp, you can make your way past the crowds and then past an awkward bit of rock (helpful if you can get your feet wet here) and stand twenty-ish feet away from the powerful water. They used to actively encourage you to get close. There’s a legend that there’s a box of treasure hidden under the waterfall, although if it was really put there in the Settlement era, it’s probably not in great condition by now.

I had lunch back at the van and then drove four miles up the road to Seljavallalaug, Iceland’s oldest swimming pool, built after a fishing disaster when Iceland realised swimming might be a useful life skill in a country built on fishing. It’s back in the mountain, a bit of an awkward scramble into Eyjafjallajokull. One wall of the pool is the mountainside and although the pool had a proper clean out after the Eyjafjallajokull eruption of 2010, it really needs to be emptied and pressure washed again. The changing huts, which were disreputable when I was here two years ago, really need to be burnt down and rebuilt from scratch. The pool is lukewarm and the water is green and although it’s in the most gorgeous setting, it’s not a particularly pleasant place to swim.

Onwards to my last tourist stop, Seljalandsfoss. I haven’t been here in years so I braved the walk behind the waterfall. That was fine but Seljalandsfoss is kind of two waterfalls – a main flow and then a much smaller one to the left, as you look at it. When you walk behind it, if the wind is blowing the wrong way, that second thread of a waterfall falls straight down onto the path that exits the cave. You time that like you’re playing Mario, mess up on the rocky scramble down and entirely understand why you need a good waterproof for this bit.

Then I walked on to Gljufrabui, once the “secret” waterfall next door. In this month’s Reykjavik Grapevine, there’s a letter from a tourist showing a photo of an hour-long queue to get in. Didn’t have that today. I went further in than anyone else (benefits, yet again, of wearing sandals) and got nice and wet again. I’d been wondering if this was where we stopped on the way back from Thorsmork in 2012 – all the pictures I’ve seen of it look a lot like the second one we stopped at. I’ll have to compare when I get home, bearing in mind that access to absolutely everything is unrecognisable these days, and figure it out.

Then it was an hour to Hveragerdi. My original plan had been to camp at Selfoss because the campsite has hot tubs. But Hveragerdi has the outdoor swimming pool a 7 minute walk away. And it turns out if you turn up with a campervan, you get an allocated space. So unlike this entire trip, if I wanted to drive down to the supermarket or to the pool, if it was further away, I could come back to a nice space instead of a stress about finding somewhere to park. It almost feels like a waste that I didn’t take the van out again. Instead I made pasta, went to the pool, sat in the children’s pool for an hour, swam 8 lengths (it’s a 50m pool, so that’s actually 16 lengths) and then came home and sorted out the van – lots of juice cartons and plastic cheese wrappers to dispose of, washing up to be done and so on. Blog to be written. Towels to be dried. One thing I’m really looking forward to is warm fluffy dry towels. The swimsuits are fine, as long as they get enough air not to go mildewy. You put them on in a hot shower so it doesn’t matter if they’re damp. But the towels just don’t get an opportunity to dry and even though they’re supposed to be quick-drying microfibre, they’re eternally damp.

So that was my day.