Today was a really long day.

My alarm went off at 6.15am, which is obscenely early on my birthday but I needed to pack a lot of stuff and then drive nearly an hour to the meeting point back at Mývatn so we could depart for our epic adventure at 8am.

The superjeep was… well, it’s not really a jeep. I have no idea what it is. Icelanders tend to default to “car” even the vehicle is clearly not a car but I couldn’t come up with any better word for the monster. It was a Hummer once upon a time, which was brought to Iceland in 1997 where it was transformed into some kind of enormous vehicle which can seat sixteen, bounce along Highland roads and cross rivers as if they just weren’t there. Anton, our guide, had named it Ferdinand after a children’s story none of us had heard of about a big strong bull who didn’t want to fight but smell the flowers.

We headed west out of Reykjahlið, along the Ring Road to the F88 turning at Hrossaborg where all the other superjeeps were stopping to let air out of their tyres – this makes them bigger and squidgier and better able to absorb rocks and bumps but Ferdinand has some magic switches that enables Anton to make constant pressure adjustments while driving, so we had no need to stop. Ferdinand’s tyres, which are half as tall as me, are at 30PSI while driving on proper tarmac roads but are reduced to low 20s on Highland roads and can go as low as 12 if necessary.

Our first stop was at a nice little waterfall on the other side of our first stream crossing. Ferdinand treated it like a puddle and we stopped just in time to leap out and watch the two coaches behind us tackle it. Because Ferdinand is big and tough, we’d ploughed straight across but the coaches took the shallower route to the left. There is an agreement that tougher vehicles take the deeper crossings because when you drive across it, you plough it just that bit deeper but you can throw pebbles around and us crossing where we did would throw some pebbles onto the shallowereroute, making it shallower still. The Mývatn Tours coach, which is even higher than Ferdinand, waded through with no trouble and the more conventional-looking Tyrfingsson coach drove through as if it was a race and then didn’t even bother stopping to look at the view, which suited us fine. The other side is lush and green, an oasis in the black and grey and brown Interior desert. There are plants and flowers and also, this is where we got stuck three years ago in the other superjeep when someone accidentally pressed the door lock thing as they climbed out, when we had to break in with a broom to unlock it.

Off we went again, trying to put on some speed and keep ahead of the Mývatn Tours coach. Iceland’s interior is vast and wild and lawless but there aren’t that many roads crossing it and if you get somewhere popular, like Askja, you tend to get quite a few vehicles all heading to the same place using the same road, leaving at about the same time and this huge empty desert begins to feel quite busy. The coach stopped at Glúfrasmiður, some rapids in the river that are carving out another colossal canyon like Dettifoss, although it’s not quite there yet, but we opted to continue – partly to escape the coach and partly because Glúfrasmiður will look better later on in the day when the warmth of the sun will have melted a little more of the glacier that feeds it and make the water levels a little higher.

We continued to Herðubreiðarlindir, something of a settlement in this vast nothing. There’s a warden’s hut which can sleep quite a few, a school of some kind that Anton was a bit vague about, and a campsite. The toilets are the main reason tour groups stop here really but it’s also home to a little stone shelter built by the famous outlaw Eyvindur, who escaped custody in Mývatn, stole a horse and spent a very cold winter hiding in a hole in the ground in the Highlands. There was a spring coming into the corner of the shelter, he killed the horse and used its skin to make a roof and its bones to support the walls and he lived off the meat all winter, along with angelica root. He couldn’t build a fire, he just stayed in his hole. Eyvindur was one of the few – indeed, possibly the only, outlaw to survive the twenty years in the Highlands that were required to be pardoned, although I don’t know enough of his story to know if he was. We don’t have anything like the Iceland Highlands in the UK or mainland Europe, I can’t describe how wild and empty and cold they are, just mile after mile – sorry, kilometre after kilometre – of black sand, or grey boulders, or nigh-uncrossable lava fields of all kinds. This particular part we were in is the Odaðahraun, which Anton and Olafur, one of the passengers, who happened to also be Icelandic, struggled to translate. The Very Disliked Lava Field? The Lava Field of Bad Deeds? I prefer the translation in my guide book – The Desert of Misdeeds which sounds like something straight out of Tolkien.

Onwards we went. The desert became lava field, the road became really terrible – and it had been little more than a gravel track before. Now it was a gravel track trying to force its way through the lava – hairpin twists and turns, up and downhill, rocks and ruts, and once we escaped that, the road smoothed out again, or at least became flat and straight again, although it was still a rutted track, and the scenery began to change. We’d come round Herðubreið and now the landscape was yellow. I remembered what it was from my last trip here – this was pumice, scattered from Asjka in one explosion in 1875, enough pumice to bury the lava several metres deep and Askja was still only just on the horizon. In the long term, this would be good for the alkaline soil but in the short term, it poisoned the land, the gases from the eruption turned to acid in the water and a quarter of the population in this part of Iceland fled.

This was the point at which we were pulled over by the police.

I’ve tried and tried to explain how wild and deserted this part of Iceland is. We’re a good two hours from civilisation – by which I mean the village of 200 souls back at Reykjahlið and for all I’ve mentioned how many people are up there, we’re talking half a dozen superjeeps and maybe three coaches, which feels like a lot when there is nothing on the horizon in any direction except desert and lava field. Therefore, to be stopped by the police is unimaginable.

We weren’t doing anything wrong but the rescue teams have been asking them for years to come up into the Highlands and make sure anyone driving in these conditions has the training and the vehicle and the insurance to do so and for the first time, they’ve been patrolling this summer, mostly looking out for idiot tourists in unsuitable vehicles and sending them home before they drown themselves trying to cross a river or making sure people aren’t killing the landscape by driving offroad. Anton had to produce his driving licence and a packet of papers from the glovebox and an important bit of paper left at home had to be scanned and emailed to the policeman who happened to work for the same company as Anton when he’s not being a policeman. Finally, with all our paperwork in order, we were set free.

Five minutes on, we stopped to look at the pumice and the formations on the mountain and talk about the Apollo astronauts. I knew they’d come out here to train because it was reasonably close to the surface of the moon but I assumed they’d been training in things like survival and camping and how to exist in a barren landscape. They weren’t – of course they weren’t. Those things are irrelevant when there’s no atmosphere. They’d come here to practice things like how to take rock samples – you have an hour, you have a box this size, bring samples that represent this entire landscape, things like that.

We made a very quick toilet stop at Drekki, the big settlement at the foot of Askja. And by big, I mean it has a bunkhouse, it’s currently accommodating the geologists researching Holuhraun, rescue teams live there for a week at a time and the police are based there at the moment, as well as the rangers, because Asjka now comes under the balloon of the mighty Vatnajökulsþjóðgarður, the Vatnajökull National Park, which now covers all things national park and nature area in the entire east of Iceland, stretching as far west as Landmannalaugar. We were not going straight to Askja for two reasons. One, it looked like it was raining up there and two, that’s where all the tour coaches and superjeeps were going. We would go first to Holuhraun.

This was the bit I was really excited about. Holuhraun is Iceland’s most recent eruption and newest lava field, the second largest in human history – the first being Laki, on the west side of Vatnajökull. The road from Askja lurched across lava field and then turned into soft black sand and ash. This wasn’t a road, this was a few sets of tyres tracks following the route marked by yellow markers and it would all be washed away in the next sandstorm, which can be violent enough to strip the paint off any vehicles foolish or unfortunate enough to be caught in it. This has always been a road, such as it is, but in the last two years, it’s had an unprecedented amount of traffic on it. The wooden stakes which used to mark it have been upgraded to the same yellow posts that mark real roads and there is now something of a car park partway down it.

The Holuhraun eruption started on August 29th 2014, after a couple of months of rumbling in the north of the glacier, which started off as hundreds of tiny earthquakes in a matter of hours in Bárðarbungar, a subglacial volcano. I watched this for every minute of those couple of months. At first it looked like Bárðarbungar was going to erupt and that was a little bit terrifying – no one knew what it would be like, whether it would be an ash explosion like Eyjafjallajökull but on a colossal scale, whether there would be glacial flash floods wiping out half the south of the country, whether that would trigger anything else. And then the earthquakes started moving as the magma began to push its way through the dike and head north. Now would Askja erupt? The 1875 eruption had been devastating, and I didn’t like the thought that I might not get another look at it, not in its current state. The earthquakes continued, so many that the seismographs were able to create a detailed 3D map of the underground dike network that no one could actually get to. And then rather than erupting in the traditional way through a central vent in a central crater, the magma escaped through the fissures. For a perfect six months – for it continued until February 28th 2015 – the lava poured out in a great river of fire twice the size and power of Dettifoss, with fire fountains shooting 150 metres up into the sky and half of Iceland tried to come and watch it. Over those six months, 1.6 cubic kilometres of magma poured out, 4.8 billion tonnes by Anton’s calculations. It covers an area 86 km2. For comparison, Mývatn is about 30 km2 and the new lava field covers an area roughly the size of Manhattan. The lava rivers flowed at a rate of 350 cubic metres per second at first – that’s 1000 tones of lava per second pouring and fountaining, rock so hot it’s melted and during those six months, poured out more sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide than the entire US and UK combined would in a year. And still that’s a lot better than it would have been if it had erupted under the glacier in Bárðarbungar like it threatened. All this was still happening seventeen months ago.

As we drove down our road of sand, we could see this great black lava field just lying there and to our left it was steaming – clouds of steam like the cooling towers at a power station, great columns of steam. Anton was staying well away from them – where there’s steam, there’s hot lava and water, and where there’s hot lava and water, there are explosions and you don’t want to be hit by a chunk of flying rock, especially not when there’s a chance of it being the size of a car. Even as we watched, a new column of steam rose up, presumably from the glacial river hitting the lava. I was disappointed that we couldn’t swim. The lava field had blocked the glacial river but it had found a way around or through and it was hot – or at least, it was hot last year. Half the population of north-east Iceland promptly came to swim in it before they could be told it was too dangerous or too hot or too acidic but sadly, it has now cooled too much to be worth swimming in.

At the little car park, there’s a trail marked by posts across the lava field, where it’s reasonably safe, where it’s not still burning hot, where it seems that all the collapsing has finished – because the lava on top cools quicker than underneath, lava rivers flow under that crust and create lava tubes and then the ceilings collapse. There are still plenty of tubes in this colossal field waiting to collapse and you don’t want to be standing on them when they do. Before we climbed up on the field, Anton made us all feel the lava. It’s very rough and spiky, a bit like evil Velcro, like a black cactus of death. This lava came up from the bottom of the magma chamber. Magma separates in the chamber – the lighter stuff, rhyolite and pumice and whatnot floats to the top and the magma at the bottom is heavy and full of heavy metals like iron and magnesium, which is why this lava is so black. I brought a tiny piece back – by Anton’s calculations, there’s enough for every person on earth to take 740kg but I only picked up a pebble and even that, I managed to scratch my hand on when I put it in my pocket. It’s partly molten rock and partly molten iron and partly all sorts of things. We were to take the walk slowly and carefully – you do not want to fall over on this stuff.

Up we went. The climb up was a little bit awkward, the step down in order to get up onto the top was worse and then there we were, on top of a fresh lava field. It was steaming gently in some of the many cracks and if you stood in front of some of them, heat just came out like you were standing near a bonfire. We gathered round and Anton showed us just how hot it is barely inches beneath the surface by the simple method of tipping two bottles of water down there – an immediate steam explosion. Well, small explosion. A litre of water isn’t enough to blow the lava field apart but it makes a very impressive steam cloud.

Two years I’ve been watching this eruption and now I’m standing on it. Right here where colossal rivers of lava were flowing less than two years ago and I’m standing on it. There’s a piece of it in my pocket. We’re in the middle of nowhere – we’ve travelled so far south from Mývatn that we’re now closer to the south coast than the north and it’s the 100 km of huge glacier that’s stopping tourism coming up here from the south. Glacier all along the southern horizon, Interior all along the north. White glacier, black lava, grey sand. It’s my birthday and I’m standing on my own lava field.

We went back to Drekki for lunch, where the weather was nice enough to sit and look at Drekagil and write down a few of the things Anton had said. I’d eaten most of my lunch in the car on the way down, so I wasn’t really hungry by then.

The next stop, the big one of the day for everyone else, was the Askja caldera. It’s about 9km from Drekki, you park in a big car park in the prehistoric caldera and then you walk a good long way into and across the current caldera. I sort of knew what a caldera was but now I properly know. It’s a collapsed magma chamber. In Askja’s case, it had this big caldera, where you stand in the middle of the volcano and there’s a ring of mountains around you, miles away, and then in the 1875 eruption, half of that caldera collapsed and was flooded and there’s now a huge dark blue lake. On the shore is a smaller crater, Víti, flooded with milky blue water. The heat in the volcano keeps that water warm enough to swim in, as I did on my birthday three years ago but on that day, the entire caldera was filled with cloud and you couldn’t see anything. I enjoyed my swim hugely but there was snow in the crater and climbing down it was incredibly difficult and muddy and scary, and the walk to and from the car was cold and wet and exhausting and I fell further and further behind every time we encountered a snow field on the walk.

This time, it was a beautiful day. We ambled across the caldera, stopping to look at rocks and talk about eruptions. Anton showed us a board explaining how the calderas formed and about the lake and as we ambled onwards, Olafur said “So the water level is decreasing?” “No,” said Anton, “why would you think that?” “The sign said so, because of rock falls and landslides and gravel and things falling in.” Anton agreed, reluctantly, that this was so although when I’d had time to think properly about it, it occurred to me that surely that should raise the water levels. That’s Archimedes in his bath, surely? But it roused something in the corner of my brain.

“Wasn’t there a big landslide in there recently?” I asked and Anton just looked at me.

“You have done your history properly,” he said and proceeded to explain that yes, at 2am on July 23rd 2014, a landslide equal to a third of the mountain around the lake had fallen in, causing a tsunami, with waves 45 metre high which had forever altered the shape of the lake. And I was pretty pleased that he was impressed, although it was only something I half-remembered, something that had happened while I was watching Bárðarbungar, which hadn’t been as interesting as the impending eruption but which had nonetheless stuck a tiny memory in my mind.

Soon we were almost at the far side of the caldera and Anton suddenly ordered us all to look at our feet. Keep walking but don’t look up and I will tell you when to stop and look up. I knew what he wanted us to see and I was excited – remember, last time I was here I could barely see the person walking in front of me. I stopped when ordered and looked up.

And there it was – steep Víti, right in front of me, the navy-blue Öskuvatn behind it and multi-coloured mountains ringing the whole thing. This was the view I’d seen on so many postcards, this was the view I hadn’t been able to see for myself before and it was magnificent. It was so beautiful. And beyond those mountains is the great grey Desert of Misdeeds.

We had an hour or so to enjoy the caldera. Some people who’d brought towels descended Víti and went for a swim. Having not realised we would have the time, I’d left mine in the bus but I ambled Víti’s rim, taking in the view. The lake is terrifying – 217m deep and it’ll suck you down. Two scientists went out on it in a boat once and vanished. I thought that was during the 60s but Anton said it was around 1907. The scientists had an apprentice who was investigating the mountains on the north of the caldera and came back to find his colleagues and the boat missing. There were no roads in that day, no communications. He stayed in the caldera on his own for two weeks before rescue teams turned up and to this day, there’s no signs of the two men in a boat. They did wonder if anything would be washed ashore during the tsunami two years ago but nothing. Of course, there are other explanations than “the lake dragged them under” but I don’t think anyone’s brave enough to go and test that. Stay away from the big scary lake.

It started to rain as we started to walk back across the caldera. I had my waterproof jacket on but it had so much camera stuff in the pockets that it wouldn’t do up. I’d left my waterproof trousers at home because I forgot about them at 6.30 in the morning and soon my legs were so cold that they were numb. Well, there’s only one thing you can do – walk faster and hope the blood flow brings back the feeling.

It was a good walk – I was impressed at the pace I kept up over that distance, across snow, up hill, soaking wet, blind because my glasses are useless in the rain, and keeping well ahead of Anton and half the group, back to the car to take off all the wet layers and warm up. Of course, sixteen damp people in a vehicle warm up pretty quickly and we had to open windows to keep the windscreen clear enough to get down the mountain.

We didn’t stop on the way home. Anton made the most of having a huge vehicle with a V8 and wheels the size of – well, massive wheels – and we just flew over that desert. Even so, we had to stop for two maniacs in Dusters. Anton pulled over to let them pass, muttering “crazy… crazy… You know the story of the turtle and the hare? We’ll meet them at the river…” and then we met them less than ten minutes later, with one of their people out of the car guiding the driver to pass a jeep coming the other way. Anton and the driver of the other jeep exchanged “aren’t they useless?” looks as we passed them without anyone having to get out and wave, and then he said to the bus in general “Told you”. However, we didn’t see them again. Maybe they went off towards Mordor. We didn’t. We carried on through the pumice, round Herðubreið and finally stopped at the rapids, as promised. They’re very impressive rapids, carving a narrow canyon that’s going to be a big deep ravine one day and I managed to be impressed by them even though I was warm and sleepy from sitting in the car for so long.

The main road seemed such a long way away. We crossed rivers, we crossed that horrible lava field, we crossed at the oasis, we bounced along the desert, along the foot of the mountains in the part of the Odaðahraun that now seemed so tame and yet we didn’t seem to be getting close to the Ring Road. I had started thinking that until the first stream crossing, this road was actually much better than the east road to Dettifoss that I drove down two years ago. This is an F road, which conventional cars are legally not allowed on – until the ford, how is this road any worse than that other road, which merely doesn’t have an F in front of it? But we weren’t at the end of it. Sand turned to lava, to sand, to boulders, to lava, to sand – every kind of Interior landscape was represented between that ford and Hrossaborg, which was where we made our final stop of the day. I’ve wanted to get a closer look at Hrossaborg for a little while – it’s the big distinctive-looking crater that stars in Oblivion along with Tom Cruise but the car park off the Ring Road which is the closest I’m legally allowed to get to it, is at the wrong angle and you can’t see its shape. But we were driving up to it, and then we were driving through a river (“There’s a secret road, which I don’t think those other jeeps know about. It’s a road!”) and into the crater. It is indeed a road – there’s a car park at the end. Inside the crater itself, it’s flooded. Not flooded like the Askja caldera, more like the sort of marsh you don’t want to go in without very tall wellies. We gathered in a circle in the car park and celebrated our day in the Interior with Brennivin, Iceland’s national spirit. It’s traditionally drunk in one of three ways. 1) Ice cold as a shot with cubes of rotten shark 2) Put a coin in a cup, pour in coffee until you can’t see the coin and then pour in Brennivin until you can 3) With coke.

Another half an hour took us back to Mývatn. It was 9.30. We’d been out for thirteen and a half hours and by the time I’d stocked up on food – Monday is a national holiday and I don’t know exactly what that means for shopping – and driven home, it was 10.30. Not that 10.30pm looks much different from a summer afternoon at home.

Since I have to be at the information centre at Reykjavhlið at 8am on Sunday, it made sense to be in the Mývatn area this weekend – not that Stórutjarnir is “the Mývatn area”. It’s at least a fifty minute drive, although that’s very much under the speed limits. I only picked up my car late last night. I’m still not entirely sure where the edges are and I’m still watching my mirrors closely to make sure I don’t hit anything coming the wrong way or slide off the edge of the road. It’s not even a big car – I have a Polo and I’m still a little bit nervous about it. I’m still hitting the door if I try to change gear without pre-planning it and I keep forgetting to take the handbrake off, presumably because last year, the Golf I had came equipped with an electronic one. Funny how easily you can slip back into a habit you maintained for two weeks a whole year ago.

Anyway. I was in the Mývatn area and what I wanted to do was go and have a proper look at Leirhnjúkur, a great black lava field caused by the Krafla Fires of 1977-1984, which is still steaming. To my knowledge there are only three fresh steaming lava fields in Iceland. Heimaey, which I went to in 2012, erupted in 1972 and is still hot to the touch. Leirhnjúkur, where I was today, and Holuhraun, which is tomorrow’s big outing and big excitement. But I’ll tell you all about Holuhraun tomorrow.

I stopped first at Víti, a flooded crater where the Mývatn Fires started in 1724. It was created in a single explosion, flooded with water so bright blue that my camera just can’t capture it and according to the pack of local information in my room, “the water in the crater was boiling for a century after the explosion”. Nearly three hundred years later, it’s not boiling. At least, it’s not bubbling and there’s no steam but it’s such a steep, deep crater that it would be pretty dangerous to try to get down to the water and I just bet some tourists have done just that in the last week. Víti has a footpath around it so you can look at the blue water from every angle but the path is sticky – it’s thick clay that sticks to your shoes. I opted to wear my sandals and there was more clay than footwear attached to my foot. It was trying to drag the things off, I could feel the straps digging into my feet as they clung on. It’s impossible to scrape the stuff off. There’s nothing to scrape them on and there’s no hope for “oh, I’ll find a stick later and scrape off the clay”. Iceland has next to no trees and thus next to no sticks. What I did find, much later on, was a shower. Just a random shower next to the road, showering hot water for years on end, for I’ve seen this shower before. I have no idea what the purpose of it is. It’s formed quite a deep puddle around it and out of range of the falling water, there’s thick green fluffy algae. If you’ve got good boots on, you can just about reach into the shower and the moving water but it’s not strong enough to wash off clay. A lukewarm puddle – and that’s a novelty in itself – did the job a little better, with the help of a chunk of pumice for scraping.

Once I’d seen all I needed to see of Víti, I headed over to the other car park for my trip to Leirhnjúkur but first, because it was raining a bit, I had my lunch sitting in the car. Nice fresh mini-baguette from the supermarket at Reykjahlið, buttered, with Babybels that I’d brought with me, and very tasty it was too. When I’d eaten and the weather looked marginally better, I put on all the clothes I had with me, because it was still pretty black over Bill’s mother’s, and pretty windy and pretty chilly and off I went.

Leirhnjúkur is endlessly interesting. I already knew the story of the church at Reykjahlið – that lava approached it during an eruption and the village prayed for the church to be saved from the onslaught, and lo, it was saved. Almost every village in Iceland has a story like that. At Reykjahlið it’s come so close to the church walls that it almost looks like the plot was dug out of the lava to build the church but no, it really did divert itself around it. It turns out this lava came from the fissures at Leirhnjúkur, which re-opened in 1977 and created this huge black Therim Pel of a lava field (please just read that book and save me explaining that reference for the hundredth time).

From the car park you walk across a bumpy field of mossy pillow lava, along the bottom of a great bald orange and white steaming hill and across a boardwalk before you find yourself at one end of Leirhnjúkir.The boardwalk is fun – most of it is reasonably well anchored and makes a noise like a boot hitting a plank but some of them have just enough suspension to make a noise like a xylophone, because technically it is an enormous xylophone, so I made a point of walking heavily to try and produce some sort of music as I made my way up.

The first landmark is a great milky-blue lake. It looks amazing, it looks perfect for a swim and if the bubbling mud-puddles around the edge and the steam are anything to go by, it would literally take your skin off. It’s another place where my camera just can’t capture the colours. White-blue water, orange and white streaked hills, sky changing colour from black to blue every thirty seconds. And then you can pick your direction to go and get acquainted with Leirhnjúkur. I like to go straight up, climb over the rubble, look at the little steaming crater and then make my way down to the viewpoint where I took my lovely selfie last year. The rock is beautiful – there’s one particular boulder that’s streaked in red and green and purple and blue and yellow, and it’s all pumice so it crunches under your feet like you’re walking across a bowl of Rice Krispies. From the viewpoint, the lava field stretches out for miles and it’s still steaming. This thing erupted before I was born and it’s still so hot that the ground is steaming. There are marked paths through it – either obvious paths or yellow marker pegs to show the way and those places aren’t hot but step too far off the path and you might find out how hot it really is.

I crossed the upper field and made my way down into the bit I missed last year, where it spreads across the heath. It’s very interesting. Lots of cones, lots of large boulders, lots of collapsed bubbles, a large conical crater with one side missing, chunks of it very obviously on the ground next to it. Rock so hot it had melted was flowing out of there thirty-two years ago. Fountains of fire were shooting up into the air, scattering pieces of pumice all over the place. And at the same time, someone had the bright idea of opening a geothermal power station. To be fair, the idea came before the eruption but the construction happened more or less simultaneously. In fact, one of the boreholes exploded somewhere on the mountainside and made a new crater which they named “Homemade Hell” (Víti, a popular crater name, means hell. I saw Krafla’s Víti today and I’m going to see Askja’s Víti tomorrow.) Due to the ongoing eruption there were some hiccups with the building of the power station but these days it’s up and running very nicely, looking quite space-age with all the red domes and silver tubes running around the mountainside.

I enjoyed Leirhnjúkur very much and was quite disappointed when my path led me back to that boiling little lake at the top of the boardwalk. My guidebook describes Leirhnjúkur as “compellingly grotesque” and I totally disagree. It looks a bit eerie if you look across it, a sea of black molten rock, but once you’re in the middle of it, it’s a spectacular and fresh lava field. It’s beautiful, for a given definition of beautiful. I might have to go to the Westman Islands sometime this week and drool over the Eldfell lava field, and the fact that half the island just wasn’t there forty-five years ago.

The weather had been very Icelandic as I wandered. A big black cloud would come over, sprinkle us with rain and then vanish, leaving bright hot sunshine and all the while, there was a cold wind. With five layers on my top half, I was alternately reasonably warm and far too hot but my legs were frozen. Fortunately, I already knew where I was going after Leirhnjúkur.

If you’re not as interested in lava fields as I am, then Mývatn’s big draw is probably going to be the Nature Baths. These are no more natural than the Blue Lagoon, its big sister in the south. The geothermal power plant next door creates a lot of waste hot water which is then piped across the road and put in a big hole for tourists to wallow in. It’s utterly impossible not to compare the Nature Baths and the Blue Lagoon and I’ve already done it half a dozen times but I think I’m inclined to prefer the Nature Baths because of their view. The Blue Lagoon’s black lava mountainlets are very nice but from the Nature Baths, you can see an orange live volcano on one side – indeed, the Baths are on its slopes – and on the other side, there are craters and lava all the way down to the lake and then views across the lake to the plains and mountains on the other side. You’re raised above the view rather than sunken beneath it. It’s not as busy as the Blue Lagoon but on the other hand, it’s a lot smaller so it feels full more easily. There’s no swim-up bar but you can buy a “beer bracelet” on the way in and the staff will deliver beer to you on request. There are no private shower cubicles for the Obligatory Naked Shower and today, there was a lady attempting to enforce that while also trying to keep the floors clear of the black sandy gunge that gets brought inside on people’s feet. I only heard her enforcing it in English. Surprise, surprise. Europeans are more used to that sort of thing. The British pretend they don’t understand and sneak out without washing properly.

The weather was still very Icelandic – rain, sun, wind, in an endless circle. I tried to keep underneath the warm water but I’ve still come out with bright pink shoulders. I didn’t visit the steam rooms because they’re just too hot but I did make a visit to the hot pot – by which I mean “concrete hot trough”. Nature Baths, you’re the premier hot water thing within six hours, get a better hot pot! Everywhere else has proper round tubs, usually at least two of them, in assorted temperatures. It’s time you grew out of a trough.

Presently, I began to feel too hot. These sort of things are especially good on cold days; on a hot day, it’s just too hot, and I was getting hungry. I climbed out, considered buying some postcards for my scrapbook, decided I was not joining the queue, which had grown from non-existent when I arrived to out of the door, and went home.

Well, I stopped at the supermarket in Reykjahlið to see if they had any more baguettes (they didn’t) and at Goðafoss (I’d stopped there on the way, and I’ve stopped there every time I’ve passed between Mývatn and Akureyri, so I’ve seen it more times than I’ve seen Gulfoss on the Golden Circle and yet I always stop again) and decided it was too cold to do more than wave at it, so I had a look in the shop/café by the petrol pumps and then came home. Food, and then it was time to hop in the hotel pool.

I keep saying “hotel” and I keep feeling like it’s inaccurate. The Edda chain are boarding schools and colleges, mostly in the countryside although Akureyri and Egilsstaðir are cities by Icelandic standards. Fifty-five years ago, they were dormitories but now they’re twin rooms with shared bathrooms, lived in by school children and students during the rest of the year. It’s student accommodation and at Stórutjarnir, not only are there views down the valley, past the lake (tjarn is a lake or pond – it’s the same root as the Scottish tarn) and across to Goðafoss. You can’t actually see the falls because they’ve cut a canyon but you can generally see a cloud of spray rising up to show you exactly where they are. This particular school also has its own swimming pool and hot pot. The hot pot is 38-40° and the swimming pool is the coldest I’ve ever encountered in Iceland. It’s open until 10pm and it’s usually pretty quiet. If you’re lucky you get it to yourself; if you’re not, there’s usually only one other group in there, usually with a small child or two. Today there was a French family with a smallish baby and later, a Polish family with a daughter of three or four who was utterly incapable of not falling into two feet of water and nearly drowning. She did it twice in under two minutes, had to be rescued twice and eventually had armbands put on her and was put in the swimming pool. A child who can’t not drown in a shallow hot pot should not be trusted in a swimming pool, even a shallowish one. How hard is it to just not fall under the water? Can you be trusted with a bowl of soup?

With every towel soaked, I now have to hope that everything is nice and dry for the morning. If I need to be departing Reykjahlið at 8am, I’m going to need to be out of here just before seven. That is a horrifyingly early morning on your birthday.

Today started earlier than I would have liked considering it was a lunchtime flight and I was already at Heathrow. However, for Excellent Reasons, I was flying out of Gatwick.

My flight next week is coming back into Heathrow, arriving quite late and it seemed to make more sense to run around between airports on the outward journey, when I had the time in the morning rather than on the way home.

I got up, moved as much of my food as I could from my hand luggage into my hold luggage, pushing it up to 17.1kg in the process. That’s a lot considering I don’t really have much luggage but it includes my tent and camping stuff. This is why I’m sceptical about people who talk about “lightweight backpacking”, who think you can get all your camping stuff in a bag half the size of my hand luggage.

Let’s just run back to yesterday. I stopped in Ferndown for fuel, discovered that their pumps aren’t long enough to reach around the car if you go to the wrong side and that the minimum delivery isn’t 2 litres because I managed to pay for 150ml, most of which splattered all over the floor. From Ferndown, my satnav app claimed it was an hour and a half to Purple Parking at Heathrow which seemed wildly optimistic, especially as it was claiming half an hour by the time I reached Fleet. And yet I don’t think it was too wrong.

Purple Parking T2 is less urban than the one I used last year. From J3 on the M4, you turn left, right, left, left, find yourself in a narrow residential street (with two houses strung with blue and silver lights – just hanging from the roof, hanging straight down, covering windows and all) and at the end is a single-lane tunnel-bridge and then… if it wasn’t for the tunnel, I’d say it was an industrial estate that was recently flattened, except that the tunnel won’t admit anything larger than a minibus. A field? I don’t really like handing over my car keys to a stranger but at least the other Purple Parking looked like a real car park rather than a field being turned into a temporary car park by an opportunistic local as a large music festival approaches.

And then there’s the real fun – getting into a minibus alone with a stranger in the middle of industrial west London. The minibuses are supposed to run to T2 but since I needed a Hotel Hoppa bus, it didn’t matter to me which I went to, so he dropped me off at T3.

I couldn’t find the Hoppas. So off I went, carrying my bag, sometimes dragging it, thinking that it didn’t feel as light as it had when I left home, and made my way to the Central Bus Station. That’s not where Hoppas go. A nice National Express lady told me to go to T2 bus stop 9, demanded that I put my luggage on a trolley and off I went back to where I should have been in the first place.

So this morning I took the Hoppa bus from the hotel back to the airport, loaded my 17+ kilos onto a trolley and bounded off to the Central Bus Station. For some reason, I’d booked my coach from T4, the only terminal I wasn’t going anywhere near, so I enquired whether I could still get on the coach from the bus station. I could but it would be a different coach, a 230 instead of a 747 and my ticket got a bright orange Authorisation to Travel sticker stuck on it proclaiming that I could get on a coach that wasn’t the one I’d booked.

The coach didn’t smell good but as long as I didn’t breathe too much, it was quite pleasant. I quite enjoyed being at lorry-level on the motorway, noticing that the entire drive, I only spotted one driver with both hands on the steering wheel.
I flew from North Terminal – the one that seems to be halfway through a major building project. The trolleys here are coin-operated. I didn’t bring any UK coins so no trolley for me. However, when I checked in, I was upgraded to Economy Comfort and given a lounge invitation. The only thing is that it does appear this particular lounge is open to the general public and I probably could have ambled in without the invitation.

Still, it’s quite exciting to help myself to juice and cake and sit in a big spinning armchair in front of a huge TV and know that I get a special seat when I get on my plane. I asked why I’d been upgraded but the nice man who checked me in didn’t know. But it didn’t seem to be happening everywhere – he had to go on a tour of all the check-in desks in search of a lounge invitation.
Economy Comfort it may be but I’m pretty sure I was sitting in the Saga seats – the magazine said the seating in Economy Comfort is 3+3 but with the middle seats kept empty to give you more room and the Saga seating is 2+2 and there were definitely only two seats, wider than normal, with more legroom than normal (and a longer stretch to the screens). I was given complementary headphones, the offer of free food and drinks, a little basket of chocolates was brought round and I turned left as I boarded the plane for the first time ever. I dimly remember I once booked an Economy Comfort seat instead of plain Economy because it was £2 more expensive and I thought I could manage that but even then, I don’t remember turning left. I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever been on a plane that had an option to turn left.
The downside – and it would have happened whichever seat I was in – was that our slot was delayed. We sat just outside the gate for ages and then we sat near the top of the runway for ages. Initially, the screens weren’t on and we were getting bored but even so, by the time our wheels left the tarmac, I’d already watched 46 minutes of Kingsman.

Having started the film so long before we actually started flying, it was finished nearly an hour and a half before we landed. I’m used to having time for one episode of something or other (Two Broke Girls on my first several flights) and then a couple of Shaun the Sheeps (now not available) but I had so long. I tried watching The Flash but I don’t know anything about it or him and the first episode available was number seven, so I gave up on it. I started watching the first episode of Sherlock but by the time they found the dead lady in pink, we were coming over the south coast of Iceland and that’s much more exciting than Benedict Cumberbatch with much bigger eyebrows than I remember. I saw Vatnajökull and Eyjafjallajökull and various rivers emptying themselves messily into the north Atlantic and then we were coming over Reykjanes. I think it’s the first time I’ve had a really good at Reykjanes from above. It looks so flat, with very obvious volcanic ridges, continental cracks visible from the air, huge bald swathes, little patches of volcanoes rising up here and there, and the Blue Lagoon is little more than a smudge. Meanwhile, on the horizon ahead of us Snæfellsjökull was looking perfect, Esja and Akranesfjall off to my right. We flew out over the Atlantic, swooped round in a long slow loop – I’d never really seen exactly where Keflavik is, or that the runway more or less runs north-south. That’s a pain for flights from Europe which come from the south-east and flights from the Americas which come from the south-west. As we came round, we’d lost enough altitude for Reykjanes to suddenly become 3D – those volcanoes were suddenly soaring from the lava field, the Blue Lagoon and Svartsengi, the power station next door, were sending up columns of white steam, houses and waves and boats became visible and then boulders and then we were coming down on the runway.

I haven’t been to Iceland for a year. Keflavik has changed a lot. I knew the departure area was changing – that was already a work in progress but now all the signs have changed from yellow on black to a rainbow of colours on black. The little mini supermarket has now turned into two separate booths for Flybus and Airport Express and the supermarket now occupies the corner where the tourist information was. The door I used to go out of is now an emergency-only door and where there used to be one or two of each kind of bus, there is now a great long line because there are now so many flights that the buses don’t meet the flights – they just have a row of buses waiting for the constant progression of passengers.

I got on the Flybus – Reykjavik Excursions. I’ve always gone with Airport Express – Greyline, previously Iceland Excursions and I feel sort of guilty but they don’t drop off at the Domestic Airport.

Unlike my National Express this morning which was more than half empty, this bus was full. I don’t particularly enjoy sitting squished in next to a stranger, half my luggage on my lap, trying to see over the top of it and people’s heads to see what’s out the window.

I wish I didn’t have to be dropped off at the Domestic Airport. When my first flight was delayed, I was worried about missing the connection. Needn’t have bothered. I had two and a half hours to kill at an airport with nothing but a row of seats and yet I had no other option, not with my luggage. There’s nowhere to store it and you can’t really walk to this particular airport. I’ve walked from the closest public bus stop before and it’s a long way if you’ve got luggage. That was fine for the first hour, when I hadn’t eaten all day. I sat and ate. But there’s still another hour to wait.

The Edda at Storu Tjarnir, my ultimate destination tonight, only has wifi in the violently green lounge downstairs. I land in Akureyri at 9pm, then I have to pick up a car and drive half an hour or so. I don’t think I’ll fancy sitting in the lounge at midnight updating my blog so this is it for Friday.