I dithered a bit over what to do with my last day in Iceland. I knew I wanted to end up at a campsite at Keflavik but really, I’d left myself a little bit too long to do the south coast – maybe should have used one of those days in the east. I’d considered hiking out to the volcano, if it was still going but it was declared over a few days ago and a cold, finished crater isn’t that exciting. I considered the Blue Lagoon. And then I decided on Laugarvatn Fontana. I missed Fontana on my last two winter trips – the bus failed to pick me up the first time and then it got cancelled the second time – and it’s nice, and it’s relatively quiet.

It’s also undergoing major renovations. At the moment, that’s a new service building, with bigger and better changing rooms etc (and the changing rooms are already improved by finally getting electronic wristbands – didn’t have them last time I was here three years ago, and this is Iceland’s third-oldest geothermal tourist-oriented experience). Later on, the baths will be completely transformed, and probably not before time, not now it has to compete with nine other lagoons rather than two. It was also incredibly hot. Fontana has a few places to shelter – the black stone art in the pool makes a surprisingly good sunshade, and the changing room-end of Viska gets shaded by the overhanging roof at the right time of day.

I stayed there three hours. I was getting hungry and getting concerned about being cooked so I went up to the little shop in Laugarvatn and bought some bread and eventually reached the nice little picnic area not far from Selfoss where you can see two rivers of completely different colour and texture meet. It was very windy – too windy to sit at the picnic table and enjoy the view. Too windy even to sit with the van door open.

So then I ploughed on to Njardvik, to the Happy Campers campsite, which is a little square of land next to the Happy Campers rental place. It’s very basic and populated almost entirely by people who have early flights. Someone arrived at quarter to three in the morning and I’m pretty sure there was a car there at 5am that hadn’t been there at 3. I arrived, did my washing up, went for my walk – Njardvik has some Grand Designs-style houses on the seafront – and then pretty much went to bed, although when I got up at 11pm, there was a spectacular massive orange moonrise.

I’d set an alarm for 6am but someone was making a racket at just after 5 so I got up. It had taken the best part of an hour to collect the van. I needed to get the sleeping bag back into the big bag, I needed to finish a litre of apple juice and drop off the van and wait for the shuttle and queue to hand over my big bag at the airport.

And that was all done by 6:34. Well, my options were to be bored in the airport for three hours before boarding, fly home, drive three/three and a half hours home, then go for a walk – or walk around the airport car park, be bored in the airport for two hours, fly, drive and then get home and go straight in the bath. So I loaded my so-called hand luggage onto a trolley and walked around the airport car park. As I was returning, I met some Americans who wanted to know about car rental – as in where is it. The shuttle buses go from the other end of the airport but if you’re after the companies you can see across the car park, you just walk across to them. They were after Hertz and I’m 99% sure you’re supposed to walk to them, especially as the person at the kiosk had pointed them in this direction but they were very reluctant to believe they had to walk.

There’s a group of Guides in international neckerchiefs here at the airport – Nottingham County, and several of them are wearing two or even three neckerchiefs. I have a suspicion that some of them are wearing Scout ones as well as the international ones and a light blue one that might be a trip neckerchief or a local one. Security was a bit slow but never stopped moving and now I’m sitting outside the bookshop with a little table waiting nearly two hours for my gate to be announced. Better to be bored at the airport than risk missing the flight.

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.

First job in Höfn was a full restock and after a bank holiday, everyone else apparently had the same idea – there were more campers parked at the Nettó than at the campsite. I topped up my fuel just in case then got on the road. I was going all of twenty minutes north to Hoffell hot tubs, which belong to a pleasant little country hotel. There are four of them, two a little cooler and two a little hotter, with views up the valley to a tongue of Vatnajökull. Two German ladies arrived at the same time as me and when they’d finished taking their selfies, they switched on some tuneless tinny music – just the perfect background to a scene like that! Fortunately they had the sense to ask if it was disturbing and I was brave enough to say “kind of – don’t you want to just experience this landscape?” and they turned it off. Later I got chatting to a Czech girl and she said that the moment the music went on, her sister said (in Czech and quietly) “I don’t want to listen to music!” so it’s not just me.
There are three of them – the mum was 60 last year and this might be their last holiday together. The older sister is a doctor who is starting to want babies and the younger sister is a student (PhD student studying biomedicine and just back from a project in Romania on nanofibres). They’re driving the Ring Road in the opposite direction to me so I’ve been told about horses and the best places to see seals and puffins, and I’ve told them they’ll see more and more sheep over the next few days and that Stokksnes and Stuðlagil are worth the time.

Then I drove onwards. There’s no shelter and it was very hot and sunny and I began to feel quite pink – one of the German ladies was noticeably redder about the arms than when she arrived. It’s quite a long drive along Vatnajökull with some nice picnic spots but nothing in particular to see or do until Jökulsárlón.
Parking there is a nightmare. It’s very beautiful – this is at least the fourth time I’ve been there but it’s still otherworldly to see those icebergs. When I’d had enough of the lagoon, I walked under the bridge to Breiðamerkusandur (may have got a couple of vowels in the wrong place there), which tourists call Diamond Beach for the chunks of ice that wash up there. No one ever mentions the occasionally half-a-dead-fish. I spent more time watching the water. The sea is violent here, probably as much so as Reynisfjara, where another tourist died recently. The waves suddenly wash ten feet higher up the sand than you expect and when they roll back, you see that the beach is steeper than you realise. Sneaker waves conditions and yet there are no warning signs and you never hear of accidents here. I think the difference is that at Breiðamerkursandur, the diamonds are washed up on the shoreline so everyone’s attention is on the sea. At Reynisfjara, people are looking at the basalt cliff and the black sand and don’t realise the sea is sneaking up behind them. Just a theory.
Then onwards to Skaftafell. I found myself a corner where at least I can open the van door to a mountain view rather than another van three feet away. Van camping is very different – space is at a premium so camping in one is like being in a car park. My neighbour on the other side is closer than I’d like and I have someone close enough behind me that I hope he leaves before me in the morning.
Normally I’d walk down to the glacier but there’s been a heavy cloud over the mountain since Jökulsárlón so instead I ate and read in the van. Hoping it’ll be better in the morning (even though by the time I’m writing this, it is morning).

I made an enemy and a friend last night. The people in the caravan opposite took their dog out and when it came back, they clipped it to a long rope and it roamed around outside – until it caught sight of me in my van with the door open. There’s a line in Good Omens that goes something along the lines of “a growl that started in the back of one throat and finished in the back of someone else’s” and that’s exactly what this dog did. When it had barked furiously at me for a few minutes, the owner came out to see what was going on and I came out to assure the dog I wasn’t scary. It’s a big black lab. It didn’t take much to become friends. His name is Mason and the owners are from Hafnarfjörður, trying out a hired caravan and using Eskifjörður as a base.

Today didn’t start brilliantly. Because it’s a bank holiday, the pool was closed so no early swim to make up for a lack of late one yesterday. Google Maps said the one two villages around the next fjord on the Ring Road at Stöðvarfjörður would be open – but it wasn’t! Ok, well, the roadside hot tubs outside Djúpivogar have to be. Nope! They’re dried out and empty and with a “closed” sign on the well, owing to an investigation into the hot water.

I carried on. Today was always going to be a long driving day. It’s only a couple of hours to Djúpivogur, not far enough to stop, and then there’s nothing until Höfn.

Actually, there is. There’s a tunnel that cuts through Vestrahorn (it bends and I slightly scraped a tyre on the kerb in there last year – I get on with this van so much better that I know where its edges are, so no repeat of that this year) and immediately after it is the turning to Stokksnes, which is an Instagram favourite and a place I’ve never been.
It’s a headland with a craggy mountain which reflects in the wet black sand. What Instagram doesn’t mention is that you have to stop at the cafe at the end of the gravel road, pay a service fee and get a QR code to open the barrier down to this view. Nor does it mention:

• the Viking village (abandoned film set)
• the radar station
• the sea views with potential seals

My next job after writing this is to find out what the village was built for. The beach is nice – kind of like North Devon in that it’s huge and square and the sea is miles away. Normal people hop from sandbank to sandbank. I wade. Of course, the water is never deeper than about halfway up my foot and it’s surprisingly warm. I guess it’s shallow, it’s lying on black sand and the sun’s been on it all day.
I took my reflection photos, went to the village, walked around down at the headland and had a cup of hot chocolate back in the cafe. Then onwards to Höfn. It was pretty early but Höfn has a pool and the next pool if I skip Höfn isn’t until Vík. Anyway, if it’s not open tonight, I can at least go first thing tomorrow, I can stock up on juice and top up my fuel – I’ve almost definitely got enough to get to Vík but when you’re going to be driving a stretch of coast like this, it feels silly to risk passing fuel, especially when my last fill was yesterday morning in Mývatn. Mývatn to Vík is a very long way. Normally I’d have got some in Egilsstaðir but I still had more than 7/8s of a tank at that point – the first eighth burns so much slower than the rest.

Höfn is only 20-30 minutes from Stokksnes, on the other side of the fjord and you can see the mountains from the campsite. In the other direction, you can see Vatnajökull, Iceland’s biggest glacier and Europe’s if you don’t count the massive one halfway along Russia’s north coast. There are three “storeys” of van parking with patches of fake grass between them. I dare say someone will park on one of those patches at some point before midnight but for now I have a garden to cook pasta in (once I’d bought a new gas canister; I tried making pasta at Hverir and it just wouldn’t boil. Took the canister out this afternoon and shook it. Completely empty).

The pool was open and it’s just a six minute walk away – although as already demonstrated, I’ll walk quite a long way to save my precious van space. I alternated between sitting in the cooler of the two hot tubs (37-39° or 38-40° depending on which sign you chose to trust) and swimming lengths. Their lane pool is much warmer than Akureyri’s!

Back for pasta, washing up, trying out the wifi, updating blog & scrapbook, reading and bed. Hopefully some roadside hot tubs tomorrow.

There were a few things I wanted to do around Myvatn – a proper look at Dimmuborgir after a long time away, a trip down to Skutustadir to see the pseudocraters and maybe climb Hverfell. So up I got and eventually, out I went.

Dimmuborgir, The Dark Fortress, is a lava formation formed when “chimneys” of lava rose up through molten lava over bog. The molten lava drained away and the chimneys stayed, resulting in a lava field of many random towers and hills, threaded these days with footpaths and small birch trees. I had a slight alterecation with a French tour group – how did I ever think tour groups didn’t come to the north?? There’s a feature, a hole in a cliff and carved out steps to climb up to it. Naturally, everyone wants to take photos there. There was a lady coming down, one who absolutely shouldn’t need a man holding onto each arm to get down but did. I’d already paused at the bottom for the photo-takers to do their pictures (I loved the kid with a broad American accent who yelled “Mom, chill!” in response to a mother panicking in Chinese over her coming down the steps alone) and then started to come up as this lady started to come down. Three abreast, I stopped to let them pass and naturally, because tour groups have neither brains nor manners, a tourist pushed past us all, followed by an entire coachload of tourists. Irritated, I sat on a rock at the top and waited until they told me in no uncertain French to move. So I moved. Was I here first? Never mind. Yeah, I’ll wait. Then a tour guide in a branded jacket came up to help move on the last few – and take some photos in a ballet position in the hole, who again looked at me like I was the one inconveniencing her, and not like she was the one who’d pushed past and monopolised the photo op for five solid minutes at the expense of her abandoned group. You want maybe twenty seconds for a selfie around here and find yourself being shoved around by a tour group for twenty minutes and they think they’re not the problem.

Beyond the hole was more lava field, beyond the bounds of Dimmuborgir but interesting nonetheless – and naturally, the tourists didn’t follow. Off the bus, take their photos, back on the bus, off to the next place, rinse, repeat, no interest or curiosity required whatsoever. Meanwhile, I meandered around the lava taking all the selfies I wanted.

The other feature of interest at Dimmuborgir is the Church, a bubble once blown in the lava which remains as a spherical hole. There was no one here so I set up my camera and took some pictures using my phone as a remote control, until a tourist couple turned up. I retrieved my camera and vanished into the bubble and they waited patiently and politely. Emerging on the other side of the bubble, I tried the rock tripod technique again and failing, another passing tourist offered to take pictures for me. I still haven’t looked at them but they’ll be better than wonky too-close rock tripod pictures or arms-length selfies.

I spent two hours and four kilometres walking around (and beyond) Dimmuborgir before returning to the van for a little lunch. Then I drove off to Skutustadir, the other place on my to-do list. I’ve always meant to stop here and never managed. Skutustadir is famous for its pseudocraters. They look like craters, little round hills with a hole in the middle, but they’re actually not craters at all. They’re bubbles again, bubbles formed by lava hitting marshland. The steam thrown up by this meeting inflates the ground and here we still are. These pseudocraters have collapsed in the middle but I saw some earlier in the week and I know there are some on the south coast that are perfect perky little round hills, topped with tufts of grass grown with the fertiliser deposited there by the birds that like to sit on the highest point to look around.

More lunch, better lunch, in the van. It was incredibly windy and I didn’t fancy moving. I certainly didn’t fancy climbing Hverfell. I stopped at a nice viewpoint on my way back round the lake and then returned to Bjarg for a relatively lazy afternoon catching up on this blog and on my scrapbook and just doing some reading before setting off across the Desert of Misdeeds tomorrow.

Akureyri not being a very inspirational setting for A Birthday, I decided to have an unofficial birthday and do what I should have done: realised from last experience that Akureyri works best as a fuel stop, done the Forest Lagoon on Wednesday instead of hiking to the swimming pool and done yesterday what I did today.

First, breakfast and pay the campsite owner. Then head for Husavík with a detour to Goðafoss before it was completely overrun with tourists.
I’ve done the “Diamond Circle” before but counting on my fingers, it has to have been nine or even ten years ago. Husavík is pleasant but its main purpose is whale watching trips so once I’d enjoyed the harbour (and the Nettó which has an entire shelf of green star crisps!!) I headed for Ásbyrgi. I’d forgotten how far it is although it’s another very nice bit of coastline.
Ásbyrgi has had some work since I was last there. I’m sure the car park used to be bigger and I’m sure there weren’t viewing platforms over the pond and over the entire canyon.
Then to Dettifoss via the eastern, unpaved road because I like the wilder, rockier, greyer east bank more. The trouble is that the west road is paved and the east road is terrible. Actual washboard texture, dust (I had the windows open and the entire van is lightly dusted), slippery and it just goes on – ~25 minutes from the north down to Dettifoss and then ~45 minutes from Dettifoss back down to the Ring Road. Good thing I broke it up with a long visit to Dettifoss. That too has changed. There are now paths marked out with stakes and ropes. “So now no tourist can go and walk in the shallows above the waterfall,” says I to myself, “or at least they’re visibly discouraged from it. But tourists are stupid.” I hadn’t been standing beside Iceland’s most powerful waterfall five minutes before a tourist (in the obligatory yellow waterproof) stepped over the rope to wander beautifully on the edge of the massive drop and the colossal churning of water while the camera she’d set up above took beautiful photos of her wandering. “What did I just say?” I said out loud.

After Dettifoss came the long drive back to the Ring Road and a quick stop at Hrossaborg. Could have been quick, anyway. It’s ~700m down an F-road which means I can’t legally drive on it, even though those 700m are no worse (probably better) than the legal eastern Dettifoss road. So I walked. Sandals, lightweight trousers rolled up to the knee, shirt open over t-shirt, walked off into the Interior and disappeared from sight of the people having car trouble at the junction (massive monster truck trouble). Hrossaborg is a crater with a hole in the side, best known for playing the part of the baseball stadium in Oblivion. That must have been a while ago too – I remember guide Jónas telling us about the filming of that as we did the jeep tour to Askja in 2016 (the Askja junction is at Hrossaborg).

Into Myvatn at last and at least a third stay at Bjarg, the lakeside campsite with the soft grass. Alas, I intended to spend the evening of my unbirthday at the Nature Baths and wouldn’t you know? Barely a space left at the campsite! At least when you camp, the tent stays put and reserved your space. The Nature Baths were wonderful, as always, but I’ll believe in this extension when I see it. They were working on it when I was here two years ago, due to open summer 2014. I was kind of sad to not get to go last year and see how it turned out but it doesn’t look like they’ve made any progress except removing the cranes. Due to open next year now. We’ll see.

I’m staying around Mývatn tomorrow. May commit an act of heresy and stay down the road at Hlið campsite tomorrow – I accidentally managed to book and pay for one night here, not the two I intended, so I can come back (it’ll be earlier than tonight but the van side of the campsite is a literal car park) or I can move.

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.