Category Archives: iceland

Iceland Feb 2015: Reykjavik & Laugardalslaug

Today, much to my surprise, it was snowing when I set out on my trek up the hill to the nearest bus stop eight miles away. Really thick snow, coming in horizontally and it looked like it was settling. As I stood at the bus stop, the snow stopped and the sky turned blue.

Ever since I first came to Iceland, I’ve heard the phrase “if you don’t like the weather here, wait five minutes”. I’ve never believed it. It’s always been wet and grey and horrible for several days or hot and sunny for several days or whatever, for several days. Today I’ve seen it change from sunny to snowy within five minutes about twenty times.

Because I woke up late, I missed breakfast so I went and got some bread and cheese and other bits and pieces. I thought it would be nice to eat by the Tjörnin, watching the birds but then I decided tempting that many birds with bread would cause a riot so I didn’t. I really like the Tjörnin, especially in winter when most of it is frozen and hundreds of birds flock to the one corner where the warm water pours in. There are ducks and geese and swans that make a noise like a bike horn and some new ducks today – little black and white ones that dive. When I’d enjoyed the ducks long enough, I walked down the street to the seafront to enjoy Esja, looking all snowy among fluffy white clouds. It was very windy and cold but clear and pretty. It occurred to me that Harpa was the perfect place to eat. You see, there isn’t really anywhere in Reykjavík except possibly Hlemmur where you can get out your own bread and cheese and eat it unless you want to eat outside but Harpa is perfect. I ate my brunch and then spent a while taking photos – Harpa is such a weird place that it’s fun to take photos. Up the third floor I found myself looking north, at a patch of cloud where Esja had been not twenty minutes earlier and realised Reykjavík was under another snowstorm. By the time I got back outside, the sun was out again and by the time I’d crossed the road and was waiting at the bus stop, another snow cloud was coming over Esja. I’ve never seen anything like it – how quickly and dramatically the weather can change. The snowstorm hit the city as I waited for the bus up at Hlemmur and then another one as I got off the bus at the big pool, exc ept this wasn’t snow, this was razor-sharp hail. I’d picked up the latest Reykjavik Grapevine at Hlemmur and that made a good shield as I headed for the door.

Laugardalslaug, I think, is the biggest swimming centre in Iceland. It has a 50-metre indoor pool, split into two 25-metre pools when I went in. In the middle is a kind of bridge with those diving stool things. And when I got in, I noticed there are tracks along the sides of the pool – you can move that bridge back to open it up to full 50 metres! Outside there’s another 50-metre pool – warmish but if you’re there on a windy day, 50 metres is a very long way to swim against the wind. I did ten lengths, which is twenty in QE’s pool. Joined to it is another biggish pool, slightly cooler, for playing in. Alongside the lane pool are four hot pots – 38°, 42°, 40°, 44° – yes, I’d have put them in order too. At the end is a “saltwater spa” – a kind of hot pot full of salty water at a supposed 40° but actually much colder than the 40°pot. Behind them is the steam bath  – eighteen white plastic thrones with a white light above each one. Other than the steam, it looked just like the sort of capsule you’d put people into stasis in while you travelled across space. Next to the play pool was a shallow dish-shaped hot pot/pool and a larger hot pot, more like a kind of mini pool that you sit in, at 38°. Icelanders like to know precisely what temperature everything is. Showers don’t have red and blue. Showers have one knob that you turn to a temperature.

I stayed there for ages, trying out every pool and every pot. I didn’t go on any of the slides. Oh, Laugardalslaug, despite being just a local pool, has an electronic bracelet system just like at the Blue Lagoon, except you can’t buy food or drinks with it. You pick a locker at random, close the locker and hold your bracelet against the red light and it locks and the bracelet remembers which one it unlocks. In the event you don’t, there’s a special scanner in the middle of the changing room which will tell you which locker it currently operates. And they employ people specifically to make sure everyone has their naked shower before they go in the water.

I got the bus back to Hlemmur and then, since it was nice, I walked down Laugavegur, which is the main street in Reykjavík, stopping off in so many shops, looking wistfully at the Cintamani shop (this season’s colour is apparently orange) and of course, the weather being so Jekyll-and-Hyde today, it was snowing by the time I reached the end. There was no view over the bay and it was getting on for five o’clock, so I popped into 1011 to get more juice (“Did you look at them and think ‘I’ll try one of each’?” said Vala behind the till) and then got the bus back to Kringlan. I timed my walk back and downhill, without several stops for photos of snow, it took ten minutes. And in the other direction, the next bus stop must be at least an hour’s walk away.

Tonight I’m not doing anything except packing, going to bed early and hoping no one screams in the night. I’m being picked up to go to Snæfellsnes at 7.30am tomorrow.

Iceland Feb 15: Warm Baths and Cool Lights

Bonus of new blog over OffExploring blog, I can see if you’re reading it! Twelve people read it yesterday. Discounting the one I know is in the USA, that means eleven people I know read my blog. And 62 views is an unimaginable number. I know how it happened – every time anyone looked at a picture in my gallery it counted as a view. A couple of people looked at all eighteen and read the blog and racked up nineteen views each. But still, it’s very exciting to see the numbers. You can’t hide from me!

And now on to last night’s entertainment.

I was picked up at 5.30 on the dot for the Warm Baths and Cool Lights trip. I’ve done this before and there were only three of us so the fifteen packed into the minibus this evening. Siggi, our guide, chatted away and off we went, via Þingvellir, to Laugavatn. I said the weather was disappointing in Reykjavík; well, it’s certainly snowed elsewhere! Although it was pretty dark and the windows were smudged with dirt/rain/snow/ice, the world was unmistakably white once we’d left the city behind and although it was even harder to be sure, it looked like the road was nothing but ice. The roundabout when we came into Laugavatn was definitely a disc of ice several inches thick.

We were delivered to Laugavatn Fontana, where I entertained myself by feeling very cosmopolitan and superior by taking the obligatory naked shower, whereas most of my fellow travellers conveniently didn’t see the sign. Anyway, I know I went into the non-chlorinated water clean and shiny.

I don’t know what they’ve done to the pools at Laugavatn since I was last there. Sæla, the long shallow one, felt much warmer than usual. Viska, the raised hot pot, felt much cooler. Lauga, the mini swimming pool, felt warmer and the newest pool, the lava one that doesn’t seem to have a name, was painfully hot. I did fifty lengths in Lauga – less impressive if I tell you I estimate it to be somewhere between five and ten metres long. I sat on a rock doing a mermaid impression and trying not to boil in the lava pool, dipped into Viska a few times because it’s very weird for it not to be painful in there and spent most of my time lounging around in Sæla. There are some black stone sculptures in there. Some are good for lying against, one is nearly a circle and you can either curl up inside it or entertain yourself blocking one or two of the three jets that squirt out of it to see what happens to the others and there’s one shaped like a giant cup with a big fountain going into it. That one’s excellent for sitting in, even if the water sloshes over the edge when you do as if you’ve caused a huge tidal wave. Obviously I sat in it.

I even ventured into Ylur, the sauna (the wooden benches are too hot and the German boys sat in there with me) and then into Gufan, the three steam rooms. Those are fun! They sit directly over the hot spring so the heat and smell depend on what the Earth feels like doing. Today one of them was stone cold and the other two were really really hot. They’re also really dark for some reason. I don’t sit down for fear of getting lost and if you’ve ever tried inhaling sulphur, you’ll understand why I don’t go in Gufan very much.

As usual, the time was up far too quickly. Floating from one pool to another, trying not to touch the handrails as you climbed out of and into pools because they were so cold, it felt like I had forever and then suddenly it was 9 o’clock and I had to get out. There is a big red LED clock which also shows the humidity and the temperature. I watched the temperature climb from 6.3° to 7.5°.

They say that you need three things for the Northern Lights – cold, clear and crisp and we didn’t have any of them. Iceland is warmer than it is at home. You also need total darkness and aurora activity. Total darkness is easy enough – there are vast parts of Iceland with no street lights but aurora activity is very temperamental and if the sky is blanketed in clouds, there’s no chance. To quote Siggi: “You have to have clear skies. What we’ve got this instant – this is terrible” and “There are high clouds, low clouds and medium clouds. We’ve got a bit of everything”. He said it might be clearer down on the south coast so we drove south to where we met the Ring Road just west of Selfoss. Still very cloudy. We headed west, to Hveragerði. “We’re going to drive up the mountain to 450m. It’ll probably be foggy at the top but we’ll see what happens when we come down.” I, for one, was not fooled. I knew perfectly well that we were going back to Reykjavík and we were not aurora hunting. It had been cloudy and rainy all day, it was cloudy and rainy as we were driving around. There was no way we were going to see any lights. We did make a quick stop in the Bláfjall “I thought I saw a star! But it was just an aeroplane.” All the same, we stopped and got out to check that the sky was definitely still full of clouds. It definitely was.

I got home at 11.20, which is nice and early. The trouble was that at about 3.30am, someone started yelling and banging doors. Banging as if to get attention. At that time in the morning, you can jump to some odd conclusions and I began to think that this was a low-tech way of waking everyone for a fire alarm. But no, it was just a drunk person, who yelled and yelled and then started screaming. I have no idea what was happening but it was frightening at that time of night. And the busy road outside had gone silent. Presumably because no one’s heading to or from Keflavík at 3.30 in the morning but it seemed scary for the road to be silent and empty.

The result of all this was that I didn’t even wake up until ten to nine. Having looked out of the window and seen that it’s wet and cloudy and a tiny bit dark, I’m not quite ready to go out yet. I will need to – I have at least three bus journeys to use up, I plan to go swimming in one of the local geothermal pools and I may or may not have eaten absolutely everything I bought yesterday.

Feb 5th 2015 – Keflavik/Reykjavik

Captain’s log, stardate 050220151346

I departed Heathrow on the good ship Snæfellsjökull at about half past eight, having achieved an entire three seats to myself. I looked through the films and decided on The Beach – only fifteen or so years late. I had no idea what it was about – people looking pretty in front of nice scenery, maybe. Forty minutes in, they’d found the beach and there was still an hour and a half to go. That hour and a half was definitely not what I’d been expecting and it all made much more sense when the credits came up and I discovered it was a Danny Boyle film. As the film went on, I had a little look around the cabin and noticed a lot of men in glasses. Well, there’s only one explanation for serious-looking men in glasses on a plane – spies. Spies, who seemed to be lurking near me. I also watched eight episodes of Shaun the Sheep before we touched down at Keflavík, where the weather was surprisingly mild. The only snow I saw was heaped up in mounds around the car park and the thermometer in the coach that took me into Reykjavík said 5°C, much warmer than I’d expect at 1am in Iceland in February.

As we drove across Reykjanes, I spied an Orkan petrol station. I’ve spied these hundreds of times in the last few years but it occurred to me that “vowel+n” means “the” when stuck on the end of a word. The Ork? Now, we all know – we should all know, because I rave enough about this – that Tolkien loved Iceland and the sagas. There’s plenty of the Volsung Saga about Middle Earth – it’s almost a blueprint for The Hobbit and the dwarves’ names were lifted straight from the Poetic Edda, in order. Now, I don’t think Tolkien ever came to Iceland and I don’t know if Orkan existed back then anyway, but if Sauron and Saruman and their forces of evil represent industrialisation, do the Orcs therefore represent the oil industry? Probably not. Ah, the things you think about in a coach at 1am.

I have never been taken from Keflavík to Reykjavík the same way twice and in the dark, it’s particularly easy to lose your bearings. The Greater Reykjavík Area is just a mass of orange lights, far bigger than it should be, far too big for a small city. The first landmark you spot is a green flashing light in the distance, from a building you can’t see perched on a hill you can’t see and you put on your best Johnny Depp voice and whisper “It’s the Pearl…”

After that it vanished. The Pearl is on the southern side of the city and it was quite a way off. Soon I was lost and confused. We hadn’t been past Taco Bell, we hadn’t come down the road that curves to the right. We had to still be in Hafnarfjörður, which has to be as big as Reykjavík itself. And then I saw the seafront and just as I knew where I was, it was confirmed by Hofði on the left and Harpa shimmering away in front. We’d managed to come round to the north of Reykjavík.

We were put on separate buses and taken out to our various lodgings. I was the last to be delivered, right out in the suburbs, almost in Kópavogur. If you haven’t already heard, I’ve made mistake after mistake with accommodation this time. I booked the cheapest guesthouse in the country and then read the reviews and realised that was a mistake. No cancellation. Bye bye money. I found somewhere nicer and nearly as cheap. But it turns out it’s two and a half miles from the city centre, barely in Reykjavík at all. But we haven’t come on to the troubles yet.

I was a little bit nervous about arrival. I’d put on the booking form that I’d be arriving late but it’s one thing arriving at 1.30am at a hotel with a receptionist on duty twenty-four hours a day and another arriving at 1.30am at a guesthouse and I think the driver who delivered me guessed that because once I was inside and had pressed the bell for help, I heard the engine clattering away outside for far longer than it normally would. Greyline are fantastic. Anyway, I signed a form and was given a key and after a mini lecture about what floor to go to (“on the second floor. The third floor. We call this the first floor, so first, second, third”) I went upstairs – no lift, so good thing I packed light – and found my room. The man on reception had shown me the number engraved on the key – 28 – and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I was just about to go back down and plead for help when it occurred to me to look at the tag. 33 – ah, there was a 33! It’s a biggish room, not enough light but that’s fairly normal for hotel-type places, and looking out over the closest thing Iceland has to a motorway – a duel carriageway heading from Reykjavík out to Kópavogur, Garðabaær, Hafnarfjördur and Reykjanesbær.

On Thursday morning I was awake far too early for someone who didn’t get to bed until 2am, mostly thanks to the M25 right outside. It was still dark but it was so hot in my room that the window had been open when I arrived and I left it open. I went down for breakfast – toast with some kind of spread that made the bread go squidgy and very watery liquid that tasted vaguely orangey. I packed a few things and headed out. The closest bus stop that I knew of for certain was at the Natura. The Pearl isn’t so far from here so I went up there, enjoyed the view, froze my ears off because I didn’t bother taking my hat out with me and then set off on the quick hop-skip-and-jump down the side of the hill that would deliver me to the bus stop. I wanted to find somewhere closer for regular use but this would do fine for now.

Off I went down the hill. Iceland has had snow not too long ago. There are still bits of it and the side roads are still covered in ice. This hill, I exaggerate not, was an ice rink. I put on the Yaktrax and they made no difference. I took teeny tiny steps, clinging to thin patches in the ice, anywhere grassy, anywhere with a bit of proper snow, using trees as ropes. At one point I even had to climb down a rock, which turned out far more slippery than I expected. What should have taken five or ten minutes seemed to take an eternity and several times I stopped and had to take a while to decide what was the best way of tackling the next bit of seemingly-impossible pathway. Taking photos on the way was unthinkable. I had to get in position, plant both feet properly and only then could I let my concentration go anywhere other than my feet. Two people came up the hill and I had to stand still and wait until they were past (with the comment “very dangerous!” as they passed) before I could go on. It’s just not possible to slither down an ice rink with other people visible, it’s too much of a distraction.

I got my bus eventually, went to Hlemmur, the main bus station in the city centre and bought my bus passes – a three day for now and a one day for Sunday. The card machine rejected my credit card. Then it rejected my spare credit card. Then it rejected my debit card. I concluded it was a problem with the machine rather than with three cards and indeed, the ATM was fine, so I bought my cards with cash and then took a bus up to Lækjatorg to go shopping. I went round my usual favourite tourist shops, in the bookshop and then in the 1011 for some food before getting the bus back. There is no bus stop anywhere near my guesthouse. I can watch buses sail down the motorway right outside my window but they don’t stop. The nearest stop, as far as I can see, is either up by the Pearl or at Kringlan. It does seem “once you’re out, you have to stay out”. I thought there was a closer stop but it turns out to be in the centre of Kópavogur, which is where the interesting church is, which you can see from this building but it’s not really in walking distance, especially when bands of rain keep sweeping across. They don’t last long. You suddenly notice it’s getting cloudy, then it gets misty, then you get rained on, then suddenly the sun is trying to come out again.

I planned to eat, get my swimming stuff and go to one of the local pools but it’s a long walk back to the bus and I’m going swimming tonight anyway. I have eaten. Iceland no longer seems to do the nice pear juice but there’s now an interesting mixed fruit juice and I’m making plans for the next few days – swimming and abusing the bus passes, mostly.

Iceland summer 2014: Akureyri to Borgarnes and Esja

Suppose I should update the blog for the last three days…

Tuesday

It was grey and rainy and horrible and I’d driven a previously unimaginable distance the day before. I had a lazy day which consisted of eating, a trip into Akureyri town centre to see what I missed on Sunday (not much) and lust after some orange Cintamani mittens. By the way, I love that my tablet offers the word slurp before it realises I’m trying to write Akureyri. In the evening I went to the pool again. Mistake! The biggest hot pot was closed, the main pool was too cold, the beach pool was both too cold and too shallow to fully submerge myself to get out of the wind and the two hot pots were too hot and too crowded. They reopened the big hot pot but I suspect it had been closed because it was too cold, as I discovered when I’d been curled up in it for ten minutes and started shivering. So the pool wasn’t any fun.

Wednesday

I drove back down south, another four hour drive along the Ring Road. I actually took it more slowly than I did on Sunday. I stopped for photos everywhere I spotted a layby or a picnic spot. Unfortunately, they don’t really signpost these so often by the time you’ve spotted them, you have no chance of stopping in time. I stopped at a hamlet in the middle of nowhere at Varmahlid because the car was making a noise like a window wasn’t properly shut and on a whim, I ran into their little supermarket. At last! Plain Milka and plastic cheese slices! I thought these were basic supplies but I haven’t been able to find them in over a week!

I stopped at Bluönduós for lunch but I wasn’t very hungry. I hadn’t been very hungry at breakfast either, which was why I’d accidentally walked off with more rolls than usual.

I stopped at Thingeyrar which was 6km up the best and smoothest gravel road I’ve ever driven on because the church there is supposed to be quite special. It’s a lovely little church but I could have done without the one-to-one guided tour. It has a blue wooden ceiling with 1000 gold stars on it and there are 100 panes in each of 10 windows. 1000 again, because Christianity came to Iceland in 1000AD. The church itself only dates back to 18-something but everything inside is older. The altarpiece is from about the 16th century and was made for a monastery in Nottingham. My nice guide was very vague on the details of how it ended up in a church in the Icelandic countryside.

My next major stop was at Ósar, also about 6km out ofy way. I went to the Icelandic Seal Centre to see if I could see seals sunbathing but it was the wrong tide. It was also really windy and really cold. Also I learnt how inconsistent Icelanders are with their English pronunciation. Sheep are seep but seals are shiels.

I made a couple of stops on my way over the last bit of mountain, paused in Borgarnes and then headed on to Akranes where I planned to spend the night. The trouble is, Akranes isn’t such a nice place. It’s very concretey, very industrial, very functional. I had a look at their famous 1km stretch of golden beach – that is not a standard km, that’s for sure – and then decided I’d rather spend my last two nights just up the road in my beloved Borgarnes. So I drove back.

Thursday

It’s my birthday! I’d long planned to spend it climbing Esja, “Reykjavik’s mountain” but when I got up, it was windy. I went to get fuel and food, everyone ignored the fire alarm because apparently no one knew what they were supposed to do and we carried on shopping.

It was still windy, really cold and,my satnav couldn’t find Esja. I came back to the hotel to consider what to do. No, I was going to climb the mountain! I found directions, the satnav understood them and off I went. Past Akranes, through the Hvalfjord tunnel – 1000kr in both directions! – and found the parking space.

I was there reasonably early, it turned out. I packed my bag and headed off. 15 minutes later, it became clear I’d packed too much. It was like carrying another person on my back and there was no way I was going to make it to the top loaded down as I was. Reluctantly I returned to the car, dumped 90% of my luggage and set off on attempt two.
It was really hard. It was so steep and so gravelly and absolutely everyone overtook me, then vanished and I was trundling along, stopping every ten yards.

It seemed like months before I reached Sign 3, where I didn’t realise the path split. Unbeknownst to me, I picked the shorter but steeper and far more brutal route. It was horrendous. It was so steep it was getting on for vertical, it was a mess of shattered rock and one bit was such an awkward scramble I thought I was going to fall backwards off the mountain. Further up the path ran out and it became a network of tracks which were barely followable, up to the top. Well, up to Steinn, the normal person top. The actual top is a bit higher but it’s on almost vertical compressed ash and scree, very dangerous and only to be attempted if you know what you’re doing. Steinn was fine for me. The view! You could see for miles, right over Reykjavik and most of Reykjanes, almost to Keflavik. You couldn’t see anything north unfortunately because of the knife-edge ridge behind us but the south was plenty good enough.

Getting down was another adventure. I’d worn my Mammut shoes, which are half trail shoe, half climbing shoe and therefore perfect for scrambling my way over Iceland’s various rocks. But they are terrible for picking your way downhill! My toes slid forward and got crushed and there’s no padding or give in them whatsoever, so by the time I’d got to the bottom I could hardly walk. Actually, it was so steep and the path so loose, I’d more minced than walked down, I’d yelled my unfavourable opinion of the path so loudly half of Reykjavik probably heard it and I struggled so much with the scrambly section going down that first I’d frozen, not dared take another step because the mountain was certain to throw me down itself face first, and then been offered help by a passing stranger going uphill. If you ever climb Esja, turn right at Sign 3. It’ll save you a world of pain.

I thought I’d go swimming afterwards. It seemed a good thing to do after a mountain and I wanted to go to Borgarnes pool so I went straight there – coming home would mean I probably wouldn’t go out again. The building itself needs replacing, and the changing rooms in a dark concrete basement are just creepy. But the pools are lovely! Three largish hot pots of assorted temperatures, a nice warm beach pool, an indoor swimming pool, a splash pool for three slides and an outside lane pool with views over the bay, cool enough for proper swimming but still warm enough to swim in outside in Iceland when it’s windy. I swam 10 lengths, ran back to the middle hot pot (39 degrees), 10 lengths, hot pot etc until I’d done fifty lengths. By then it was dawning on me that I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast so I washed the pool out of my hair and came home.

Tomorrow I have to empty the car and hand it back 😦 It’s a bit of a mess. My camping stuff is still thrown in the back seat – I’ll need to find the bags for everything and put it away. Still, this time tomorrow I’ll be in Reykjavik and the Natura has its own spa pool. Last time I was there the room was uncomfortably cold but I’ll investigate tomorrow.

Iceland summer 2014: Wonders of the North

On Monday I went to see if the Edda breakfast is worth having. It is. Not only do they have orange juice and little bread rolls, they also have miniature croissants. I’m not a huge fan of croissants but if there are mini ones on offer, then I’ll go for it. And mini chocolate muffins and biscuits. I did not get caught out by cardboardy cereal again.

I went to see the wonders of the north. They don’t really have a tourism tag for them yet because there is next to no tourism infrastructure up in the north. There’s very little in the way of accommodation outside Akureyri despite the Wonders being an hour and half away from Akureyri. There’s no flybus from Akureyri airport into town! I want to go and watch the planes for a bit today because the runway is right in the middle of the fjord.

First stop was Godafoss, where Thorgeir the Godi threw his pagan statues into the water in 1000AD when Iceland was Christianised. It’s a nice little waterfall, overrun with tourists, many of whom get far too close to the edge.
Then I stopped at some odd lava formations on the edge of Lake Mývatn and got angry with some Spanish tourists who were determined to walk on the wrong side of the rope marking the path despite there being no difference – I might have at least understood if the path was rockier or muddier but it wasn’t.

Next was Dimmuborgir, a maze of quiet pleasant greenery among twisted lava formations. I visited the Yule Lads’ cave, which surprised me by being furnished, and strayed onto the hour long Church path by mistake. The Church itself is a bubble of lava which has popped, leaving something a bit more round than a simple lava arch.

I tried to get fuel and food at Reykjahlid but it was chaos. The queue went all the way around the supermarket, there were more 4x4s in the car park than I’ve ever seen before and the tanker was refilling the pumps.

I finally got fuel at Húsavík, nearly an hour away and over a long and unexpected gravel section of road. Húsavík’s main function is for whale-watching tours but it also sits on the side of a pretty fjord. I stopped on the hill just outside Húsavík for food and photos before heading on to Ásbyrgi which is a deep horseshoe-shaped canyon full of woodland and wandering paths. I hadn’t appreciated how deep it is – tipping my head back to look right up at the cliffs wasn’t such a great idea. I’d been driving for a long time so I settled down on the decking at the pond to just sit on the floor and relax.

My main stop for the day was Dettifoss and the biggest Wonder of the day is why haven’t they built a real road to join their biggest tourist attractions?! There are two roads joining Ásbyrgi and Dettifoss and according to my map, only the east one is paved. So I picked the east one. It is not paved! It is 56km of the worst gravel, rutted, washboard-like track through countryside that looks less inviting than most of the Interior! I was half-convinced I’d strayed onto an F road by mistake – a 4×4 only Interior route from which hire cars are banned. But no, this is what northern Iceland considers a suitable tourist route. It isn’t! This is why tourism concentrates on the south and not the north! It’s 2014 and I see that you don’t want to scar the landscape with unnecessary paved roads but I really think that one is worth the effort of paving and maintaining. I thought the car was going to shake apart, I didn’t know whether driving faster or slower would lessen the vibration and the tent pegs – which I left on the back parcel shelf in my panic on Saturday – spent the entire 56km trying to deafen me. Worst of all, it turns out the southern part of the west road (from Dettifoss down to the Ring Road) is in fact paved and “there’s talk of surfacing the entire road by 2014”. Read the guidebook, don’t just look at the map, which has been faultless up until now.

Dettifoss, when you have the time to properly appreciate it (and you’re putting off the horrors of going back on that road), is mind-blowingly powerful. Last year I saw it from the west side but stayed up high because we didn’t have long. This year I saw it from the east side, up close. Not too close – many people do go far closer than I feel is wise. It’s very powerful. The spray it throws up is almost strong enough for the water to bounce off. You can’t see the bottom. It’s carved out a deep sheer-sided canyon and the spray appears to have carved things too. Dettifoss is part of the Jökulsá á Fjöllum, which is a massive glacial river, flowing from 200km south at Vatnajökull – the whole river canyon right the way up to Ásbyrgi is part of the massive Vatnajökull National Park. The Jökulsá á Fjöllum is one of the most relentlessly grim places I’ve ever seen. The water is grey and opaque and churns and it cuts out a long grey rubble-strewn canyon. Even at Dettifoss, where the spray makes the banks bright green, all you see is grey. I met this particular river further south last year, near Askja and it was grey and grim and there was just a mess of basalt boulders everywhere. It’s magnificent, I love it, it’s just so grim that I’d love to see a proper post-apocalypse movie filmed along it.

A further 31km along that accursed track – overtaken by buses, 4x4s and even another i10 – and I was finally back.on real road, west of Mývatn. I passed the crater from Oblivion, which marks the start of the Askja F road – there are information boards 50 yards down there which I’m sure normal cars are allowed to visit but it’s not a good angle for photos. It’s real name is Hrossaborg, I think. It sits at the top of the Ódádahraun lava field – commonly translated into English as the Desert of Misdeeds. I did wonder if my gravel road ran through it but it turns out that’s the Borgarás Hólssandur. Incidentally, my car came with a map showing where I’m not legally allowed to drive and has some gravel roads marked in black as roads with high number of accidents involving foreign drivers. Yes, my gravel road was one of them! But my map showed it as paved – I was deliberately avoiding what I thought was the gravel road! Never mind. You get a better view of Dettifoss from the east anyway.

I got back to Mývatn just before 7. I’d skipped a few local.wonders – the blue-black boiling bubbling mud pools on the back of Krafla, a few hidden hot pools around Reykjahlid that are either too hot to swim in or too cold and thus riddled with bacteria. Instead I went somewhere I wanted to go last year and didn’t have time for – Mývatn Nature Baths. The Jardbödin are the northern version of the Blue Lagoon and if you’re going to compare and contrast, I think the Jardbödin actually win. The Blue Lagoon has a connecting door to the inside so you don’t have to go outside and get cold to get to the water and it does have the magic bracelet system so you can buy food & drinks while in the water and ok, the changing rooms are better but the Jardbödin win on setting, by miles. The Blue Lagoon is carved into a bowl of black lava, growing a hard white silicon shell. It has a view – from the right spot in the water – over the power station next door and of some small mountains. It’s a beautiful splash of bright milky blue in a black and white setting. Now, the Jardbödin are on the side of an active volcano, overlooking Mývatn and the plains on one side and black, red or orange volcanoes on the other three. The water is waste from a power station too, I think, and it also comes from a borehole but it’s heated by Krafla, which is pretty active and has erupted in my lifetime! Jardbödin are about half the size of the Blue Lagoon and just as touristed, in its northern way. It means it’s quieter. The pool ranges from painfully hot to quite pleasant, there’s a trough-like hot pot and there are underwater slabs to sit on. But unlike the Blue Lagoon, these slabs are covered in.some kind of slippery stuff and if you’re in the mod for being childish, you can slide on them. The sides where the steps come in make even better slides, if you can get to the top in the first place. Finally, the water is actually different to the Blue Lagoon. The Blue Lagoon’s water is very salty and really dries out your hair. I think the Jardbödin’s water is more sulphurous and it makes everything feel really soft. However, having unplaited my hair this morning, I think it’s a lot drier and bushier and nasty-feeling than I expected.

I spent about two hours in there and could have stayed longer. I watched the air temperature fluctuate between 14.2 and 13.6C, which meant the hot water felt nice instead of too hot. I drifted around, slid, enjoyed the view and reluctantly got out at 9.15, knowing I had a ninety minute drive still, over the mountains. I stopped briefly as I came into Akureyri’s fjord because the sun was setting at the mouth of the fjord – at eleven at night! – and making a huge blood-orange fireball that desperately needed photos. I was home ten or fifteen minutes later. It was a very long day.

Iceland summer 2014: Borgarnes to Akureyri

When we left the story on Saturday night, I was still feeling a bit dizzy but ok when upright and enjoying walking around the headland at Borgarnes, seeing fluffy ducklings and a redshank.
On Sunday it was time to move on. After a breakfast of cardboardy cereal, warm apple juice but perfect orange juice and lovely hot buttered toast fresh from two trips through the very exciting conveyor toaster, I smuggled the tent out to the car, did another quick walk around my circuit to make sure I was definitely ok when upright, stopped at the roadhouse for petrol and juice and headed north.
The journey itself was fairly unremarkable – four hours across lava fields, low mountain passes, past long flat-topped ridges of mountain which gained a smattering of snow as I went further.
25ish minutes out of Borgarnes, I came to the university town of Bifröst. Hafnarfjordur gets called “the town in the lava” but it’s a much more fitting name for Bifröst, literally carved into the middle of a lava field and loomed over by two reddish scoria volcanoes.
It turns out you can climb one. I didn’t mean to but… it was there. Its name is Grábrók and it’s only 170m. Nice and easy, follow the steps to the top, walk around the top of the crater, take lots of photos of the view, steal a little piece of lava rock – some kind of basalt, looked like pumice but not light enough.
That was a detour of much less than an hour and it was just after 4 when I arrived at the hotel in Akureyri. The Edda chain of hotels are school/university accommodation most of the year and open as budget hotels in summer. It very much looks like a student room and I have shared facilities. As usual, all the sockets are in inconvenient places. But all the rooms have names – mine is called Helgrimur.
I went down to the town centre – really down. I hadn’t really realised that Akureyri is built on on the steeply-sloping side of a mountain and I’m quite high up the town. I made it to the church. They want it to be compared to Reykjavik’s Hallsgrímskirkja but it’s just not on the same scale. Apparently its windows are from Coventry Cathedral, “removed, with remarkable foresight, at the start of World War II” and found in a London antiques shop by an Icelander. There’s not much in Akureyri town centre because Akureyri is quite a small place, even if it is Iceland’s second city.
I finally found a supermarket, five minutes walk from my hotel in the opposite direction to the town centre but first I thought I’d go swimming.
All would have been beautiful except I left my towel in the car. Never mind. That’s actually not such a catastrophe. The pools are lovely. A big warmish main one. A huge but freezing one with lanes. A hot pool. A warm beach of a pool with waterfall. Two hot pots – a pleasantly hot hot pot and a painfully hot hot pot. And a kids pool. Plus the splash pool for the slides. And the container of cold water for the men to prove how manly they are.
I went to the supermarket afterwards. No plastic cheese slices. I had to get real cheese – no idea what it is, the packet just says “ostur” which is Icelandic for cheese. The hamburger bread that I bought to go with it had mould within 24 hours, so that was nice and I shall find somewhere else to get bread tomorrow.
And then I was tired so I was asleep by 8.30. Not so dizzy just lying down but moving while lying down didn’t feel too delightful.

Iceland summer 2014: Borgarnes part 2

Since I was feeling a little better – a little better than I did at 7am, anyway – i was persuaded to go out for a nice little walk in the fresh air.

I had made the delightful discovery that the socket I had my tablet & camera plugged into was actually pulling power out of them. My tablet was visibly losing power while being used despite being plugged in and the camera, which I was just keeping topped up was so dead it wouldn’t even switch on, after having been charged for eight hours. I moved them to a different socket and with my camera at one nearly bar of charge, took it out for a walk.

I now remember why I’m fond of Borgarnes. There’s nothing here other than the service centre and the wonderful Settlement Museum for tourists but it’s such a pleasant little place and it sits right in the fjord, with mountains on one side and little rocky cliffs and islands around the lower part of the town. When it’s reasonably sunny, it’s just a pretty place to enjoy the view. I’ve worked out that the weather drifts from south to north. It’s getting sunnier here, sunset is a long way off yet but Fossatún looked like it’s in for another nasty night. I chuckle vengefully but I do really like Fossatún when it’s dry and no one’s trying to force me out of my camping spot.
Speaking of Fossatún, there was a girl from Florida in the hot tubs, first talking about this “really nice guy” she stayed with couchsurfing (who did not sound nice and sent up several red flags in what she was saying including asking her to not mention something that happened because he had a really good reputation on Couchsurfing – presumably because he bans anyone from mentioning the bad things and she also said “I think I’d stay with him – but maybe not on my own” which she also wasn’t going to mention and which i felt is really worth mentioning – “as a single female traveller I did not feel safe on my own with him” is definitely something I’d want to know.)

Anyway, she was complaining about the European-style breakfast on offer at Fossatún – and that’s unusual, I think, a campsite offering breakfast. First, she felt it was too expensive (I’m inclined to agree – 1600kr is about £8 and I can’t eat enough breakfast for that to be worth it for me ) and second: “Where are the aigs? Where are the pancakes?” Well, pancakes are not a breakfast food, so that’s the answer to the second question. As for the first, if I’d heard it out of context, I’d have had no idea what “aigs” were supposed to be. “Aigs”? Really?

Oddly, I feel a little more dizzy back in my room (which smells of sulphur because I had a shower and apparently the hot water here comes directly out of the ground, which dates this hotel back at least a couple of decades) than I did walking around outside. So waking up in the morning will, in itself, probably not tell me whether I really feel better or not.

Iceland summer 2014: Borgarnes

Today has been a total waste of a day. It began badly on last night. My neighbours had no intention of shutting up and going to bed until about 2.30, the rain bucketed down and what had been a patch of mud when I arrived on Wednesday became a huge puddle, almost a flood. It kept everyone else off the main part of the field but it also kept me checking it every ten minutes for fear I’d have to suddenly move the tent or even abandon it.

By about 6.30, the kids were crying and shouting and I discovered that every now and then, the tent seemed to start spinning uncontrollably. Ignoring it was impossible. Well, obviously I had labyrinthitis, I wasn’t going to be able to drive, I wasn’t going to be able to fly home and I’d be stuck in a tent about to be flooded for the next several weeks. Settling down at the other end of the tent on a little mountain of sleeping bag helped a bit but not enough. I got up, discovered that it was more or less ok once I was upright. I had a little drink and a biscuit in the car and then made a plan. I struck camp and threw everything into the car. The flood had hidden in the grass and I had to paddle through water deep enough tp submerge my feet every time I crossed from tent to car. Being upright and active was helping but there was no way I was driving four hours to Akureyri today. I could make it to Borgarnes though. So I did. I went to the Hotel Borgarnes, asked for a room for tonight that I could have immediately and was in a warm, dry, quiet, cosy bed with not-quite-good-enough blackout curtains by 9.45am.

And there I have remained. There hasn’t been any room-spinning, just general feeling dizzy. I thought about going to Borgarnes pool but settled for just a shower in the end. I’ve eaten and I really hope I feel better tomorrow after a good night’s sleep in a real bed because if I don’t, I don’t know what to.do.

Iceland summer 2014: Snæfellsnes

When I got back to Fossatún, I was feeling quite attached to the place and quite sad about leaving tomorrow. However, when I reached my tent, I discovered that a load of morons had moved onto my field and were trying to park a caravan where it would not fit. I went to the hot tubs for a couple of hours and found they’d moved yet another caravan on and had blocked my car in with one at each end, parked inches away. “Can you move your car please?” How the hell do you think I’m going to do that? And why should I? Mine is next to *my* tent and has been for two days and I assure you, it wasn’t me who chose to pitch your camp in an awkward place. I will slam my car doors as many times and as loudly as I can when packing up in the morning, believe me, you rude, inconsiderate people.

Anyway. Before the entire world descended on Fossatún and ruined everything,I was driving around Snæfellsnes, dodging showers, climbing gorges using stepping stones, being divebombed by Arctic terns, knocking over stone towers on the beach (graffiti, junk, eyesores and haven’t you grown out of being proud of making little towers yet?), enjoying the view from the little mountain that forms the north wall of Stykkisholmur’s harbour and generally doing a lot of driving.

Now, if that radio is still wailing in an hour and those stupid kids scream even once in the night, I will lose my temper.

Tomorrow I move on to Akureyri, where I shall find a hotel for at least two nights. Four if this endless rain doesn’t stop.