I’d planned to spend Monday morning in the spa – if the hotel has one, it seems foolish not to use it. However, as the spa cost 3500kr, I decided to give it a miss and go into town and buy the glass volcano coasters I’ve been staring at for years. I collected my bus pass from reception, crossed the road to the bus stop and discovered that on bank holidays the buses don’t start until nearly ten. The Hilton is a little way out of town but not far and it’s certainly not difficult to get there – it’s on Laugarvegur so you just walk in a straight line until you crash into Lækjatorg. Of course, being a bank holiday, hardly anything was open – only really the souvenir shops. I acquired my coasters, got some juice from the 1011 – the leftover dregs of four-day-old Fanta wasn’t really what I wanted for breakfast – and then decided, since I had time on my hands and not much to do, I’d go and have breakfast in Eymundsson on Skólavörðustígur – right opposite the Thor Guesthouse where I’d started the holiday. I had croissant and orange juice sitting out in the sunshine and then went back to Lækjatorg in time to catch the 11 at 11.08. I’d been told the 11 would take me from Lækjatorg to the bus stop right by the hotel – it hadn’t occurred to me to ask what bus stop. Off we went and soon enough, I realised that I needed this vital piece of information. Well, I could see the Grand Hotel and I knew the Hilton was close-ish to that so I jumped off and found myself on an unfamiliar road with no idea where to go. I had a map but it didn’t seem to do much good. I found the road I was on but as the smaller roads branching off weren’t named, I had no idea where on the road I was. I could see mountains at each end and I could identify Reykjanes and Esja but I couldn’t get my head around the fact that Esja is north of the city and that I had to go north to get to the hotel. But I walked towards Esja and bumped into Miklabraut, one of Reykjavik’s biggest roads. That threw me completely. According to my map, that shouldn’t intersect with the road I was on at the angle that it did. I couldn’t comprehend it and eventually I had to conclude that I’d gone the wrong way. Off I went in the other direction and ran into another large road and a hospital. That road shouldn’t be meeting my road at all! It took so long for all the pieces to fall into place, that the road I was in had two halves and I was on the southern half, not the northern half. It was about 11.40 by this time and I was supposed to be checking out at 12 and being picked up to go to the airport at 12.30 (a piece of genuine genius; I’d planned to take the bus and drag my 18kg+ luggage down to Lækjatorg but instead – having realised that the luggage was heavy – I’d popped into the Greyline offices and pleaded to have a hotel pick-up added to my booking, which was about the same price as getting the bus and far more convenient). I stormed up the road, realising I was at least half a mile in the wrong direction and at least half a mile to go after that, hot, thirsty, angry and frustrated. I found a bus stop. The bus was due in four minutes. Surely that was more efficient than continuing to storm up the road. It was.

The lovely bus driver stopped at the right stop for me and pointed me in the direction of the hotel. I was fifteen minutes late. No one has ever shoved everything into a bag as quickly and as recklessly as I did. I checked out five minutes later, sweating like a pig, still breathless from my haste – and no one seemed to care that I was late for check-out and I probably had no need to panic – and then I spent half an hour sitting outside on the luggage waiting to be collected.

The coach trip was uneventful, the waiting at the airport was uneventful – except that all the flights go out within about an hour and a half of each other – that’s thirteen flights to North America and seven to Europe which is far too many for a little airport like Keflavik which was only really designed for about a dozen flights in a whole day. The non-Schengen zone was packed so tightly that you could hardly move. The main departure area has had a lot of changes since I was last there – the nice restaurants where I could have some of the bread without having the soup has transformed into a weird kitchen where you order hot things and are given a Nebari life disc which lights up when it’s ready and you can’t have the soup or salad until you’ve got whatever it is you want  – hot dog, burger etc – already on your tray.

My flight was an hour delayed and I’m pretty sure it took off even later than that. I passed the time watching the second half of Kingsman, the second episode of Fortitude – so I could point at it and go “I stayed there!” “Oh, that’s Henry’s house!” and “Look, you can see the towers!” – and finally the bits of Walter Mitty that were filmed in Iceland.

But the adventure wasn’t over when I landed, at 9.12 rather than 8.10. By the time I was back in my car it was 10.30. The ticket machine told me I owed £250 for parking – no, I prepaid and it sure wasn’t that much, so I had to dump my car the wrong way round on double yellow lines to go and see Customer Services who acted like this happens all the time, which it probably does and that’s why you should have somewhere people can leave their cars. I was struggling with the car, actually. For a start, I’d tried putting my foot on the clutch to start the engine, as the Golf demanded but Puffin doesn’t. I’d tried to put it in gear with my right hand. I’d tried to put my foot on the brake and succeeded in hitting brake and accelerator at the same time, which felt really reassuring for a trip along the motorway if I ever managed to escape the car park.

Nice and easy to get out of Heathrow, follow the signs to the M4. Which I did. M4, turn left onto M25, turn right onto M3, straight down it until I get home. I reached the M4 junction. Turn left for The West, turn right for Central London. Ok, that’s a left. I drove along the M4, expecting to hit the M25 in under ten minutes. How odd, I seem to have been on here for ages. Did I see signs for Slough on the way up? Hmmm. Maidenhead. Is Maidenhead inside the M25? I genuinely didn’t know. But I did know that Reading East isn’t and in much rage and fury and fear, I turned off, drove for miles down a road before finally coming across somewhere I could get to the other side of the road to get back to the M4 and head east back to London. I found the M25 turning! It was closed! Now tempted to stop the car on the hard shoulder and just sleep right there and forget ever getting home ever again, I continued on into London, wondering what was going to happen. How did I cross what turned out to be twelve lanes of traffic without even noticing? The motorway has clearly been moved. Ah, here’s the Heathrow turning, more than an hour after I left it! Here’s where I can go back on the M4 westbound again – this was a repeat of the morning in Reykjavik except at higher speed, in the dark and with decreasing hope of ever getting any sleep. It was 11.37 before I finally made it onto the M25 and quarter to two before I got back home. I am never driving to Heathrow again.

I started today with a quick trip round the three southern Eastfjord villages. Didn’t take long – there’s not much there and since it’s Sunday, everything is shut. The road winds around the coast – slow but picturesque. I wanted to go swimming but all the pools were closed, so I just did a tour of Fáskrúðsfjörður (“the French village”), Stöðvarfjörður and Breiðdalsvík.

At Breiðdalsvík you can carry on north up the Ring Road to return to Egilsstaðir or you can take the winding road back round the fjords. It seemed quicker and easier to take the main road, the state-of-the-art good tarmac road that encircles Iceland. Except for the stretch between Höfn and Egilsstaðir which has a large stretch of gravel. Fine, it was a good road, I could do 70kph on it fairly easily (legal limit is 80; I’m not quite that brave) but then I started to think that I seemed to be heading towards a horseshoe of mountains. Don’t know of any tunnel, so we can’t go through it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go round it. So evidently we go over it. Oh yes. The main road becomes a series of very steep, very tight bends on very loose gravel. I’m so glad I didn’t meet anything going the other way. This is the main road! Buses come up here! I implore you, look at it on Google Street Maps – this is the sort of road you could easily just fall off if you meet something coming the other way. No wonder absolutely everything you read breezily suggests taking the fjord road and neglects to mention that the Ring Road really exists. Now I understand why that particular stretch has “no winter service”.

Back in town, I had lunch outside the roadhouse – wish I’d noticed the supermarket sold Babybels days ago. Fresh baguette, babybel and orange juice. Not exactly exciting but honestly, the best food I’d had in days. That done, there was only one way to fill the afternoon. I have literally done everything in the east of Iceland and the airport is one kilometre away, so no need to get there too quickly for an 8.30pm flight. I went and killed time at the pool. Tried on some flippers – fun but managed to rub my feet to ribbons.

Once I’d had all I could of the pool, I filled it up, got some more cash out and took the car back to the airport where I killed more time cleaning nine days of picnic out, handed back the keys and sat and waited for my flight.

It was uneventful. Too cloudy to see much until we got back to the west. Þingvallavatn was nice and visible and we flew right over Esja – I could see the path I walked up last year – and then over the bay, Snæfellsjökull looking perfect off to the north, in over Reykjavik and then down. I’d been planning to get the bus home but common sense prevailed – I had no idea which bus and I had a bag of 18kg+ with no easy straps to carry it. I could get to Hlemmur, the main bus station but I didn’t know which from there and besides, it was Sunday night, 9.30 by the time we arrived. I didn’t even know if the buses were running. So I got a taxi and very decadent it was too. A taxi to the Hilton, how nice.

It was nice! Proper blackout curtains and a bath! I enjoy the hot pools and the hot tubs but it’s not the same as having your own bath.

I experienced something tonight that I didn’t even know was possible in Iceland. The shower ran out of hot water. As Iceland’s hot water comes courtesy of the magma deep beneath our feet, a lack of hot water must be an early warning sign of the apocalypse here. If the world ends tonight, well, I did warn you.
I awoke four miles west of Goðafoss, packed my stuff, had my breakfast, said goodbye to the Australian ladies and went to poke around the Goðafoss souvenir shop – the first such shop I’ve seen since I’ve been here, believe it or not – in the hope of finding the glass volcano coasters I’ve been eyeing for four years (failed) and set off east. Egilsstaðir is less than two hours from Mývatn and if I went directly, I’d end up sitting in my room for most of the afternoon. So I went and looked at the Krafla Geothermal Power Plant (the cooling towers have wooden slats! This is a space age power plant built while an eruption went on around it, and part of it is wooden!
I was thinking about going back to Leirhnjúkur but then I was reminded of Dettifoss, an extremely powerful waterfall in the desert north of the Ring Road. I would go there, by the west road.
Last year I took the east road, right from the north, from Ásbyrgi. That’s 53km of the worst road I’m legally allowed to drive on – so bad I wasn’t even sure I was allowed to drive on it. It’s rutted brown gravel track, like driving on a washboard, through a rocky brown desert that looks so much like the end of the world that they used it for it in Oblivion. I’d thrown my tent in the back in a panic some days earlier and the pegs on the back parcel shelf rattled and tinkled for every bump of those 53km. It took hours.
The west road is smooth, perfect tarmac. Instead of bouncing along at a terrified 40, I flew along gleefully at 90 and was there in no time.
The west bank is green, brought to life by an incredible amount of spray off the massive waterfall, whereas the east bank is all grey broken rock and devastation. It’s very scenic; I love it, but the two sides are very different.
I also paused at Selfoss, the smaller and less well-known of the two cataracts. That’s fun. The waterfall funnels about three-quarters of the water, the rest flows down around the top, where you’re walking. To get to see the waterfall, you literally have to walk through Iceland’s biggest and most ferocious river, Jökulsà à Fjöllum. Mostly it’s fine, it’s just little streams looking for an alternative way back down to the main river but there was one quite big stream, with half-submerged, pointy wet stepping stones and I just couldn’t trust my feet to do it. I approached the little crossing, whimpered and stepped back about a dozen times. I prowled the stream looking for somewhere else to hop across but this was my best bet. I was so close to the waterfall and the only way I could get to see it was to cross this insurmountable little step.
Finally I was saved by a nice man who, having helped his other half across, paused and held his hand out to me. Pulling on it, I jumped across without falling in the river and being washed down Dettifoss a couple of hundred metres downstream (a lot of tourists on the east bank getting far too close to an incredibly powerful waterfall). I took my pictures of Selfoss and returned, the step being a little easier in the other direction because you jump to the flat side of the central stepping stone rather than the point.
By now it was getting on a bit. I made a brief stop at the one and only bridge crossing this violent and frightening river, in order to walk half a kilometre back up the road to take a much-coveted photo of Hrossaborg – there’s a layby next to it but it’s at the wrong side, you can’t see its shape, hence the inconvenient stroll. From there, there was no real reason at all to stop until Egilsstaðir, 130-odd kilometres on. Brown desert, green desert, grey desert, green mountainous farmland, nothing to see.
By the time I reached Egilsstaðir, I was so tired I decided to pop into the pool before the final part of my journey, onwards to Reydarfjörður. That was nice but we were thrown out at six, which only gave me an hour, which isn’t enough to sit in nice hot water and daydream.
Tonight I’m back in Reydarfjördur, in the Fortitude Hotel. Not because I’m stalking Fortitude locations, just because it was available and cheap and sort of close to Egilsstadir. And now I finally realise that the teeny-tiny N1 across the road probably is that N1 as well, which I didn’t realise on my trip here last week, before I knew I’d be back. The Fortitude Hotel aka the Tærgesen B&B is where the hot water ran out. My room was up in the eaves, which was nice and it had skylights but the only covering was a sort of mesh blind that clearly wasn’t going to keep out the sun at 4am.
Tomorrow I have most of the day to get the stuff that’s been living in my car back into my luggage because tomorrow I fly back from Egilsstaðir to Reykjavik and then – and I’m quite excited – I’m staying at the Hilton, and that will certainly not run out of hot water.

After breakfast of actual toast and hot chocolate, I set off for for Mývatn, via Goðafoss (can you tell I’ve got a real Icelandic keyboard? Things are not all in the same place but the special letters exist!) for a few photos, because you can never have enough photos of a famous historical waterfall, and then on to Mývatn, where I had a look at Grjótagjá which has always managed to elude me – it´s a cave under where the rock is pushed up like a tent, where the water is hot. And I mean hot. Too hot to swim in, anyway. It was always a popular bathing site and then in the Krafla Fires of the 70s and 80s, they got hotter. I stuck my hand in one, it´s pretty uncomfortably hot.

The Jarðböðin, the Mývatn Nature Baths, are a lovely temperature. That´s where I´d always planned to spend this birthday and it was delightful. It´s like the Blue Lagoon but with a much better view and it doesn´t taste as salty if you accidentally get any in your mouth. It´s on the side of an active volcano, so on one side is steaming red mountainside and on the other is a view stretching away across the lake and the plains with conical volcanoes rising up and a snowy mountain ridge right at the back. There´s not much to say except that it´s very nice spending several hours floating in warm water with a view like that.

I have a computer but it won´t accept my camera. I was hoping I could finally put up some of the pictures from my camera but it is not to be and I have such a lovely one of me looking scared on the rocks in Grjótagjá.

On Thursday I set sail from the Hotel Puffin, bound for the north.
Mývatn, my ultimate port of call, is 166km from Egilsstadir. At 90kph, that’s under two hours. But today was the day I finally noticed that there’s something wrong with my speedometer. 0-60 are marked in tens, then it’s in twenties. The smiley-face speed checkers on the side of the road say that when I thought was 55 is actually only 50, so I no longer have any idea what speed I’m driving at. No wonder I’m always getting overtaken – I could very easily be doing 20 less than I realise.
Anyway.
I made a few stops on the way, to enjoy the way northern Iceland is such a grey-brown desert – the Odadahraun is good for this. Literally “the Desert of Misdeeds” – that’s the best place name in the world! I stopped at Hrossaborg, the collapsed crater from Oblivion, which I’ve wanted a closer look at for two years. It’s just inside the F road – that’s the ford-ridden Highland roads I’m legally not allowed on, but there’s a car park and an info board just at the turning and I’m allowed to go there.
I stopped at Námafjall, the high temperature area where blue mud bubbles and Earth put on two kettles a few millennia ago and forgot about them. It’s unbelievable how long those two piles of rocks have been steaming for – and not just gently, idly steaming – steaming like a steam locomotive in a race uphill. I’ve been there before but on an afternoon tour of everything interesting within about eighty miles, which doesn’t give you time to look at anything properly. I ambled. I got laughed at by an Icelander called Olaf P because the steam made my glasses steam up. I wondered why on earth tourists were standing so close to the kettles – touching them! – for photos.
Next stop was Leirhnjúkur, where a series of fissures opened between 1977 and 1984, the Krafla Fires. Krafla itself – right opposite – had its own Fires in the 1720s but they were called the Mývatn Fires. Krafla Fires not actually from Krafla. Easy. Anyway, it was amazing! Ground Zero of an eruption recent enough that the ground is still steaming, still hot to the touch. In places, the rock is whitish. I thought that was where it had got really hot, like charcoal, but no. It’s where a light coat of moss is starting to grow. Spread out in front is a big black fresh lava field, hardly any older than I am. I loved it. You propose to me on that fresh lava and I will marry you (I will consider it; I don’t actually want to tie myself down with unwise promises just because I got overexcited at some warm rocks).
Final stop was Víti, another crater filled with turquoise water, but not the same Víti that I swam in on top of Askja two years ago. I could see Askja very clearly on the horizon today, far more clearly than I could see her when I was standing on top of her. And Herdubreid, who finally shed her crown of clouds. She’s very easy to recognise, and huge. I don’t remember her being so big when I was right at her base hut.
This is Krafla’s Víti. You can’t swim there, I think you’d be an idiot to even try to get to the water.
The road back to the Ring Road goes through the Leirbotn Geothermal Power Station. It has boreholes all over the mountainside, joined to the central station by big silver pipes. One of those pipes meets the road and their solution was to bend the pipes over in a big arch, limiting the size of traffic that can go under it.
I am staying tonight at Stórutjarnir, four miles from Godafoss, 25 miles from civilisation. It was the only hotel available for under a certain price in miles. It’s pleasant – very isolated and quiet, give or take noisy guests down the hall. My view is down a valley with a lake in it, mountains rising up each side. There’s a pool – the only Edda with a private pool. I had the hot pot to myself for half an hour before I was joined by two elderly Australians, whose travel agent seems to have gone out of their way to give them hotels in the middle of nowhere – I think they were at Neskaupsstadur last night, half an hour further along the eastern fjords than I was. They can’t pronounce any Icelandic names and they’re not even going to try – they think they were in a place that begins with F and had about fourteen letters in it. I think they mean either mean Fjardabyggd, the collective name for the three fishing villages, including Eskifjördur, where I was (not enough letters) or they’ve mistaken the first letter, because Neskaupsstadur is about right.
Anyway, we boiled ourselves in the hot pot, an Icelandic lady and a girl from an unidentified place that isn’t Iceland joined us and I was delighted to find that I could comprehend the girl’s attempt to pronounce Hveravellir and I knew where it was but the Icelandic lady didn’t have a clue. Mwahaha, I am better at Icelandic geography than you!

On Wednesday I left surprisingly early. The road out of Reydarfjördur had mysteriously turned into several kilometres of gravel road in twenty-four hours and once I was past there, my car suddenly demanded that I check the oil now. As I was going through Egilsstadir, I popped into the airport where I hired the car to seek their advice. No one there. There are three sets of in/out flights a day and not a soul around in between. But Hertz do have a phone that connects directly to Hertz in town (not that they exist on any map). They asked if a number matched a number on the inside of the windscreen. I had no numbers at all so I pulled out the dipstick and made faces at it and apparently that pleased the car, because the warning promptly disappeared. The man on the phone said it’s just a reminder, which the mechanics must have forgotten to reset. Anyone know anything about Golfs have any opinions on that?
Off I went to Borgarfjördur Eystri, supposedly a highlight of the area. Four stretches of gravel road, including one over corkscrew mountain roads and the “loose cliffs” just outside the village are a massive landslide waiting to happen. It dwarfs the potential landslip at Dinah’s Hollow. When these cliffs go – and I’m pretty sure they will – it’ll be colossal. You don’t hesitate on that bit of road. Pretend it’s a rally, hope there’s nothing coming the other way and run for it.
Borgarfjördur – or Bakkagerdi, a village far too small for two large names – sits prettily by the sea between rhyolite mountains but there’s nothing there. The drive is nice enough but the village is just a teeny-tiny fishing village.
I came back to Egilsstadir, checked the oil properly because the car was complaining again and then went to wander around the rocks next to the pool.

Having not really slept, I’d decided to depart the tent and find somewhere with a roof. There being nothing of the sort available in Egilsstadir, I ventured further away – to Eskifjördur, which had a very nice room in the Pufffin Hotel, with mountain and fjord views. True, the name over the door said Hotel Eskifjördur, which meant I drove past it three times before concluding that it wasn’t a coincidence that it was covered in pictures of puffins.
Oh, it felt good to have a real bed, with pillows and there were curtains to block out the incessant light and my own shower – adjustable temperature and no strangers watching. Bliss. Such bliss that all I did all day was have a blissful shower, nap, read, eat and watch Wolf Blood on CBBC before going to the pool in the evening. Not that Egilsstadir is a big town by any means but Eskifjördur really is remote and quiet – give or take the “main road” to Neskaupsstadur right outside my window.

Monday was a bit clearer. I’d more or less worked out the art of The Morning in a Tent and so I was out much earlier, to drive around Lögurinn, a lake that’s actually a bulge in the river. Its southern bank is lined with trees, which Icelanders are very excited about, as Iceland is very short on trees. It’s nice but there’s nowhere to stop to get a proper view of the lake.
Towards the end is a bridge and on the other side, there is a canyon cut out of the mountainside. I immediately decided I wanted a closer look and soon found there was a car park and trail for just such a purpose. Hengifoss, the waterfall that carved out the canyon is Iceland’s second or third highest, depending on where you’re reading it. It takes about an hour to walk up – it’s a lot further than it looks from the ground and it takes longer if you stop for lots of photos or to enjoy the posing sheep, who are clearly very accustomed to having cameras pointed at them. Hengifoss has carved out a little horseshoe, which has several thin but bright and very visible red layers between the basalt. It’s very pretty – I don’t know why it isn’t better known.
I came back through Egilsstadir and took the “good mountain road” to Seydisfjördur, where the Denmark-Norway-Scotland-Faroes ferry comes in once a week. It’s an unexpected road – very steep, very twisty, very high, with a winter wonderland at the top – a half-frozen blue and white river. Just a few miles further on, you descend the other side and almost immediately it’s summer. Seydisfjördur sits at the mouth of the fjord, with steep mountains, several snow-capped all around it. It fails on information, though. No maps. No idea where anything is. But pretty. It also fails on people ambling across the road randomly – not defiant of cars, just totally oblivious to them and deserving of being run over. The pool is inside so I decided not to bother and instead to enjoy the mountain road back to Egilsstadir – much more enjoyable when you’re expecting it.
I lounged in my tent for a bit when I got back, slept a little bit and then went to the pool – which is hiding a nice warm play area separated from the main pool by a piece of glass – I thought the pools were connected but they’re not and it’s nice and warm.
Tomorrow night I may move into the Edda hotel. The night after I definitely will – I want a proper roof over my head for at least one night before I move to Mývatn on Thursday.