Iceland August 2013
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Day one
We arrived in the Keflavik airport in the afternoon, packed our stuff in the rented car and went searching for a supermarket as we wanted to buy all food for the first half of our trip. Iceland met us with good sunny weather. It felt like the Alps in the Spring: warm subshine compensates for a chilly weather.
We had a very tight timetable for the whole trip, so we started on the road No 1 towards Hveragerdi without delay. The plan for the day was to walk to the hot river and wild camp in the vicinity.
The map below shows our track in blue. Driving is shown with red colour. The green tent shows the place where we pitched our tents. If you zoom in, you will see our tracks in detail. All maps for the trip to Iceland work in the same way.
The green tent shows the place where we stayed overnight.
We stopped for a short break in Hveragerdi.
Toy birdhouses in a playground.
We spent some time hopping on rubber volcanoes, had a brief lunch, drove along a dirt road to the parking place where we left our car, and started our journey to the hot spring valley
Hot springs soon appeared.
These springs were very close to the parking place.
It's getting late. But it does not get dark until very late, so one can keep walking for a long time.
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Looks like there are some springs up this valley too, but we did not go there. |
The near side of this pond was literally boiling hot. |
This is the famous Reykjadalur valley.
One has to be vary of these fumaroles and tread with caution. The earth crust may turn out to be thin and give way easily exposing boiling mud. Getting stuck in this mud is no fun!
We've made it at last! The hot river (shown on the map above)! We got here around 8 pm and stayed in the water until at least 11... Upstream the hot river is joined by a cold one. The hot stream is really very hot, you cannot sit in it for more than a few minutes. After mixing with the cold stream, the temperature is comfortable, the further downstream, the cooler.
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Still in the water, we had our dinner. The bowls floated on water, one had to watch the current carefully! As we got there on Saturday, this place was quite crowded and we were lucky to find a free basin But later, around 10 pm, most people went home, and we were left alone in the hot river. This was the best strategy: visit interesting places late in the evening and wild camp in the vicinity. This way we avoided the crowds. We could have pitched the tent right next to the hot river, but we decided to move upstream some 300 m (see the map above). We did not see a soul there.
