Iceland August 2013
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Day Two: The Reykjadalur valley and the cave Raufarholshellir
We planned to do a circle around hot springs and in the evening start driving towards the Ice Lagoon. If you zoom in the map, you will see our track around hot springs. When we got back to the car, Maria remembered that there is a cave not far away (bottom left on the map), and we decided to visit it.
The green tent shows the place where we stayed overnight.
This is our first camp, an amazing place, and great weather. A smoking hot spring is seen under the rock on the right. We climbed up the gully at the left...
But only after another dip in the hot river.
This hot spring was right above our tents.
Some thyme plants are peppered in the moss
We climbed up the gully onto a plato.
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It took us quite a while to make the circle around hot springs, as each was worth exploring. They were all different: some were very noisy, some had unusual flora, some boasted very unusual colours, some bubbled and made funny noises, some were covered by sulfur crystals...
Sonya is washing her hands in a lukewarm lake. We did not dare to bathe in the water of this colour :)
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Some fumaroles are covered with the sulfur crystals.
The mud dried to make a bird shape.
Drying mud sometimes made strange formations of different colour.
Warm springs can be easily distinguished as they are surrounded by green weeds.
Steam from a hot lake condensed on these plants.
A flatfish...
Ouch, I am about to burst...
Splash!
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The Raufarholshellir cave. We stopped here almost by chance, we did not even have a proper torch with us. The cave was made by a flowing lava long time ago. Walking in the cave was time consuming as one had to negotiate one's way through the fields of huge boulders. We did not go far and soon turned back...
Then we accidentally shone the torch down a hole and saw... ice stalagmites! This was totally unexpected. The guidebook said that there are more ice formations at the end of the cave, but we had neither time nor a good torch to get there.
We were planning to wild camp at the end of the day near some waterfall, but this area turned out to be full of agricultural land and small villages. We had no choice but to find a campsite. We were not allowed to stay in one campsite as they had some sort of a music festival, so we had to drive until Hella (it is called a different name on the Google map) and pitched our tents in a campsite in this village quite late at night.
