Iceland blog - Wednesday
Today we had a lazy start and arranged with the travel agent
to stay in our hotel and extra night. Hotel Grimsborgir is by far and away the
best hotel we have stayed in and they have upgraded us to a suite, so we are
making the most of it. Breakfast is OK, but not the greatest. I had pickled
herring (again) and there is very little sign of fresh fruit. You would think
that there is not much fruit found here but later on we found where they grow it. All in all, Iceland is good for food if you like pickled herring.
Sam and I went out at lunchtime for a hike at Hveragerði
where there is a lot of geothermal activity. We hiked in to the Hengill hills
where there is steam gushing out of the ground as you walk up. There is a well-marked
trail and even in the overcast weather it is pretty stunning.
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| Waterfall in the geothermal valley |
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| Not my picture (it's not drizzling) |
After about an hour we came to a stream that is so hot that
people bathe in it. I was tempted to get in but only paddled as I could not
find a good spot and it was VERY HOT.
When we came down we had a well-earned hot chocolate and
went off to visit the town’s rather sorry geothermal information centre. There
we learned not very much but we did discover that they use the heat to
cultivate fruit and vegetables in huge heated greenhouses. We went off on
another quest (with the help of Google Maps) to find a famous lava tube in the
area.
We found a nearly empty car park with one solitary car in it
and no very obvious sign of a tourist attraction. A little search yielded an stunning cave
formed by a lava tube just below the ground. There was a sign advising stout
shoes, a helmet and a good torch as the tube is 1.3 km long and has no lights
at all. Obviously we didn't have any of these but ventured in to the darkness
anyway. We only went a little way, but it was a very unusual and eerie
experience. It was very damp and there was a constant mist shown up in the
light of our iPhones; there was a wonderful dripping sound and you could still
find last winter’s ice on the floor and roof.
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| Sam in the lava tube |
When we came out Iceland had done one of its radical weather
shifts and we found ourselves in the middle of a cloud with 50m of visibility
but this quickly cleared. We returned home to find Jack exactly where we left
him eight hours before. We then raced off to place the time lapse camera in a
location we had scouted on the way home. Tomorrow we will find if we have a
great video or if a squirrel has made off with the camera…
