Wednesday 9th July

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.

Waterfall in the geothermal valley

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.

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…