it had been a somewhat spontaneous decision, and after quite a lot of time spent searching for accommodations on a small, tourist-laden island, finally came up with an itinerary that made decent logistical sense. There weren't many affordable places left where we needed them to be and on some days would have to travel far to our beds, but we were feeling up to the journey. Looking out the window above the left elbow of Denmark, I was thrilled, and promptly fell asleep.
When I next opened my eyes, Vatnajökull National Park was waving merrily below, peeking out this way and that from under the clouds with its streaky, slowly sliding southern glacier.
Farther west, milky rivers meandered to the sea through a green and barren volcanic landscape.
The famous Blue Lagoon was clearly visible as we neared the airport, looking for all the world like a sad puddle of melted ice cream on a hot concrete sidewalk.
It was to this ice cream puddle that we first ventured, once we'd landed and managed to get to our rental car through the gusty air. There aren't many trees on that part of the island, and the wind blows at its leisure from coast to coast across the peninsula.
The Blue Lagoon is a milky-blue geothermal pool and probably the most successful tourist trap on the island, with travel companies and airlines aplenty offering special layover deals to pay a lot of money to swim there between flights to and from Europe and North America. It was indeed visually stunning, with this strangely colored water in the midst of a scorched lava field, though for me just walking around the public paths was quite fulfilling enough. We had a peek into the resort with the many people swimming in the warm pool, buying unfathomably expensive cocktails waist-deep at a built-in bar, and I was content to use the swanky restrooms and continue along the road.
It was early evening by that point but we still had several hours of daylight left, this being summer and Iceland, and although we had many miles to go to reach our destination we decided to take the longer, scenic route along the south coast to get there.
Before we'd driven far, I noticed a Point of Interest marked on our road map nearby and we took an exploratory detour, where we encountered our first stinking, benching, bubbling mud pots and fumaroles in the geothermal area of Seltún. As we neared the parking lot, we saw billowing steam rising in the distance, and a closer investigation of the picturesque little stream draining away from it, dotted with fluffy cottongrass, revealed that even here the water was quite literally steaming hot.
As it turns out, geothermal areas like this are awesome. I loved it. Except for the overwhelming, nauseating stench of rotten eggs, I loved it. The minerals in the soil turn it bright colors, the pools of mud boil and bubble and produce steam more reliably than any drama club smoke machine, and the whole thing was altogether alien to me. Even when sights like this became commonplace in the week of hiking and adventuring that followed, it still thrilled me every time I saw steam rising out of nothing on a distant mountainside or from the middle of a lush, flowered field.
The late evening pictures don't really do it justice, but this YouTube video at least provides some electro ambiance.
By that time it was quite late and we were anxious to hit the road again and find our cabin while we still had some daylight. We had 100 km to go and thankfully had good directions to guide us to the tiny house on a dairy farm off a side road of a side road somewhere outside the little town of Hella. The sun settled down as we followed the coast, past the lonely little Strandakirkja in the distance and little fishing villages dotting the otherwise empty coast.
The sunset hung brightly across half the sky as we parked and unpacked, tired but excited, and went to sleep with the wind blowing through the gnarled and hearty copse around us.
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