July is going to be all about the Laugavegur Trail but as I’m still on the plane home as this is published, that’s not going to start until Thursday. But I can write about one of the Useful Travel Items that helped me survive six days on the Laugavegur Trail.
It’s my mountain sandals, aka my favourite ever travel footwear. My hiking boots are getting a review in August but the sandals have been serving me for a long time. They’re not entirely stylish, I admit. They have great flat footbeds that stick out around my feet and big wide neoprene-padded straps that wrap all the way around to make sure no glacial river sucks them straight off my feet. They are pink… but that doesn’t make them pretty, that’s simply the colour-coding that tells you whether you’re in the men’s aisle or the women’s one of the outdor shop (seriously, black-brown-green-red suddenly gives way to pink-purple-turquoise-bit-more-pink – it’s ludicrous).
I bought my first pair of mountain sandals somewhere around 2004, under peer pressure from my caving club (no idea why; wellies for caves and trainers for the pub were the only requirements for caving, but I clearly remember Moon Moon’s disdain for my lack of sandals on our trip to Ireland) and they’ve lasted so well. They’re still in B+ condition today. The velcro has got a bit clogged up and I can’t seem to clear it so the straps occasionally come undone and the sole is starting to peel away on one of them. That’s ok at home but when I’m depending on them in Iceland for a week or two, it’s hugely inconvenient for them to totally fall apart so I’ve had to replace them. They’re Hi Tec, not exactly a prestigious brand, so they’ve done really well to last as long as they have and I wish I could have replaced them with another Hi Tec pair.
Alas, outdoors sandals for women mostly come in two flavours. Thin decorous straps that don’t feel secure or waterproof, or approach shoes with a few cut-outs and elastic instead of laces. I’ve agonised for years over what I’m going to replace my sandals with when the day comes and when the day came, it had to be North Face because they were the only ones that made the right sort of thing – solid, chunky, ugly and 100% functional.
They’re not as good as the Hi Tecs. The footbed isn’t as foamy and padded, the straps are thin webbing with neoprene padding threaded on, which means yet another adjustment to make them comfortable and I think they stick out around my foot even further than the Hi Tecs. They’re not bad. I’ve just walked across Iceland in them.
Well, I don’t know what I did in them. I’m writing this two weeks before I even fly to Iceland. I definitely need them for river crossings, and if my map is at all accurate (which I don’t think it is; Iceland’s highlands and rivers are difficult to keep up to date) I can see sixteen rivers to cross in the first four days. These sandals are good at rivers. I’ve been paddling in my old sandals for years and I tried to climb up Rauðfeldsgjá in them last year. They’re properly waterproof and my feet are reasonably coldproof so we get on ok.
But they’re good for climbing as well. In 2004 or 2005 I climbed a mountain in Austria to visit a showcave (where I wasn’t allowed a lantern because the guide thought I was under 16 and too young to be responsible for an actual carbide lamp) while wearing them. I climbed Laki in them. I explored Þórsmörk in them, much to Mathias’s dismay – he eventually allowed that my sandals were indeed suitable for climbing mountains and exploring canyons and even said I have “seal feet”.
I’m hoping to do a chunk of the walking in these sandals. Not day five, when we walk up the eruption site at Fimmvörðuháls because that only erupted in 2010 and the ground should still be dangerously hot a couple of inches down and I’m not an idiot. But the four days from Landmannalaugar to Þórsmörk should be fine for at least some of the walking.
If you’re not worried about fashion over function and you want a pair of lightweight shoes that can take anything you can throw at them, and you have seal feet like me, I really recommend a pair of mountain sandals as the most useful travel footwear in the world.