You’ve read my Day One diary (in which there was a blizzard and exhaustion and near-death) and now we move onto Day Two – featuring me going in the support car rather than walking.
Breakfast started with lots of fresh fruit and coffee and moved onto François’ special-recipe porridge, with added fruit and brown sugar and cinnamon. It was thick! After that, we packed – spent ages packing and we left about 10.30. At least, the rest of the group left. François and I – mostly I – had judged it prudent if I travelled in the car with the luggage today.
The car was very full with luggage! Eiður has a trailer available but it’s easier without it and so everything was going in the car, like it or not. One more bag and we would have needed the trailer.
The walking group set off south, the 7 miles/12km to Álftavatn while the car set off north, a little bit west of the way we’d come yesterday, ploughing straight into the snow. The sky was still white but now you could see – there was snow and there were mountains and they were two separate things. I could very clearly see the long slope I really hadn’t got up yesterday, saw every pole and every cairn right down to the hot spring – well, I couldn’t see the hot spring itself but I could see the stream and the Misty Mountains beyond that where this hobbit had nearly perished.
Eiður said last night that the car wasn’t very much modified. No, not by Iceland monster monster truck standards. But it has big chunky wheels and enlarged bodywork and three sets of gears. It didn’t exactly eat up the terrain but if it pushed hard enough, it could do it.
Early on, we found a bit of snow that required us to tilt sideways. It knew we weren’t going to roll. I was reasonably confident we weren’t going to roll. I hoped we weren’t going to roll. But the car tipped at quite an alarming angle and I began to mentally prepare for finding myself lying on my side with two or three tons of car, luggage and driver slipping towards me.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the snow is quite waterlogged, which means 1) you sink 2) it creates a vacuum. And even without the water, some of the snow was 2 or 3 feet thick and as fresh as possible, just laid down yesterday in the storm that nearly killed me.
After a while I realised there was a road – a track – in the distance. So that was where we were heading. It soon turned out that more of the road was on snow than on track. And it was steep in places. In one place, we had to take 7 run-ups to bash our way through the deep fresh snow and pop over the top. That was terrifying the first time – or the first three times, especially the bit where we slid backwards to have another go. By the end, it was still scary and we needed all the 4×4 tricks the car had to offer to haul ourselves over the edge but it was only “really scary” doing the run-ups by then rather than “absolutely terrifying”.
I knew that for the walkers, the snow would end when they crossed the mountains on the horizon, at the end of the Torfajökull caldera, south of Hraftntinnusker. But we’d started by going north and I was already hopelessly lost. The snow was just getting thicker and thicker and there was no sign of it ending. It was quite exciting. Bit terrifying.
We bounced across relatively flat snowfields for a while, sending up bow waves up snow. We scattered slushy snow. We scattered melted snow and gravel. We went up and down slopes and mountains – we attacked slopes that just shouldn’t be possible in a car. At one point, while turned almost sideways – I really had no idea whether we were trying to go up or down. Or indeed, whether we were just going to end up rolling down the slope.
We descended to river level. River? Road. Much easier to drive on than the snow. Nice and low, with plenty of grip in the form of the oversized gravel in the bottom. I gathered that the road worked differently here. There was a place where the road ended and a place where the road started again but otherwise you just pick any route possible through the water. Occasionally it was a little bit scary getting out of the river – a few high banks that even a 4×4 shouldn’t be able to get up. But we got up, every single time. I think we slipped back and had to have another try just once.
More snow. More sideways. More flying across snowfields. More throwing the car at slopes and snow until we forced our way through. The scenery became very monochrome and I began to wonder if I could draw some of the mountains I could see. We got stuck again. Eiður put it in the lowest of low gears and let us hover, so so slowly across the snow, until I wasn’t sure if we were moving at all.
The snow ended quite suddenly. One moment 90% of the landscape was snow, the next minute 90% wasn’t snow. Of course, the road still ran through all the patches of wet sticky snow. And the landscape began to turn a deep blackish-red. Now we hit good road. Well, dirt track. Dirt tracks are so much better than gravel tracks – less bumpy, less slippery. We bounced but it was pretty smooth and we began to get up some good speed, although you can tell from the sound of the engine that the car’s designed for slow difficult pulls rather than unbridled speed.
Gradually the landscape began to turn green, the lime-green of moss and lichen in summer. It was pretty, although I thought a picture of it on a wall wouldn’t be so pretty, especially not compared to the snowy craggy peaks on the south side of the caldera. We saw Álftavatn in the distance, between a narrow pass and behind that, the white expanse of Mýrdalsjökull. The walkers would be amongst the black mountains to our left, making their way down towards the campsite. If not the huts themselves, they’d be able to see the lake for two or three hours before they actually reached it. We went across and round a ridge and then suddenly we were at the pass. The lake was in front of us – and there was the campsite. It had taken less than two and a half hours.
It got a bit more confusing when we arrived. We stopped opposite a car going in the opposite direction and they talked and then Eiður leapt out. I sat there for a bit but eventually I concluded that it was time to get out and go and look at the campsite. There seemed to be something wrong with the other car and soon they were taking giant crowbars to it and lying underneath looking at it from pallets. So I wandered. I enjoyed the view. I took photos, went back to the car for my Instax, went back to the car for more warm layers, found the toilets and then settled down out of the wind behind Hut #1. I was soon found by one of François and Eiður’s colleagues, who presented me with a tent and sent me off to the grassy area to pitch it. No problem. Well, not too much problem. I put the poles together and discovered that they’re colour-coded. The pole sleeves were colour-coded too and I soon discovered that it was a tunnel tent. I moved in, made myself at home, charged my GPS and started catching up on yesterday’s diary.
Presently I peeked out. There was a group putting up tents on the other side of the campsite. My group? I looked with my camera’s zoom. My group! I’d assumed they’d come and camp at least vaguely near me but no.
I ambled up to the food tent and François emerged. We went over to the tent-pitching to find a couple of people having trouble with their tents. Despite the appalling wonkiness of mine – half a mile away! – I soon established that I was the resident tent expert. I helped get Jake’s up and then attempted to help Csilla who was having trouble with the special bit of groundsheet that goes in the porch but which she had put under the main part of the tent and which didn’t really fit properly in the porch. Once everyone was done, it was time to settle in, which meant for the newcomers investigating the onsite bar and restaurant. The beer was 1200kr and the bottles of wine turned out to be only half-bottles. Still, it was enough to get everyone in the mood for chopping vegetables for some kind of mysterious goulash/soup/stew thing. I did 2 onions before my eyes hurt so much I had to run away and wash them. When I came back, we’d moved inside the food tent for the rest of the prep and I carried on with just potatoes and turnips after that, still crying because there were so many onions in a very confined space. François stuck it all in another cauldron, stirred it with another huge wooden spoon and declared “dinner at 7!”. It was about half past five.
I passed most of it getting my diary up to date while nibbling leftover custard creams. I had a quick chat with Kieran who had just enjoyed five minutes of hot shower and at least five minutes of cold shower. I answered everyone’s questions about my drive down here. I sat in the food tent until it got too cold, then I ran down to my lonely (but clearly unshared!) tent, shivered until everything hurt in my sleeping bag, added all the extra clothes and took some Gaviscon. I don’t know if it’s Iceland or camping or cheese slices or some combination of the three that gives me heartburn but something does and I’d been meaning to take some for hours.
Dinner turned out to be lamb stew and once it was eaten, most people vanished to the bar. Eiður had been in and out throughout dinner to collect another helping of stew and update us on the football score – 1-1 in the end, I think, and the end of Iceland’s World Cup dream. We washed up as a group, using boiling water from the cauldron tipped into one of the crates and a washing-up bowl full of clean water for rinsing.
My plan was a shower, especially when I discovered it works by vouchers with a QR code that you scan and can then keep. Scrapbook material! It took a while to brave the cold to go and get my shower stuff from my tent. I got my voucher – paid cash but they do take cards – and then went and sat in the dining tent with François, Clarence and Kieran, keeping an eye on the shower queue. It didn’t get any shorter and new people kept joining it. Eventually I had to give in and go and join the queue. I chatted to a girl from Switzerland who was doing the trail with G Adventures, one of whose team is Eiður’s brother-in-law. They were supposed to set off yesterday and come straight to Álftavatn but because of the storm they’d had to stay at Landmannalaugar and set off a day late – no room in their schedule to make up time, unlike our original – well, maybe not original plan. Unlike our Plan B from last Friday.
When she went in the shower I chatted to a girl from California and we met one of the hardy/stupid people who had camped in the snow and the blizzard and the howling wind at Hrafntinnusker. Considering those shower tokens only give you five minutes of hot water, the shower queue moved incredibly slowly, with each emerging person assuring us that the water was boiling hot. We had heard rumours that the shower on the other side was only lukewarm so we stayed where we were.
The rumours were true. The shower was very hot. I’d give up on any idea of washing, let alone trying to wash my hair. I just stood and enjoyed some hot water, although I had to spend a lot of the shower fiddling with the cold tape in order to stop it taking my skin off – it was very, very hot. Getting changed before and after was unpleasant, though. The floor was wet and the air was cold and the shower was littered with abandoned vouchers. I was careful not to misplace mine, while its code was still usable and then to pick up the right voucher afterwards for my scrapbook.
I scuttled back to my tent half-dressed and dived into my sleeping bag to warm up. Slowly, gradually, I climbed out to get changed or to add layers. It took at least 3 attempts to figure out how to arrange my bed. I’d managed to pitch on a little hump and sleeping either side of it proved uncomfortable. An then I couldn’t decide which end of the tent sloped downhill most. It had been so comfortable to spend the afternoon in there but not so much to sleep. I did get to sleep and then I woke up frozen. I needed more clothes again but it was just too uncomfortable and too cold even to sit up, let alone to do anything about it.
Day Three: Alftavatn to Emstrur
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