Yes! At long last I have new travel content – and new Iceland content at that! I got on my first plane in over two years and we’re starting with a bang: I visited the new Icelandic volcano!
It still hasn’t been officially named, to the best of my knowledge, but it’s usually called Fagradalsfjall – that’s actually the name of the nearest mountain since the volcano just sprang out of nowhere. It means the Mountain of the Beautiful Valley. You may also see it still referred to as Geldingadalur which is the name of the nearest valley – Geldings’ Valley, although the tour guide translated it as “Rams’ Valley”.
Speaking of rams, the eruption happened on sheep grazing land and in a totally un-Icelandic move, that means it’s on private land and the landowners charge for parking. I suppose it’s not unreasonable, especially as you can’t graze sheep there anymore but the case of Kerið’s landowners charging for entrance was massive with almost all of Iceland siding with the notion that nature should belong to, be free to and be accessible to everyone so this feels weird.
There’s no reason why you can’t visit the eruption site yourself with your own car but I didn’t have a car and only a vague idea where I should be going. So I booked a tour. It meant I’d be taken to precisely the right place and with someone who knew how to keep us safe at an active eruption. Well, the eruption stopped seven months ago but a volcano can still be considered active even if it hasn’t erupted for the best part of ten thousand years. This region hasn’t erupted in around eight thousand years and those who know reckon that this eruption is the herald for 150-ish years of increased activity in the Reykjanes region – meaning plenty more eruptions. And as for this eruption, there might not be new new lava but the existing new-ish stuff would still be hot.
I specifically picked the tour with Reykjavík Excursions even though I’ve tried to be loyal to Grayline for the last decade, because their tour included the Blue Lagoon. It’s just up the road from the eruption site, close enough for people to be concerned for it in the early days and I thought while I was out on Reykjanes I’d like to pop into some hot geothermal water to warm up after hiking up a volcano, and RE was the only one that offered the two as a combination. I think it’s this one but when I booked it, it was called something else. Definitely had the word “volcano” in the name of the tour.
Pickup was at 10am and we headed west, via the campsite toilets at Grindavík. It wasn’t the day I would have picked for it. It was cold and damp and overcast and very breezy. I’d already piled on several layers and packed more and within a minute of getting off the bus I’d added my gloves and my extra layers.
I’d expected at minimum a forty minute hike but car park 2 is literally on the other side of a low ridge separating it from the valley flooded with lava. I walked up the ridge and there it was, spread out before me. Much “wow!” ensued.
It’s the freshest volcano I’d ever seen but it stopped seven months ago and although I know enough about volcanoes to know it wouldn’t actually be anywhere near cool yet, I expected it to be kind of… black and cold and dead. And it wasn’t!
The whole thing, or as much as I could see in that one valley under a heavy mist, was issuing steam. From the ridge, the steam and the white ashy caps on the rough lava made it look like a stormy sea. The lava was alive! Not as much as it might have been if it had been glowing red and crawling oozily across the valley floor but so much more alive than I’d ever imagined.
We had two hours to enjoy it. Our tour guide said that some of us would walk quickly and some slowly and he’d try to keep with us but I lost him by the time I’d got off the bus so I had to rely on my watch. We had the option to climb what the locals call “The Hill” which is the adjacent mountain but frankly, that would have taken most of my time and I wouldn’t have even seen the crater itself in the fog. Why would I want to try to see the crater through cloud when I could get up close to the lava itself?
There it was. Because it’s still hot, you’re not supposed to walk on it, especially in the regions where it’s steaming. It may look solid but if it’s still hot, that could be a very thin and fragile crust and you could end up knee-deep in actual red-hot lava. I did scramble up on the edge where it seemed stone-cold and very solid and I felt guilty enough about it to wonder whether I should keep the photos to myself. But later, an entire tour-bus full of idiots turned up and they pranced around all over the thing, going so far up it that they were almost lost in the mist, gathering for photos around the steam vents and generally infuriating me.
I looked at it. I touched the cool edges. I took photos of interesting patterns and whirls within it. It’s like when you’re whipping cream – it had got thick enough and solid enough to wrinkle as it “set”. I climbed the mini hill and looked at it from above. I walked down the valley alongside it. It steamed away. It was amazing.
It was also incredibly windy. The breeze had picked up until it was strong enough to literally stop me in my tracks. I’d worn my long-tailed hat – because almost all my clothes were black, I thought it might be good to have a colourful and interesting hat for photos – and it flapped like a flag. It’s quite heavy, with a pompom on the end and the gale flapped it around like a child’s windmill. When I returned to the bus, back down that ridge, I had to lean forward to fight it. I’ve never walked down a steep slope leaning forwards!
My plan to fall into the Blue Lagoon and repair my eardrums, which the wind was trying to drill through, was scuppered by RE’s plans for the day. The volcano is a new item on their Wonders of Reykjanes itinerary so I had to endure a concave cliff that threw storm waves over the viewpoint (ok, that was quite fun), Gunnuhver (a hot springs area which is little more than a massive steam vent and a ghost story), the lighthouse and cliff at Reykjanesviti (far too cold and windy to appreciate a grey rock between grey sky and grey sea) and the Bridge Between the Continents (contrived and fake, although our guide did tell us that) before I was finally dropped at the Blue Lagoon. Frankly, it wasn’t as its best that evening either. The wind continued to howl, the cloud remained low and a heavy layer of steam lay over the water so you couldn’t see anything.
But the Blue Lagoon was really only a bonus, and very secondary to my main goal, which was to see the new eruption. If Reykjanes wants to fulfil that prophecy of 150 years of increased tectonic and volcanic activity so I’ve got a chance to see a live one, I’ll take that, thank you very much, but at least I’ve seen the 2021 eruption at last.