In this week’s video, it’s my birthday! I give you a quick tour of Systragil, drive the hour or so to Myvatn, put up my tent at a beautiful lakeside campsite and then head to Myvatn. Hverir, the hot springs area, is my first stop, then I go up to the viewpoint over the Krafla area and go exploring on Leirhnj煤kur, a steaming lava field from the late 70s/early 80s and after an afternoon reading in my tent, I spend the evening at Geosea.
I do have stuff to tell you about today that didn’t end up in the video.
- Myvatn means midge lake. As I drove around the lake, there was a splattering noise like it was raining but I couldn’t make sense of that. There were no clouds at all and there were no raindrops on the windscreen. I later discovered I’d driven through a cloud of bugs and my car had a coating of orange-yellow splodges on the front for the rest of the trip.
- If I’d had time, I’d have poked my head into Grj贸tagj谩, a hot flooded cave (you know it from Game of Thrones), Dimmuborgir and had a look at Viti. You really need at least two and a half days to scrape the surface of Myvatn.
- On the road up to Krafla, there’s a roadside eternal geothermal hot shower just standing in the gravel car park. Last time I went there, the drain had got blocked and it was in a puddle full of pillowy green algae-moss stuff. Today it was clear but there was a man – it’s聽always a man! – in Speedos having an actual shower in it. Soap, hands down the Speedos, the whole thing. I filmed the shower once he’d finished but it looked a bit weedy and I was in a hurry because someone else was doing the same thing and the man’s wife/girlfriend/partner emerged in a bikini for her turn to have an actual shower.
- My first stop at Myvatn was actually the little supermarket opposite the campsite. This is my third day and my only food stop so far has been a five minute supermarket sweep at Grindavik. Not that this supermarket has a lot – it’s really only a convenience store but as this is a major tourism centre, it’s badly needed. If it’s not here, you’ve got to go into Akureyri (an hour/hour and a half away) or Husavik (nearly an hour away). I was later told “and here is Iceland’s most expensive grocery store!”.
- I think I remember being told Reykjahl铆冒’s population once – that’s the name of the village on the edge of Myvatn. It’s the sort of village where one birth or one death actually affects the number. Wikpedia says 227 in 2021. Anyway, because presumably of tourism, it has its own V铆nb煤冒in, which is the state-operated alcohol shop. This particular one is open 4pm-6pm Monday to Thursday and 1pm-6pm Friday, closed at weekends. Yes, Iceland can be a bit strict on sales of alcohol.
- I got back from Geosea at around 11pm to find two bikepackers had pitched their tents almost on top of mine. There’s an entire campsite, fairly empty – because no one wants to camp, they want to sleep in vans – and you decide to pitch so close that I’m going to fall over your guyropes getting out of your tents. You should have your tent licence revoked. Honestly, at that time of night, I could cheerfully have slit their tents open with a knife and cut off their guyropes, if I’d only remembered to bring one with me. As it was, I made all the huffing and puffing and passive-aggressive noise I could manage as I moved my tent away. It only has ten pegs, it’s pretty easy to do, even with all my stuff inside. I made the deliberate decision to cut that out of the video – it didn’t seem to fit with the mood of the series but it exists.
And so onwards, to the video.