I Am A Polar Bear

Instagram first. This is me at Stuðlagil.

Blue-green water, basalt columns, vintage film camera slung across me, pretty Insta-perfect.

The reality: an unplanned 5.4km round hike, a scramble my mum must never find out about, perpetually checking everything is zipped safely away and keeping half an eye on the rushing water in case some malevolent spirit pushes me off balance and down the rocks to my death in the river. Oh, and when I stood up, I discovered I was sitting in a puddle.

I’ve seen Stuðlagil online a lot – either on Instagram, where you get the iconic photo of the narrow basalt corridor and the blue-green water and a beautiful girl dressed for the outdoors but no less beautiful for that; or you see it in Ring Road videos where they then skip over the entire northern half of Iceland because they’ve run out of time or can’t find any Insta-popular photo spots along there.

What you never see is what it actually takes to get that photo.

Now, everything I’m about to say can be put down to the fact that I didn’t do the reading for myself. I’m normally very good at it; I’m the person tutting at all the tourists who didn’t do their research. But in this case, Stuðlagil was pencilled in for my day in the East, not for the day I arrived in the East. I saw the sign when I was still some forty miles north of Egilsstaðir and I skidded to a halt, sending all the luggage in the back of my campervan flying. The research should – would – have been done that evening, if I hadn’t made the split-second decision to cross it off on Saturday afternoon rather than spend Sunday in the east and include that as one of the things I did.

The first thing Instagram never mentions is that Stuðlagil has two car parks. Now I’ve been there, I recommend the first one. Leave the Ring Road and follow an increasingly narrow gravel road 15km until you see the HAK Bistro on your left. Drive past the bistro, cross the river and follow an even narrower and rougher gravel road until you reach the worst car park you’ve ever parked in in your life. This isn’t just rough gravel; if you turn right immediately upon entering the car park, you’ll find yourself driving over rounded rocks of the kind that should be on the bottom of a river bed. Your 4×4 monster truck will handle them with ease but my 2WD campervan didn’t enjoy them at all. In fact, it’s only recently that the road has been improved – and only just enough – for 2WD vehicles to get down it at all.

If you prefer the second car park, don’t turn at the bistro but just keep driving onwards until you reach the campsite, country home and car park. This one delivers you to an excellent viewpoint above Stuðlagil but it’s a lot of stairs down get even vaguely close to it.

On the other hand, it’s a 5.5km round hike from the first car park but it’s a fairly non-strenuous hike. I’m usually dressed and shod for an unexpected hike when I’m in Iceland but I might have made different decisions about what I carried and when I had lunch and how I felt about the queue for the toilets had I known I was going to be out a while. You’ll probably want a bare minimum of an hour and a half for the round hike and time to take a few photos, two hours minimum if you’re planning to try for the nice pictures down at water level and two and a half hours if you want to take your time. You’re also going to want to allow at least 25 minutes’ driving time in each direction just to get to the car park. So all in all, as you’re leaving the Ring Road, you need to have an absolute minimum of two and a half hours clear in your day.

As I said, it’s not a particularly strenuous walk. You’ll probably want some half-decent shoes on, especially if you’re planning to do anything other than gaze down into the canyon. My mountain sandals did the job just fine but your flip-flops probably aren’t going to cut it. An hour and a half of walking is also a long time to risk the weather changing, so even if it’s sunny, it’s not a bad idea to take waterproofs in case a cloud comes over suddenly, as clouds often do in Iceland, and I’d have taken a snack to eat sitting overlooking Stuðlagil if I’d known.

You’ll be getting on for 2km into your hike before you finally realise you can see Stuðlagil ahead. Instagram is absolutely right about the colour of the water but you’ll wonder several times on the way if the narrow bit with the basalt columns really looks like that or if there’s some editing at work. You’ll be walking alongside the river and alongside the gorge it’s carved into the mountainside but it just doesn’t have that Insta-drama until considerably later on.

You’ll know when you reach the right place because there will be people climbing all over it. Access down to water level from the other side, the second car park side, is at the northern end of the canyon and there will be people hopping on stepping stones across, people on the stony “beaches”, people making their way down the stairs, people standing on things it shouldn’t be humanly possible to access. Instagram makes this look like a hidden spot where you won’t encounter another living soul but if you haven’t realised that’s not true by the time you reach the car park – well, you’re going to realise it by the time you get up to Stuðlagil.

The pretty bit is a little further on, where Stuðlagil is almost divided in two by a kind of “island” of basalt columns. There’s no easy way down. The beautiful girls don’t look like the kind to do a hairy scramble above fast-flowing ice-cold water but they have. If you’re going to follow them, please do it really carefully. Put the camera away until you’re sure of your footing and don’t do anything stupid.

The best place to get those photos is at the northern end of this “island”. There’s a lovely pile of boulders just above it, with a stream running through them. I was quite satisfied just to sit on the boulders and hold my camera out to the side (strap wrapped firmly around my wrist) rather than brave the wrath of the canyon god that might make me slip on the rocks and fall all the way down, but it’s really not much scarier to continue down until you’re on the little pavement down the middle of the canyon. I watched a mum with two smallish kids go a lot further down than I did.

This is marginally quieter than elsewhere in Stuðlagil, I’ll give Instagram that. Not many tourists make the hairy scramble down to the rocks and are quite content with pictures from above, or down to the more open beach-like area immediately to the north. If you want to go right down to water level, the easiest access is probably from the opposite bank, from the other car park, but like I said, it’s a lot of stairs down. The internet says somewhere around 240, then you use the walkways around the top of the canyon and meander your way to the staircase that leads down the corner of the canyon to the river. It’s safer and less scary than scrambling around on the rocks but physically, it’s much harder and it’s going to take you to the opposite end of the popular bit of Stuðlagil.

So there I am, sitting on my rock, trying not to look at the fairly long drop down into the rushing river below, taking photos, trying to avoid getting people in the photos by shuffling myself and my camera and I’m reasonably happy with what I’m getting. I reckon the Instagram girls are going very early in the morning and probably not in the height of summer to get their pictures uninterrupted and that moody look to them but for 2pm in early August, I’m pretty pleased.

Of course, I’m wearing a yellow t-shirt which is almost completely see-through and the neckline is misshapen beyond recognition; my hair is coming loose from the plaits and blowing in the wind and I’m wearing a black and brown checked shirt over it all. I should be in pristine 66° North or Canada Goose and either wearing a headband or a hat but 99% of us aren’t Insta-perfect and even the people who seem to be are most likely mostly faking it.

Anyway, I was feeling quite happy about it all. Stuðlagil does in reality look like it does on Instagram, I’ve got some acceptable pictures, the weather is good and I’m going to scramble back out of the canyon and stroll back to the van. I stood up. I made the delightful discovery that when I found a suitable and secure rock to sit on, I completely missed the fact that it’s got a small stream running across the back of it and I’ve been sitting in a puddle for at least the last twenty minutes. The Instagram photos never show anyone in advertently getting wet trousers visiting Stuðlagil.

Luckily, my hiking trousers are quick-drying, so that wasn’t a major disaster but it wasn’t a very pleasant sensation to hike the 2.5km back to the van feeling like I’d wet myself.

The last Instagram vs reality is entirely on me. That vintage film camera I’m wearing? The film ran out and I replaced it but when I got near the end of the roll, it didn’t seem to stop and when I wound it back, it didn’t feel like I was winding back 36 photos. I suspect it hadn’t been winding on at all and when the photos came back, it came with a separate email to tell me one of the rolls was blank. Yeah, I realised that too late. I did get a couple of Stuðlagil on the end of the first roll and they’re probably some of the better ones – a lot too dark, a lot had a weird light leak and a lot of them were just… not good quality.

So there’s the truth about Stuðlagil. Instagram is entirely right about the beauty but fails to mention moderate difficulties in driving there, parking there, hiking there and scrambling there. I’m glad I went and I’ll go again and I recommend you going but it doesn’t hurt to go with a better idea of the bigger picture than Instagram’s perfect shot gives you.