I Am A Polar Bear

This is the first of a little trilogy about the north of Iceland. Tourists flood to the south west and the South Coast but tend to skip over the north. If you ever watch a Ring Road vlog on YouTube, they cover the South Coast in excruciating detail, might do Stuðlagil and then skip over the north entirely, either because they’ve realised they now have to rush to get their flight or because Instagram hasn’t instructed them to stop anywhere for the next three hundred miles. So when I went to Iceland in July, I went with the intention of uncovering some bits of the north of Iceland that most people miss.

To be honest, huge swathes of north Iceland are mostly arable land or mountains. There are no massive tourist stops up there and I have mixed feelings on that. On the one hand, there’s a bit of Iceland that isn’t drowning in tourists! Places are not being turned into paid car parks and cafes! It’s just nature and scenery and one road cutting through it all! On the other hand, there’s definitely something to be said for spreading the tourism a bit thinner all over instead of having it all along the south coast, and there’s probably something to be said for a bit of tourist income in this region. On the whole, I’m leaning towards preferring the first, though, a bit of Iceland that’s just empty and pleasant.

Today is about a subject close to my heart: hot pools. This particular hot pool made an appearance in one of the sagas, all the way back in the thirteenth century. The pool is called Grettislaug and the saga is called the Saga of Grettir the Strong. Grettislaug = Grettir’s Pool. Grettir Ásmundarson was an eleventh century Icelandic outlaw from the Christian era on a quest to become a hero of the pre-Christian days, the kind who roams around slaying monsters. He’s not actually born in his own saga until chapter 14 and gets cursed by an undead shepherd in chapter 35, resulting in everything in his life going awry. Eventually he’s outlawed for deaths caused by a bit of accidental arson in Norway. In chapter 67 – yeah, this thing is long – he moves to Drangey, a small rocky island in Skagifjörður, visible from the shoreline by Grettislaug. In chapter 76, a thrall lets the fire go out and for some reason, the only way to relight it is to swim a mile back to the mainland to fetch some more fire. Not some more fire wood, some actual fire. How Grettir hopes to swim back across a mile of freezing ocean with fire, I have no idea. I assume he succeeds; a man lends him a boat to go back and I assume he takes some fire with him. But before he rows back, “he went up to the homestead at Reeks, and into a bath that night, and then went into the chamber”. That bath is the pool now known as Grettislaug.

It’s on the western edge of Skagifjörður, one fjord west along from the fjord Akureyri sits on and it’s accessed by a single road leading north from Sauðárkrókur, the last 7km of which are gravel. This road is closed in winter because it’s pretty remote and it’s literally cut along the line where the north Atlantic shore meets steep-sided mountains. There are a handful of farms and summer guesthouses along this road and at the end, there’s the pool, a tiny harbour and a surprisingly big campsite. Having originally planned to bathe and then return to camp at Sauðárkrókur, I immediately decided to stay there for the night and let the gravel road be a problem for the me of tomorrow. It was drizzling when I arrived. I paid for my camping and access to the pools in the little reception/cafe and found a spot to park. You have to pay for access to the pools anyway but if you camp, you get unlimited access the entire time you’re there – no extra cost if you want to go there at 4pm, have a late night beer in the water and then an early dip, for example.

The campsite consists of two fields. The smaller one on the other side of the track was closed but its facilities weren’t – two turf huts housing a toilet block and an indoor kitchen/cooking/common room. The big field had two sheds next to the cafe with the toilets and showers in and the cafe itself was open until midnight and would re-open about 7am, so if you wanted to shelter from the weather, sit on a comfortable armchair, enjoy the stifling heat, use the wifi or have some food you didn’t have to cook yourself, this is the place to come.

I’d had quite a long day of driving, broken only by climbing a volcano, glancing at a roadside waterfall, visiting a closed church and going to a turf farm – ok, maybe my day had been broken up a lot more than I realised; and my adventures in the north will continue over the next two or three posts – so I parked up, climbed into the back and made something probably best described as “girl dinner”. I don’t remember exactly what it is but I bet it involved some sour cream star crisps. As I was eating, I heard an engine close by and then a lot of slamming doors a lot closer than I would have liked. I had no idea how close it was until I was getting ready to go to the pool, when I opened my door to discover someone had parked six feet away and then set up an awning whose ropes were less than two feet from my door. I’d very begrudgingly allow that if the campsite was busy but this was a field of 16,000m², about the size of a fairly massive French hypermarket, and only had maybe ten vehicles parked it at that time of day. I didn’t imagine, given its remoteness and given how few cars I’d seen on the Ring Road, that it would get particularly busy anyway. What I should have done was accidentally-on-purpose tripped over all those ropes as I got out but what I actually did was slam my sliding door as hard as I could, flounce round to the driving side and drive off as indignantly as I could to the other side of the field, where I left at least fifteen feet between my two neighbours.

But enough of the campsite. Time for the pool. Part of the reason there’s a charge for using the pools is that someone over the last thousand years has built changing facilities. They’re pretty basic, just two rooms with benches and pegs round them and showers just set back far enough that you don’t soak the nearest clothes when you switch them on. Since my trip to Budapest last year, where pool shoes were a requirement, I’ve acquired some proper slip-on comfortable flipflops, pool sliders if you prefer, which I carry around with me. I could see immediately that I’d want them here – it’s just enough of a distance from the shower room door to the pool that it’s going to hurt to do it barefoot and it’s going to be really cold, even in July, if it’s drizzly.

I scrambled as quickly as I could into the nearest pool, which was the larger of the two. Yes, two. In Grettir’s day, it was just the one pool, which is the smaller of the two. The bigger one is called Jarlslaug, the Earl’s Pool, after Jon Eiriksson, who was known as the Earl of Drangey, and there’s a big metal sign to that effect on the stone wall that mostly separates the two. I would imagine in Grettir’s day, the pool was a lot rougher and more rustic. Now they’re both lined with stones to make a rocky but reasonably smooth bottom and sides, there are rocks placed to sit on, a smoothish pavement built around and between the pools and as a finishing touch, there are actual pool ladders going down into both. Other than these cosmetic touches, though, the pools are pretty natural. The hot water rises from the earth and is made tolerable by a hose piping in cold water and the rocky bottom is uneven enough that you can easily trip up crossing the pool.

I’d jumped into Jarlslaug, which is the hotter of the two and after I’d taken the required selfies and looked at the view, a French family came out. The dad was wearing lime-green budgie-smugglers – if I have to have witnessed that, you have to share the misery of the mental image – and there were three sons, ranging from about fifteen to maybe about ten. They came over to the nearest pool, Jarlslaug, and stuck their feet in and then they rushed off shrieking about how hot it was. For some context, I’d been in it for at least five minutes. Icelandic swimming pools helpfully label their hot tubs by temperature and I know that 40° is uncomfortably hot for me, and anything hotter is almost impossible for me to get in. To sit there and not start to turn lobster-red within seconds, that pool could have been no warmer than 39°. From the shrieking, you’d think the pool was approaching boiling point. They rushed off to Grettislaug, which was apparently a bit cooler.

I spent a while luxuriating in Jarlslaug I love a good lagoon, I like a local swimming pool but something more natural like this is just special. I won’t say I had it all to myself, not by a long way, but a small natural pool on the shore up a gravel road on the north coast is a very different beast from something like the Blue Lagoon. Eventually, it was time to sample Grettislaug itself. Jarlslaug is almost like a miniature swimming pool – deep enough that you can creep around it in a crouched position with your shoulders more or less below the water – but Grettislaug is like a hot tub, just what you want after a long cold swim, a little shallower so you more or less have to sit and small enough that if you starfish across it, you’d probably be touching it with all limbs. I’d not had any major problem with the heat of the bigger pool but the cooler pool was pleasantly cool too. I could have done without the French family – the dad demonstrated his party trick, squeezing the water so it squirted and the three boys immediately mimicked him, for the next hour. Party tricks lose their novelty very quickly and within a couple of minutes, I was tired of seeing them squirting water around.

When I’d finished with the hot pool, I went and phoned home using the wifi and wandering around outside the cafe and then went off for my evening walk over the cliff beyond the pools. The owner of the campsite had said that there’s a nice walk and a nice black beach over there so I went to investigate. On the horizon was a solid block of an island, the one Grettir swam from, over a mile out to sea, according to the saga – four and a half miles according to Google Maps. Seeing the sheer sides, I might be slightly more concerned about getting off the island and to the sea in the first place.

At quarter to eleven that night, a van arrived. By then, the field was a lot more full than it had been at 4. Vans formed a ring around the perimeter of the field and a few were lined up in small groups around the middle. It was busy but not so busy that a newcomer needed to push its way through the ring and park ten feet from my nose. That was irritating enough but then, as I peeked through my curtains, the two occupants of the tiny van began to unload it as if it was Mary Poppins’ carpet bag. This is a van made for two people, just like mine, where I couldn’t imagine having two people and two people’s luggage in one space, and they unloaded a full size garden chair, a large coolbox, enough towels and drapey fabrics and damp clothes and actual rugs to fill an entire suitcase and then pulled out a camping cupboard, the kind that folds into a storage bag at least three feet on each side. I have a similar one for my big tent. I could not even begin to imagine where they were storing such a thing in a campervan, let alone at night when the two of them would occupy every inch of space inside the van. How did they get it to Iceland in the first place? After half an hour of setting up, while a phone on a tripod filmed every second of the process, they finally shut up, turned off the lights and vanished, presumably to Grettislaug and I shook my head and went back to bed. What do you do with all that stuff you’ve just laid out outside your van if it rains, as it’s known to do in Iceland? And five minutes later, to prove me right, it began to rain. Actually, they left most of it outside to get rained on. I assume they had clothes or food in that cupboard, so have fun letting that get soaked. And then have even more fun in the morning when you have to put it all back in the van to move on, with all that wet stuff lying on your bed, which is the only possible place to put it.

I was up just after 7am to scurry back to Grettislaug in the hope of getting it to myself, which I did for twenty minutes or so. Actually, I spent most of it in Jarlslaug. It had been grey and drizzly the night before but now it was reasonably bright and sunny and the pictures from the next morning are so much prettier. A dip in a hot pool is always a good way to start a day and I ended up in sixteen pools, lagoons and other wet places over those two weeks, I don’t think any others were anywhere near a first-thing-in-the-morning dip. I hadn’t even had breakfast. I just put on enough clothes to get across the campsite and jumped in.

I highly recommend it, both staying in this spectacular place and getting in the pool first thing in the morning. This was Wednesday morning and I’d arrived in Iceland about 5pm on the Saturday before, so I was already starting to feel like I’d travelled a long way, done quite a lot and spent several nights in the confines of the van, so I could kind of imagine how it felt to be a saga hero relaxing in the hot water after an epic experience, until you glance out at sea and realise no kind of road trip is ever going to compare to a swim like that, and you are so far from being a saga hero.

Yes, I would go back to Grettislaug. Yes, I would camp again at Grettislaug. I’d probably go in an ordinary car and take my tent rather than battle the van fields ever again, and I’d be a lot more careful about where I position myself so that no one can park right up against my door or push into positions they’re not supposed to be in. I have a theory about these two in that van – that between arriving late and parking behind the ring of vans, they were planning to avoid paying for camping. I’d therefore assumed they’d be leaving early too but there was no sign of any movement from them by the time I got back from my morning swim, nor even by the time I’d had breakfast, got sorted and packed and was reversing out of my space to head back to civilisation.

I don’t know when it’ll be, because I’ve got adventures past and future to write about in the next few months but at some point I’ll do a blog on all the sixteen pools I went on in this trip – my boss asked me to tell him where I swam and which was the best but that’s a big question better answered in an entire blog post.