This is a really old adventure that’s had two or three posts over the years but deserves a new write-up and a new place at the very front of this blog rather than being buried in its bowels: the day I swam in an active volcano, got stranded for hours in a lava field and was not allowed to walk into Mordor.
It was 2013 and I had something Iceland used to call a “bus passport”, which was a pass for the long-distance bus network that used to encircle the country. Mine was a Highland Circle passport, which meant Reykjavik to Skaftafell to Landmannalaugar, up to Myvatn, back to Akureyri and then down to Reykjavik on the Kjolur Highland road. You could do it in either direction, jump on & off wherever you fancied and stretch it out for as long as the buses continued to run as long as you didn’t go back on yourself. I was in Myvatn and I was a day behind schedule because I hadn’t noticed the bus from Landmannalaugar to Myvatn only ran every other day. I’d taken down and packed up my tent and everything before realising this. If the northbound bus had been running every day, how different my day at Askja could have looked…
Once I arrived in Myvatn, a day, late, it was time for my Askja tour! Having established that the bus wasn’t coming, I’d arranged to do the tour a day later, since I’d still be in Landmannalaugar when it was due to depart and that was no problem. I’d booked a small group superjeep tour, a world away from the high-clearance bus tour I took in 2023. It picked up at 8am, maybe even 7.30am, from the little car park across the road from the campsite and it was a massive shiny black 4×4, big enough that the Ford badge on its nose was about level with my nose. Naturally, we took it in turns to have our photos taken with it.
Our first stop was maybe an hour away. Follow the Ring Road away from Myvatn towards the east and 35 kilometres later you’ll see a saddle-shaped half-collapsed crater that you may recognise from the Tom Cruise film Oblivion. I think it’s one I caught up with later on DVD but it had been released a few months earlier and Jonas, our driver-guide, told is about the making of it, all the locals and experts involved and the logistics of filming a big Hollywood movie in a place like this. The Ring Road here cuts through a lava field called Ódáðahraun, which translates roughly into English as the Desert of Misdeeds. Not a hospitable place; mile after mile of either grey rock and violent grey river or dusty brown rock. Very little lives here except around a couple of oases.
We were travelling in convoy with a couple of other jeeps and we stopped at a river crossing to admire the flowers that grow here, the little waterfall and the view of prominent volcanoes sticking up out of the grey rocky desert. Mishap one: the jeep somehow got locked with the keys still inside but that was the work of a mere twenty minutes with the help of a broom handle to fix. You have to be reasonably self-sufficient to drive out here – the Icelandic AA is not rescuing you anytime soon. But that was a minor misadventure.
We continued to another oasis, Herðubreiðarlindir, which has a couple of huts, some toilets and a hole in the ground that served as a home for notorious outlaw Eyvindur who was exiled to the Highlands for twenty years for being an unsavoury, murderous sort of chap. You can’t quite help admiring his survival instincts, though, looking in a hole barely big enough to squat in, while wearing a fleece against the fine July weather and imagining him here in winter, living off scrappy herbs and frozen horse meat using the untanned and untreated horse skin as a roof. The stream hiding under the greenery today would have kept the hole just above freezing, which would have been a couple of dozen degrees higher than the temperature outside.
So far, so good. Onwards to Dreki, which these days resembles a tiny village deep in the Highlands. It features a few huts for hikers, space for camping, a communal dining room and very basic cafe and now it also has a base for the police, who patrol the Highlands for anyone putting themselves in danger, and mountain rescue. I’m not sure all of that existed in 2013, though. We had lunch either in the dining room or on the decking outside and then we did a group hike into the canyon behind it, which has a rock feature looking down into it which kind of looks like a dragon. And this is all very well but it isn’t what I came on this adventure for!
But at long last, it was time for the critical part of the day. We were going to drive up into the volcano behind the campsite and go for a swim!
Askja means something along the lines of “boxes” and it refers to the fact that this entire mountain is one caldera inside another inside another inside another. A caldera is basically a collapsed magma chamber – it looks kind of like a crater but a crater is formed by lava building up walls whereas a caldera is formed when the ceiling falls into a pre-existing hole, to put it really simply. We were going to park the jeep in the second-newest caldera and walk through the rock into the newest. It’s about 2km to the lake and it was a surprisingly hard 2km. There were patches of half-melted snow, which bogs you down and there was a heavy mist sitting on top and ruining the views. I’ve put in pictures from a sunny trip back in 2016 just so you can see what it’s supposed to look like but this is what it actually looked like.
In better weather, we’d stop to admire the view. Occupying half the circular enclosure is a dark blue lake deep enough to swallow One Canada Square, which you might know better as Canary Wharf. In the early 20th century, some scientists took a boat out to investigate it and vanished. No boat washed up on the shores, no bloated bodies, nothing. The chief suspect is a landslide and a tsunami which just dragged them down to hell. You could not pay me to go out on that lake.
But Viti is a different matter. Viti is an explosion crater on the north shore and it’s filled with warm, milky blue water, just like at the Blue Lagoon. Of course, by “warm” I mean “verging on tepid” and if I’d known it was 70m deep, I might have hesitated. We scrambled down its muddy banks, Jonas cutting steps for us with an axe, and changing facilities meant a muddy beach. I’d been to Iceland enough times by now to realise I needed a microfibre towel and a drybag, so I changed and stuffed my clothes and, I think, my boots in the drybag. The boots I’m dubious about because they would surely be covered in thick clay by now.
The water wasn’t unpleasantly cold but if you’d sold this to me as the wildest Blue Lagoon in the country, I’d be disappointed. Definitely not hot. Municipal swimming pool kind of temperature and completely opaque, thank goodness. As it was, we kept to the edge where we could touch the bottom as we swam a fairly hasty circuit. The weather was closing in and the wind was funnelled down into the crater, so there were waves. I learned first-hand that pumice really does float. And I learned that getting dried and dressed under the circumstances is a singularly unpleasant experience.
Climbing out was a mudbath. I’d slightly sliced my finger on a chair back at Dreki and it didn’t feel good getting mud in that cut as I used both hands to haul myself out of the crater. It was red and swollen for a couple of weeks – partly because I couldn’t stop picking at it – and I probably should have gone to the doctor and explained that there was a hell-volcano infection in there. Yeah, Viti means hell in Icelandic.
We hurried back to the jeep and I fell behind, bogged down in every patch of snow and barely able to see the group by the end. But we made it! We took off wet layers and demisted the jeep and I spent… well, the rest of the day, actually, picking mud out of the camera that would have been better buried in my bag.
We’d taken the F88 down, an F-road being a mountain road, for high-clearance well-prepared 4x4s only. It’s illegal to drive most rental cars on them unless you’ve negotiated specialist expensive insurance because they’re unpaved, mostly just scratched into rough lava and tend to have scary river crossings rather than bridges because flooding and winter tends to wash away bridges. But for some reason, we were headed home via the F905, which would pop us back onto the Ring Road some 60km south-west of Myvatn instead of at Hrossaborg 25km closer. I’m sure there was some logic to taking the lesser-used road but anyway.
The jeep broke down.
I’d already had to guide it over a rare wooden bridge that was only about six inches wider than the car and then the engine seemed to lose interest in being an engine. Jonas coaxed it back into life but within ten minutes, it became clear that it was going no further without a mechanic. Where’s the nearest mechanic? Probably at Akureyri, which is 116km from the F905/Ring Road junction which is itself 40 or 50km away. On roads like this, driving takes at least three times as long as it would on a paved road, so probably two to three hours to the Ring Road and then another two hours to Akureyri. Four or five hours before rescue could get to us.
Luckily, a couple of tour jeeps passed by and we were able to offload most of our passengers. There were three of us left, plus Jonas and we just had to wait. I spent a lot of the time picking mud out of my camera and looking out at the greyness. Jonas switched the engine on to get some heat in occasionally and we maybe persuaded our prison on wheels to move forward a kilometre or two over the hours. The three tourists couldn’t really comprehend how far we were from anywhere. The plan had been to stop at a tiny settlement called Möðrudalur for soup. That was close enough to civilisation that a standard car could get through and we were absolutely convinced that this place was in walking distance, if only Jonas would let us go. I now realise just how far it really was. No, we couldn’t walk it. Not even nearly. Jonas, rather than occupying us with an Icelandic lesson, told us that our foreign tongues had no chance of managing “Möðrudalur” (mer-thru-daal-ur, in very rough phonetics!) and that we should just say “Mordor”. Being told you cannot simply walk into Mordor does the opposite of convincing idiot tourists that you can’t walk there, by the way!
Luckily, Jonas had managed to get in touch with a mechanic who diagnosed the jeep over the phone as needing some special oil and he was on his way with a big bottle of it. His name, believe it or not, was Óðinn, which if you overlook the Icelandic letters, is very clearly Odin. Odin was coming to take us to Mordor! Tell me Iceland isn’t a bit like living in some fantasy epic.
I suppose it was hours of waiting but my brain has blocked out most of it. Òðinn turned up eventually in a battered but tough pickup truck, the jeep was oiled and we were moving! And then we stopped! More oil! We crawled towards Mordor shadowed by Óðinn and broke down about every twenty minutes. More oil, another twenty minutes of motion.
Finally, the jeep broke down once and for all. No more could a drink of special oil get it moving. We were within sight of the village now. There was a sign saying “Welcome to Mordor”, or words to that effect. We’d just walk the last hundred or so metres. I’d get my Lord of the Rings moment. But no. Boromir spoke truly when he said, “One does not simply walk into Mordor”. Óðinn produced a rope and towed us into Mordor.
Bit of a tame ending to all that: the inn at Mordor fed us lamb soup (well, “leader sheep” soup but that’s another story) and when we’d finished, a Citroën people-carrier was waiting to take the boys to Akureyri, dropping me at Myvatn on the way. Jonas and Óðinn we never saw again. I assume they either spent the night in Mordor or at least the jeep did. I got back to my tent well after 11pm as it was.
And did I mention this was my 28th birthday? I did when we were back in the car park and got a multilingual round of Happy Birthday in before I went back to my tent.
I Am A Polar Bear 