I Am A Polar Bear

Ok, time for the post that explains the tag for this series, which is literally “This Trip Was Cursed (2026)“.

Before…

I had most of this planned back in February. The first day in Reykjavik was a bit more open but I had a potential to-do list and from Thursday onwards, everything was planned almost down to the minute. I actually went off to Finland looking forward to Iceland far more: Finland had one swim booked and another planned and that was it, even by the time I arrived in Helsinki whereas Iceland, four months in the future, was ready to go.

All good. Then, three weeks before I departed, I saw something in the Iceland travellers Facebook group, asking about Fontana, which was not going to be opening on the 1st of June as planned. That was one of my two main reasons for going. I knew last summer that my favourite lagoon was closing and being rebuilt literally from the ground up and was due to reopen in its new incarnation in “spring”. I thought about going over May half term but then my favourite comedian announced his Nordic tour with a stop in Reykjavik two weeks after half term. Well, it wouldn’t hurt to give Fontana an extra fortnight. By the time I booked it, and this was back in February, Fontana had announced it was open from June and I had a ticket. Now, three weeks to go, it turned out there was a delay of a month. That left me an entirely empty day with a campervan and I’ve already talked about how long I dithered about what to do with it before deciding to go back Inside the Volcano.

Then I discovered something that I really should have already known – that the Wednesday, my emptyish day in Reykjavik, was Icelandic Independence Day. That’s independence from Denmark, the colonial power in these waters, and don’t I look forward to squaring that circle in some upcoming blogs. What it meant was that lots of things would either be closed all day or would close early and parades meant that roads would be closed and therefore buses diverted or cancelled. Whatever tentative plans I had would have to be scrubbed out and replaced with a bit of improvisation. Fine.

Tuesday (in which the local pool is closed for the week)

So I arrived in Iceland on Tuesday afternoon. Got to the room just fine. Walked the 300m or so down Snorrabraut to Sundhöllin, my favourite local swimming pool – or rather, the good pool in the centre of downtown Reykjavik – where I like to spend evenings. Five minutes later, I discovered that the pool was not just closed but drained. Closed for a week for maintenance, reopening next Monday, 24 hours after I left. I had three nights in Reykjavik and intended to spend two of them in Sundhöllin! Plans derailed! So I took the bus to Laugardalslaug (which, two weeks later had half the lane pool and all the hot tubs cordoned off over fears of bits of the ancient seating above crumbling away, so at least I dodged that one).

Wednesday (in which everything is closed for the day)

Wednesday morning went fine. I went to the Saga Museum to replaced a glass ring I’d accidentally smashed a few months back and discovered they don’t sell them anymore but fine, whatever. That was never guaranteed. I did get an actual steel firesteel. I went to Volcano Express at Harpa. I did some shopping and bought a new ring, not a blue glass one but a steel one with a lava stone set into it. And then, out of lack of inspiration, I went home and had some lunch. After lunch I went to watch the Independence Day parade and then… what do I do?

I’d sort of planned to get the bus out to Kopavogur and go to the public pool there, the one just up the road from the Sky Lagoon, but it was closed all day and besides, what were the chances of figuring out buses on a holiday timetable with road closures anyway? I’ve done all the things in Reykjavik. Well, I haven’t, but I was feeling uninspired and everything was closing early or already closed. I ended up at Vesturbæjarlaug which is the third pool in Reykjavik, my least favourite of the three but the only one open within relatively easy walking distance. It closed at 5 and I got there around 3, which left me with no idea how to spend my evening but at least I was in the water for the afternoon. Getting sunburned. Looking at the pictures from my stroll down, I can see exactly how it happened. It was a pretty overcast day and while I was walking around town in long sleeves, sun protection just wouldn’t have crossed my mind, until the sun came out while I was in the pool and I discovered there was very little shade in there. So, sunburn.

Thursday (this day went fine!)

Thursday, I’ll allow, went almost completely to plan. I mentioned that I had to walk a kilometre in the drizzle to the bus stop after my visit to Nauthólsvík but I’m not counting that as part of the curse. Sitting awkwardly in a Reykjavik bar while a band soundchecked very loudly and trying to pretend I wasn’t watching my tablemate grumpily picking sweetcorn out of a burrito was maybe not the highlight of the evening but the rest of it went great. Icelandic-Danish colonial history was discussed, as if we hadn’t had this very conversation last time we were in a bar in Reykjavik three and a half years ago (what do you mean, “I did not know any of this”, you were here when the words “they’re kind of our colonisers” were uttered!).

I had the Icelandic word tónlist (music) explained to me for the second time in one day – I’d twigged only that morning that the -list part of tónlist means “art” and had been wondering about the tón part (tone – music is tone art) but in eighteen trips to Iceland, the origins of this word had never come up and now it was twice in one day. I explained the habit of picking up forgotten bags, jumpers and water bottles with the phrase “I spend a lot of time following seven-year-olds around” when I really meant “Because my Brownies are also scatty, I’m used to looking around a room for belongings before anyone leaves it (and also how have you managed five nights of this tour without permanently losing your stuff??)”. A good evening.

Friday (this day did not)

Then came Friday. Bad, terrible Friday. Friday in which I was at the bus stop by 7.30am for an airport bus pickup because I don’t trust Reykjavik Excursions, which operates it. Pickup was at 8 and wouldn’t you just know it, they were there by ten to. Finally made it to the airport by 9.30. The shuttle vans to the campervan hire place were inadequate for the number of people waiting for them, so another half an hour to wait. And then it was an hour and a half before my number was called to pick up my van – an hour and a half with no breakfast because I assumed I’d grab something on the road in Keflavik. And when they’d checked my driving licence and looked at the computer, it turned out the van I was already an hour late to pick up wasn’t even ready. “Maybe thirty minutes?” she said as I flounced off to a seat. No, it was a whole hour.

Now, this was all very well. No breakfast and now it’s 12.30 and now also I’ve had no lunch. But I had the Inside the Volcano tour booked this afternoon for 2.30 and if you were self-driving, they wanted you there ten or fifteen minutes in advance. If you’re not a chicken about big cities – yes, we can argue about the relative bigness of Reykjavik but I wasn’t going near it – you can do that drive in about an hour and ten. I’m not touching junctions and traffic lights and lanes in a mirror-image van. I’m getting better at driving LHD but I’m still a little awkward about it and I’m not a city girl and while Reykjavik has a population about the size of Croydon, it’s sprawlier than it should be because it doesn’t believe in high rises because of earthquakes. Yes, I know, Japan also has major earthquakes and Japan is great at high rises. But the fact is that Reykjavik sprawls a ridiculous distance considering its size. So I always, but always, drive south to Grindavik, turn left and drive along the southern Reykjanes coast, popping up to join the Ring Road at Hveragerði. That route would take me an hour and forty-four minutes to reach the Inside the Volcano meeting point. No stopping for sightseeing, not even any stopping for food. I just had to motor.

Parts of the coast road were torn up for resurfacing, which meant mile after mile on slippery black gravel at 20kph, listening to the tiny stones pinging off my bodywork. Had Google Maps taken this reduced speed limit into account when it told me how long it would take? Was I just plain going to miss it? Was there a 3.30 tour I could go on instead? Did I have anything left to eat in the van?

I made it. I drove up from the coast with one eye on the satnav and one eye on the road and I got there at about 2.14. Now I had ten minutes spare to tear my luggage apart to find the bits and pieces I wanted to cross the lava field with – cameras, warm clothes, waterproofs. I had half a bottle of Appelsin, a fizzy Icelandic orange drink, left and it didn’t have much fizz by now. I had some hot dog rolls I’d bought on Tuesday evening and some sweaty cheese that had been sitting on my desk in Reykjavik since Tuesday and as we were waiting for the last of our group, I had time to put them together and shovel them down my throat. Not the best food, stale bread and cheese, and wolfing it down like this was almost guaranteed to cause digestive disaster later but it was better than setting off on a 6km round hike and volcano adventure on no food at all in the last 22 hours.

By the time I was hiking back – alone, because some of the group had vanished ahead of me and the rest didn’t seem to have ever emerged from the mountain base hut – I was in despair. It was getting on for 6pm by now. I had nothing to eat or drink. I could buy a drink at the road base hut but first I had to get there and I was less than a kilometre in. Another half an hour. A drink. And a toilet. And then it would be at least half an hour to Hveragerði where I planned to camp. It’s got a supermarket. Supermarkets have food. I can live this day out. Once I get to Hveragerði, which is still at least another hour away, it’ll all be fine.

Imagine my delight when the little shop was closed at the road base hut by the time I arrived, and not a guide in sight to beg to open it! Imagine my delight when I arrived at Hveragerði to a sign at the campsite saying it was full and to continue to Selfoss! Selfoss is a busy campsite at the best of times; it was almost certainly not going to have spaces by now if Hveragerði didn’t. Well, I need to go to the pool. Yes, I’m a logical creature. No food, no drink, no campsite, a supermarket down the road but what am I going to do? I’m going to sit in the pool for an hour! To be fair to me, there were drinks at reception and no can of freezing cold Coca-Cola has ever been drunk in a children’s paddling pool so happily. Hveragerði has a lovely pool and this was a wonderful idea!

Did I stop at the supermarket afterwards? No! I had priorities – find somewhere to sleep! I needed to be on the Golden Circle by 10am the next day so I was going to go to Laugarvatn, which had been my plan back when Fontana was supposed to open. It was another 40 minutes away but I’d had a drink and I’d realised I had half a packet of my favourite sour cream star crisps left. There’s a little supermarket in Laugarvatn. All would be well.

All was not well. Once upon a time – 2023 – Laugarvatn was an obscure campsite where you wondered if you were supposed to be camping here because there was no one else there and no signs and no one to pay. Now it was packed with full-sized campervans and even full-on motorhomes and caravans. I drove round two or three times before finding a space, except that as soon as I got out of my prison on wheels, the man in the caravan next to that space told me I had to move because he was saving it for three caravans that wouldn’t be here for another half hour. If I’d had any sugar in my blood, I might have stood my ground. I might have said “I’m here, they’re not, therefore it’s my space” but instead I tried not to cry out loud as I said “Well, I’ll just go… somewhere else!” and found a space that was blocking someone else in. Can’t cry. Take the empty Appelsin bottle. Go and see if you have to pay at that little cabin. Try not to burst into tears as you do. Fill up the bottle with ice-cold tap water at the washing-up sinks. Go back to the van. And then just erupt. Oh yeah, I just cried like an overwrought toddler, which I kind of was. I had a little squirty bottle of ultra-concentrated squash and was able to make the most incredible ice-cold orange squash from my washing-up water bottle and I ate those crisps like someone who’s had no food for more than 24 hours except some stale sweaty cheese rolls. After that, I found I could exist without crying but I wasn’t in the mood to go back outside. So I read a little and then I curled up in my sleeping bag – well, lay flat on my back because the storage boxes build into the van don’t allow you to lift your knees – and tried to sleep.

Saturday (in which my insides became outsides)

Saturday. Crisis-fixing day! There’s a supermarket almost exactly opposite the campsite. You need to be at Laugarás Lagoon for 10 and that’s a 22 minute drive. Get down to the supermarket first thing and have a good breakfast. Except the shop doesn’t open until 9. So I went and parked outside. Reversed into the space very nicely. I’m so much better at reversing a campervan than my own car! I got out and was promptly embroiled in another hanger-fuelled tantrum because the sliding van door wouldn’t close. It wouldn’t close last night while I was crying my way around the campsite or this morning as I was getting ready but I was in a hurry and merely hissed “I hate you!” at it while giving it the finger before going off to the wash block and leaving it unlocked. Now I wanted to close it properly and I’m not kidding, it took twenty to thirty attempts, not helped by a swarm of insects. When I slid it, it seemed to catch somewhere and just ground to a stop. Usually you have to slam it to get it to close properly but it physically could not slam. The hiss became an actual shriek and extra words, not to be uttered here, were added to it. Many fingers were used. I had to actually repress the urge to lie down in the car park and throw a kicking screaming flailing tantrum. And all this could probably have been averted had that campervan been available at the time I’d booked it for yesterday. I’d have bought food on my way to Þríhnúkagígur. I’d have checked in at the Hveragerði campsite around lunchtime and been assigned my own space to come back to after the volcano adventure. Yes, it was clearly the beat-up old van they keep in the corner for emergencies, judging by the rust and the spare wheel and the fact that the door doesn’t close and the extra hour and a half wouldn’t have changed that but I might have had the temper by Saturday to figure out how to close it without turning into a two-year-old in a supermarket car park.

The shop opened at 9, as it promised. It would have been the last straw if it hadn’t. I bought all the food I could carry, had a gluttonous but desperately needed breakfast of bread and cheese and chocolate and cheese-flavour star crisps and apple juice in the van and then I went off to Laugarás and had a lovely time.

Knowing that my flight was at 10.30 the next morning and that I needed to drop the van off by 8 at the latest and that GoCampers could keep me long enough that the flight could be back at Gatwick and on its way back to Iceland before I got out, I needed to be on Reykjanes for the night. From Laugarás, that’s a drive of about two hours. I don’t quite know how I made four out of it. I stopped at Hveragerði to top up my food supplies and then there were still speed limits on the southern Reykjanes road. And I suppose you don’t need to know this but the excessive breakfast in the morning plus five hours in the sun (yes, without sun cream, I had other things to think about that morning than “must put my sun cream on before I get to the lagoon”) plus a longish drive resulted in that aforementioned digestive disaster. I made a stop at the Blue Lagoon and you did not want to see me trying to get from the car park to the building.

Ever since a volcano ate the Blue Lagoon’s car park in November 2024, it’s all changed. I hardly recognised it. The road now directly passes the geothermal power station and however otherworldy or moon-like it felt before, it now feels absolutely apocalyptic. It’s quite incredible. Might have been a mistake not to throw £90+ at coming here on Wednesday when everything else was closed. Anyway, afterwards I spent some time hanging around the lobby just in case, before getting on the road again and I noticed that there’s a wall in the Blue Lagoon that wasn’t there the last time I was there. I can’t quite believe that was nearly three and a half years ago. The wall is partly to contain the new sauna with the massive Sky Lagoon-esque window but it’s also because they seem to be expanding the public part of the lagoon. I will rave on about how big the Blue Lagoon is and how that means, despite the fact that it’s a tourist trap, it’s very easy to find a quiet corner but… where’s the rest of it? This is a huge pool; why does it look barely any bigger than the Sky Lagoon? Barely any bigger than Sundhöllin’s lane pool. What’s going on??

Later in the year when it finally actually reopens (it’s now saying July 15th), I’ll have to go back to try out Fontana and apparently there’s a new lagoon due to open in Hveragerði called Reykjaböð but it looks like I might also have to come to the Blue Lagoon, just to see what in the world is happening there. For now, the day was wearing on and I had to get to a campsite. There are two within particularly easy distance of GoCampers but only one has a nearby swimming pool. Unfortunately, because it’s a Saturday and Iceland is illogical like that, it closed before I’d even got to the Blue Lagoon, let alone driven the rest of the half an hour or so to Sandgerði.

It’s a small campsite but you book online through the Parka app and it assigns you a space, which I like. Designated spaces and no one can steal it! Having spent the day either at Laugarás or driving up from Laugarás, I hadn’t done my daily walk so I walked around Sandgerði, which is a small quiet place which seems to do a brisk line in fish processing, judging by the smell. And then the curse came down on me once more. The breakfast. The hasty lunch at Hveragerði. I’ll spare you the details but in short, I didn’t crawl into my campervan until nearly midnight. Not that midnight on the night between the 20th and 21st of June in Iceland looks like anything except mid afternoon back home.

And it was cold! Last night I’d had one sleeping bag and two blankets wrapped around me and been ok, if a little on the chilly side. Tonight I was freezing. I’d put on the thermal top I’d brought specially for such an occasion but I had to get out the second sleeping bag – one thing I’ll say for GoCampers, they throw two sleeping bags into the back of each van whether you pay for them or not (and I’d been offered anything I wanted from the extras menu for free and had requested a sleeping bag as compensation, only to find I already had two). No good. It was too cold to sleep. My toes froze and my nose froze. Honestly, name a body part to rhyme with froze and you’ve got to expect it to freeze.

Sunday (in which I nearly didn’t get home)

Twelve hours later, after getting a little lost getting to the van drop-off (there’s no handy place to put the satnav and the morning sun was in just the wrong place to read it as it lay on the passenger seat next to me) and an unremarkable flight where I nearly ended up swapping into a middle seat – actually, no, it wasn’t an unremarkable flight! I retract that! Further cursedness!

I checked in online from Sandgerði only to be told they couldn’t give me a seat and I’d have to visit an agent at the airport. I checked in using a machine at the airport and it printed me a boarding pass with the letter SBY where it should have said Seat 31A. Standby? I booked this flight five months ago and paid extra for my seat! You can’t put me on standby! Luckily, I went straight to the check in desks and ten minutes later was presented with a new boarding pass with seat 17A. And then the EU gates were closed so everyone had to go through the queue for the non-EU checks, including an Italian group I was quite snarky with before I discovered that they hadn’t made a stupid decision a decade ago and it wasn’t their fault Keflavik had decided not to open the gates they always use. It took forever! The sort of forever you see at every airport any Brexiteer in the Daily Heil has ever been to, which I’d never experienced before.

Anyway, once I was on the plane my neighbours asked if I’d swap with their friend and I did the snarky “Oh, and is he by chance in a middle seat?” only to find he wasn’t. Well, it was a hassle requiring six people to move but whatever. A windows seat is a window seat. Except the moment I stood up, half my luggage in the hands of my grateful and helpful neighbours, it turned out the friend was in a middle seat but had grabbed the vacant window seat assuming it to be empty because he happened to board before the occupant of it. So we all sat back down again. My neighbours did say “We would never dare to ask if it was a middle seat!” and when it turns out it was, the decision was instantly and unquestionably reversed. On the bright side, it meant I was chatting to my neighbours and emetophobe here could ask if she needed to be frightened of them (she did not), which meant it was a relatively relaxed flight. My phobic brain can’t quite let go of “there’s a first time for everything” but my logical brain assured me it was going to be fine, and it was.

And as I was saying, after freezing off my toes and nose at 3am in Iceland, I got off the plane at 3pm in London to the sort of heatwave that I’ve seen described on Twitter as “like the heat that comes out the back of a bus” which was quite the shock to the system, from one extreme to the other in twelve hours.