Iceland 2.35: The Blue Lagoon and Seltún

We had breakfast at the restaurant in the Northern Light Inn, with its delightful view over the adjacent power station.  The hotel (and its inhabitants) were geothermally heated to within an inch of their lives too, but otherwise we really enjoyed our stay there.

We needed to drop the hire car off at the airport in Keflavík around 14:00, so had the morning to explore the area a bit before commencing our journey home.  Since the hotel was right next door to the Blue Lagoon we decided we ought to go and explore.  We had neither the time nor the inclination to take a dip, but instead wandered around the many geothermal pools outside the lagoon itself.

The place was a magnet for Homo photographicus of various nationalities, although the very harsh light was doing the place no favours from a photographic point of view.  Some people simply wanted cheesy family portraits, but Harriet showed her mettle by helping a poor chap who was having trouble taking a selfie.

Having exhausted the Blue Lagoon (well, the free bit of it, anyway) we had time to visit one last geothermal area - this time at Seltún, near Krýsuvík.  The Reykjanes peninsula is highly active volcanic region, being situated over one of the tectonic plate boundaries.  Several power stations have been built to harness the energy, and in the early 1990s a sink-hole was drilled at Seltún in order to provide hot water for the nearby settlement at Hafnarfjörður.  The sink-hole exploded inexplicably in 1999, so the project was abandoned.  The area has now been provided with board-walks to allow visitors to observe the boiling mud and steaming fumaroles at close quarters.  Having seen some much bigger, and more impressive, geothermal areas during our two trips to Iceland, Seltún turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax.  There again, maybe it was because we were about to head home after an excellent holiday and were simply not in the right frame of mind to appreciate it?

The final picture from the trip shows the mobile "Farmers Soup" van, which was in the process of opening up.  I searched for an apostrophe to tell me how many farmers were involved in the soup making - or even whether the soup was made from farmers - but all in vain.  Time was pressing, unfortunately, so we weren't able to hang around to find out.

The journey home was long and tedious, starting with a huge queue at the airport to drop off our bags.  The flight was on time, and everything went smoothly until we got to passport control at Heathrow.  Those with the super-duper new "biometric" passports were forced to use the automated system.  This involved standing in a specific spot in order to have one's photograph taken - sans spectacles - for comparison with the passport.  When this didn't work properly, it was necessary to follow the instructions on a screen (which, of course, were unreadable without glasses).  If I ever meet the idiot responsible for designing the system, I look forward to shaking him or her warmly by the throat!  We eventually got back to the car park by 21:00, only to find that the car's battery was completely flat.  It was almost exactly 6 years to the day since exactly the same thing happened to us on our return from South Africa.  The AA promised they would be with us by 23:00, but in the end it was 23:30 before they turned up.  After another 30 minutes there was enough power in the battery for us to leave, and we finally crawled through our front door at 01:30.  Since it was now Monday morning and we both needed to go to work in a few hours, it was a less than perfect way of ending what was otherwise a really amazing trip.

So, another long and tedious travelogue finished.  The next stage is to turn this series of blog posts into a book, and I'll post a link when this is done.  Iceland really got under our skin in 2013, and this was reinforced by our experiences in 2015.  The place is certainly getting busier, and the pace of hotel-building is barely keeping up with demand.  Having said that, most of the visitors are restricted to the main tourist areas around Reykjavík and along the south coast, and it's still possible to find absolute peace and solitude on this magical island.  So, will we be back?  I'll answer that question with another: Does the pope go into the woods with the bears?

Iceland 2.19: Krafla 2

The closer we got to the site of the Krafla Fires, the bleaker the landscape became.  As well as barren and broken rock as far as the eye could see, the whole area was steaming quietly to itself.  It was also very grey, and the only real colour was provided by green moss and the occasional pinky/orange rock which looked for all the world like buried house bricks.  Every photographer should have a spouse with a red jacket, and the first image demonstrates that I am no exception.

Every so often we found a solitary plant clinging to existence among the lava, but this was the exception rather than the rule.  In most areas it was moss or - usually - nothing.

The next few images include people, and hopefully give some idea as to the scale of the place.  Talk about post-apocalyptic...

The last few images are of some of the people we met while walking around the lava fields.  The lady with the camera is clearly not Russian - partly because she wasn't travelling as part of a herd, but mainly because she knows exactly how to use a lens hood.  As for the little boy with his hand over one of the many volcanic vents, his sense of wonder sums up everything I felt in visiting this place.  It was exactly how I imagined Iceland would be when I first saw news footage of Surtsey and Heimæy as a child back in the '60s and '70s.  Truly magical.

Iceland 2.18: Krafla 1

The following day dawned dull and grey, but thankfully it was no longer tipping down.  Mývatn was like a mirror in the calm conditions; and, because there was no sun to prompt them to hatch, the lakeside was mercifully free of midges.

The plan for the morning was to visit Krafla, which is only a short drive from Reykjahlíð.  We'd visited the main volcano caldera and power station on our previous trip, so this time we decided to go for a walk to the large geothermal area which was the site of the Krafla Fires: a series of fissure eruptions and magma movements which happened between December 1975 and September 1984.  Not very long ago in geological time, in other words.

Some of the older lava is now covered in mosses and lichens, but there are still plenty of places consisting of bare rock.  A few straggly plants had managed to gain a foothold in the hostile environment, but nothing of any size.

Evidence of volcanic activity was everywhere, and the ground was steaming in places as we approached the site of the most recent eruption.

We were expecting other visitors at a place as famous as Krafla, but it soon became clear that the number of people wielding expensive camera equipment was rather higher than normal.  They turned out to be Homo photographicus rutheniensis - a bunch of Russians on a photographic tour of Iceland.  Very well equipped, but they all had one thing in common: not one of them seemed to know what a lens hood was for...

The rather ominous pall arising in the distance is not an impending volcanic eruption, but steam coming from the nearby geothermal power station.