Landmannalaugar – Álftavatn: 22.2km
The night was as awful as anticipated. My sleep was fitful, between the heat of the room – I barely needed even my sleeping bag liner – the polyphonic chorus of snoring, and the alarming propinquity of strangers. I had one trip to the messy toilets in the night. It was raining.
We rose around 6:45 and tried to organise our bags as best as possible in the narrow confines of the room. The poor French people tried to sleep on but didn’t stand much of a chance with all the zipping, fumbling and mumbling. Breakfast at 7 consisted of salty porridge (an interesting combination with a spoonful of honey), muesli and various bits of fruit, chopped by Robert (from Vancouver). I prepped some sandwiches from the cheese, salami and mushroom spread, as well as putting together a bag of trail mix with dates, chocolate raisins and salted peanuts (a novel combination again).
Having been cold the previous day, I packed more clothing but, as we assembled outside in the sunshine and clear skies, I found I was overdressed and needed to drop a layer. We set off through the lava field again, this time by a different route, and entered into the rhyolite hills. Every view was breathtaking and seemed to get better the further we progressed. Smooth red mountains were cut by valleys and ridges, and were interspersed with harder rocks which left spikes, gnarly crags and great lumps, like gigantic lava cowpats. The path climbed steadily up, past steaming vents and glowing tarns, deeper into the mountains. It was hard to process the strangeness and vastness of the place. These weirdly coloured hills with snow and steam on them stretched everywhere. There were pools of bubbling grey mud in one place and a hot stream with a couple of little pools of bubbling water. We pulled off the main path to sit by the stream for first lunch, inhaling the occasionally powerful smell of sulphur. HD gave us a lesson in conservation: his grandmother had asked him to tell tourists ‘not to step on the moss’. It was a rule that wasn’t strictly adhered to by anyone, including HD.
From here the geology changed again and became dominated by obsidian. Shiny boulders of the rock were scattered all over the dark ground as we climbed higher towards Hrafntinnusker (1141m). After passing the memorial to Ido Keinan, who died in a snowstorm in 2004, we crossed a compact tongue of snow on the hillside. It sucked heat out of the air in the opposite way to the hot slopes near the fumaroles. Being up quite high, a lot of the hills around us were streaked with snow, indeed a couple of weeks earlier the whole area had been covered in snow. On this clear day we were treated to mind-blowing views of the still-snowy mountains, the mass of which dwarfed the isolated Hrafntinnusker huts below. Around the huts were circles of stonewalls built to shelter tents but they looked like the remains of a Bronze Age village. My legs had again been feeling the effort of crossing the terrain to get this far – it felt we were really amongst the mountains now – but walking through hill country is what I do for fun and I was loving the walk, even if it was a struggle make sense of what I was seeing. As well as they, the enjoyment at the walking was fighting against the discomfort of staying in such cramped conditions with strangers so close. The enjoyment was, on the whole I felt, winning, except that to achieve something that meant something to me, I had to push myself into another shape, almost accept a different way of being. It was a test in many different ways.
The particular hut we stopped at was just for dining, so was filled only with tables and benches. Being unheated it smelled rather of mould but at least it was out of the cold wind and we were ready for more food. With that out of the way (time for a jæja) we had a long section passing through the snow-streaked black hills. There were countless ups and downs on scree and soft ash slopes, which were energy sapping to climb. My brain chose as its earworm a Doors’ song: ‘I’ve been down so goddamn long that it seems like up to me.’ The track took us through endless inventions of weirdness: yellow sulphur deposits, luminous green moss, banks of snow hovering on valley sides with water running underneath, psychedelic swirls of grit in the hillside snow, all kinds of crags, peaks and valleys.
Finally we looked out over a plain where Álftavatn lay. Except it wasn’t really a plain as it was covered in narrow, sharp ridges of free-standing hills. It was like a raw-from-the-forge, fire-blackened, unfinished version of Sutherland’s knock-and-lochan scenery, with Stórasúla rather than Suilven. The sun was getting lower behind the hills by this time in the afternoon, giving the view a misty air, and glinting off the massive glacier of Mýrdalsjökull. Again it felt unearthly, like a fantasy landscape we were approaching. It took a long time to descend out of the mountains along scree paths to a river, the Grashagakvísl, our first proper crossing. Perhaps because it was the first, it had a handy cable strung between boulders for us to hold onto. It was cold but fairly brief, and the heat of the lower altitude helped warm us up after a day where we veered from hot in the sunshine to cold in the cloud and wind (a change which happened about every 5 minutes). As the crossing was a bottleneck, there were quite a few people around, despite it having been a pretty quiet day.
The rest of the walk was a pacey stomp along a level track which took us to the Álftavatn huts. They are in a spectacular location at the head of the shallow, sun-reflecting lake with hills to either side. Inside the hut there was a good kitchen-dining room with our room upstairs. The room was even smaller than Landmannalaugar and had less storage. It was roasting hot though. First order of the day was coffee and cake on the veranda, which we took in the sunshine looking over the lake. It was blissful to sit there, me sipping brennivín, Amy sketching watercolours, Sophie knitting – the only problem was losing things between the boards (pen top, knitting needle). Before dinner I grabbed a shower, which was warm but shabby, the floor being made of warped, damp plywood.
Given the lovely evening, we ate our dinner outside too. HD cooked up a superb traditional Icelandic lamb soup. Second helpings were everyone’s choice. Some of the boys drank beer from the on-site restaurant and we all chatted. Robert tried to convince us that the phrase, ‘That’ll do pig, that’ll do’ was from Lord of the Flies. ‘It’s from Babe!’ we said, ‘They’re very different.’ He was very insistent until someone used the marginal data signal to look up the answer, after which he was suitably embarrassed.
We helped to wash and dry then I sat at the dining table to try to read. This was a bit tricky as a loud Norwegian girl was engaging everyone in boisterous conversation, helped by the beers. Instead I moved to the bedroom where a number of the party were reading or getting ready for bed. When Laurie was ready she loudly insisted the lights should be turned off, even though she was wearing an eye-mask. Essentially she chucked the ones who wanted to stay up out of the room. Arnab and I were hoping for a bit of aurora action, given the clear skies, though the forecast for them was poor. At 10pm we adjudged it was dark enough so we went out for a look and to make some attempts to at least take pictures of the stars, in the absence of anything else. The stars did indeed look magnificent and innumerable. The great arc of the Milky Way stretched over our heads and over the hut. A big-wheeled 4x4 drove in along the dirt road with bright lights shining. It stopped at the hut from where a bloke came out, chucked his bag in the car and climbed on board. With that, it drove off again into the darkness. Odd place for an Uber. At 11pm we gave up on the Northern Lights and retreated to the hut, which, like all the huts, had a curfew then.
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