Álftavatn – Emstrur: 19.6km
The beer helped Swasti’s snoring boom out like a cross between a foghorn and a pneumatic drill. During the night Laurie complained to Karl, trying to get him to give Swasti a nudge. When she fell asleep she added to the volume (later, when she was complaining about Swasti and was told about her snoring, she replied, ‘Good, it means I did get some sleep.’) The room was cooler than before, thanks to Coen leaving the window wide open to the gales. It was just a shame the zip on my sleeping bag wasn’t working – it was too dark and cramped to work out why – so I could only try to wrap it around me. This qualified it as the worst night of the trip.
There was porridge and other bits for breakfast. I was introduced to the idea of putting drinking chocolate in my porridge and it was a game changer. Who knew? The forecast was for a wet day so we fiddled about packing our bags appropriately. But we walked outside to find that, although it was windy, it wasn’t raining that much and it wasn’t that cold. We headed out into the grey day, climbing a little way through a mossy, dark landscape with the hills largely shrouded in cloud. It wasn’t long before we came to our first river crossing which was mercifully brief but very gritty.
We climbed a little more before dropping down to the collection of huts at Hvanngil. Again there was a ‘dining’ hut which was a busy place. Luckily some people were just leaving so we could squeeze into the upstairs room for second breakfast/first lunch. It was good to be out of the wind but the rattle of raindrops on the windows was ominous. As it happened, on emerging from the hut, it wasn’t really raining but it did feel cold, so a few of us, including me, added extra layers. The next obstacle was the Bláfjallakvísl river. This one was very cold and quite deep, leading to a certain amount of profanity. On the other side, HD led us a little way (over the moss) to look at an impressive waterfall on the same river.
Beyond here we crossed black plains of ash, deposited by the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010. The ground changed subtly along the way with larger or smaller pebbles, or big rocks with ash blown against their windward sides. Small clumps of grass had pushed through here and there, along with the ubiquitous thrift and sea campion. We turned aside at a bridge by a basalt-walled waterfall (probably on the Innri-Emstruá river) for second lunch, huddling below some rocks for shelter. I put my sunglasses on to keep the flying grit out of my eyes but my sandwich tasted rather crunchier than expected.
The path crossed more black desert with small, sharp-toothed and mossy hills around us. The wind was at our backs and walkers coming the other way had scarfs over their mouths and glasses over their eyes. HD set a furious pace and when we stopped for a pause, Karl and Laurie, who had been left behind, caught up and voiced their unhappiness about being dropped. The pace thereafter was somewhat slower. From the black plains we reached a kind of escarpment dropping towards Emstrur where the hills and blackness were cut through by narrow valleys, and where the unimaginable bulk of Mýrdalsjökull menaced on the far horizon, like some terrible disaster just waiting to happen. I was flitting between amazement at what I was witnessing and grumbling over all the little gripes: all the people, the threat of more snoring later, the fiddling about with gloves and layers, the pace and the stop-start dictated by someone else. Jæja, here we go again.
As we had zoomed along this section, HD suggested we had time to divert up to Markarfljótsgljúfur. This is a 200m deep, very long, winding canyon created largely in a single eruption 2000 years ago. It was a stunning sight, dizzyingly airy from a small standpoint at one bend. The walls were a textbook in geology with differently coloured layers revealed. HD pointed out to me where magma intrusions had pushed through weaknesses in the strata to leave other types of rock mixed amongst them. The ravens, one of the few birds we had seen, were enjoying the space too, tumbling and calling in their customary way.
After a while we took the short walk to Emstrur hut. It is perched very scenically looking out to valleys, hills and the glacier, but it was even more basic and even more cramped. The beds were in two storeys in two sections, six below and above in one, four below and above in the other. The mattresses were comically narrow, not much more than sleeping bag width. For neighbours on one side I had a pleasant couple from San Francisco whom we had met at Álftavatn; and on the other side I had the wall. I suggested I would sleep with my head out and they could sleep more traditionally. ‘Yes,’ said the girl (whose name I missed), ‘that’s better feng shui.’
There was little storage, just a vestibule by the front door with a gas fire burning to dry out the great collection of damp gear we hung around it. There was hardly room for us all to eat at once either, though there was plenty of space outside to admire the wonderful views, if you could stand the wind and the cold. I sat on my ‘bed’ reading with a headtorch (it was a dark corner on the lower bunk) and sipping some brennivín. Most of the rest had a lively conversation round the table, which veered dangerously into politics for a moment before being steered rapidly away.
HD kicked off the barbecue and roasted some fantastic salmon steaks. Arnab boiled up a staggering amount of rice – however much we ate it never seemed to reduce. There was plenty of everything so, as usual, the leftovers were shared out amongst the other hut residents who, as usual, received them gladly. After dinner, I was feeling tired so I headed back to my bunk to read. A card school took over the dining table, playing some hideously complicated game that HD had explained. It was all too much for me and I lay my head down to sleep.
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