Saturday 28 June 2008

All kinds of Water




Geysir - an eruption begins

Godafoss

Gullfoss

We’re in the north of Iceland, in a place called Akureyri and when we arrived last night in the rain (it has been snowing at one point on our way here) we headed straight for the pool which was awesome. Probably 6 or 7 pools all up – but I didn’t see all the indoor ones. A chilly 3 degrees out it was between 28 and 43 degrees in the water depending on the pool. We managed to do some laps and take on the water slide, steam bath, huge heated water jets and some of the hot pots before checking in to our accommodation and then out to a degustation dinner at a place called Rub 23 – sensational, and leagues above the previous night’s $15 burger that I would have complained about if it was more than $3 in Australia.

The previous night we stayed in a place in the middle of nowhere – simple cabins where we slept in our own sleeping bags – and it was great, though there were no showers in the massive complex, which perplexed us a little. Certainly the glacial river running through it wasn’t going to be our bath was it? The daylight never ends up here and I had a jacket and some t-shirts hung over the windows there to exclude some light for a less interrupted sleep. We’d traversed a 60km stretch of dirt road on our way there in our 2wd (our 4wd packed it twice in back in Reykjavik and we elected to bar it from our trip – taking the Mazda 6 wagon instead – not so good on dirt roads though). The moonscape on this overland trek was speckled with life and topped with glaciers. Spectacular even if Sylvain was swearing at the road every 100m. We’d come from being drenched in the mist from Gullfoss – a mammoth waterfall, and almost drenched by an enormous Geyser, which would have been quite a bit hotter! Spectacular all around.

Today they predict rain (click here for our Iceland weather forecast) , but there's already some sun shining through, so hopefully they'll be wrong again.

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