HVERAGARD

We pulled into the small town of HVERAGERDI around 18:30PM. The town sits at the mouth of a green valley in a large geothermal area, full of steaming vents where hot water from volcanic hot springs is used to heat greenhouses and produce flowers and vegetables. Hveragerdi is called the “flower village” because of its many greenhouses and gardens.

We found the small campground and checked in. The rain eased up enough as we cooked dinner in the camp kitchen to set up the tents without getting them wet. There were mostly camper vans in the campground but as we set up another group of tenters arrived and set up beside us on the grassy tenting pitch.

The town pool closed at 17:00PM so after dinner, it being still light out and not raining we took a walk around HVERAGERDI checking out the houses and finding the Geothermal Park which was closed and would be closed tomorrow so we looked through the fence at the thermal vents and bubbling pots. Next to it was a geothermal plant harnessing the heat of the earth to power the town and its greenhouses.

We learned that Hveragerdi has a long history of using geothermal energy, dating back to 1929 when the first greenhouse was built. We continued on past the park and up a hill past a church. We noted that Icelandic churches are pretty dramatic looking buildings reminding me of ships which is not surprising considering the people who settled these lands came in boats. To sea faring people ships are sacred spaces and when Christianity subsumed the old religions the old ways found a way to come through. They are all around if only we would look.

There are frequent earthquakes in HVERAGERDI which is close to the HENGILL Volcano. A big one came in 1896, creating a hot spring called Sandhólshver near the church which we could not findrch Probably heating one or several of the houses around the church. Would be sweet to have a hot spring in the backyard, Iceland is a sweet backyard.

We continued through the neighborhood and came to a river flowing out of the steaming valley and looking upstream we could see plumes of steam rising from the earth. I went to the edge of the river and knelt down, felt the water and it was lukewarm. The whole ridge overlooking the town is leaking geothermal plumes. It’s quite dramatic.

We circled back to the campground then it was crawl-into-the-tents-time-and-read and for me to try out the new sleeping bag we bought this morning. Seems like that was a long time ago.The bag was warm and cozy, a good deal for 9950K and we slept through the night listening to the rain on the tent. It does not stay dark long and we slept most of the time in some kind of light waking the next day to a constant drizzle.

When it eased I got up and made my breakfast in the camp kitchen and brewed some tea while the girls slept. The other tent people had packed up long ago and were gone but some camper van folk were in and out of the kitchen. Apparently the way to do Iceland is to come with your girlfriend or whomever and rent a camper van and drive the ring road around Iceland in 10 days. We’ve heard its about 24 hours of driving if you hit all the main attractions about and 1500KM That seems insane! We are on another plan and we are not trying to see all of Iceland. Our goal is waterfalls and hot springs. We did both yesterday and we are going to do both today!

Colleen got up next and we thought about going for a run but the rain came back so we looked over the map and the guidebook and planned our day and our next stop. By the time Ambiana and Jakobi got up the sun was out and we decided as a family to not stay another night and to hike to the Boiling River up in the steaming valleys of HVERAGERDI then head for VIK.

After Ambiana & Jakobi ate we packed up the car and drove up the steaming valley to the parking area for REYKJADULER- the smoky river. There were lots of cars pulled off before the parking lot to avoid paying the fee but we parked in the lot. Once again my parking apps did not cover the parking area so I had to go to the parking kiosk. It said to pay when we left as our license plate had been captured by CCTV when we arrived and would be captured again when we left and our fee would be calculated by comparing the time stamps on the two images. It was about 800K for 4 hours which is a very reasonable fee as all monies go to the upkeep of the area.

The hike led up into the hills and low hanging clouds. At the start of the trail, which was broad and gravelly, there were some steaming vents and crazy colored bubbling pots which we wandered over for a bit, feeling the heat of the steam and the water, such a marvel to see the earth at work, releasing heat..which comes from what?

The spinning of the planet? The pressure of gravity? Magma into mountains; it is the birthing of the Earth. And the crafty Icelanders are heating their homes and their water and probably generating some electricity from this geothermal heat.

Leaving the vetns behind we began to climb onto the West ridge of what became a large steep valley with a small river cutting deeply through the middle of it. As we gained altitude we could see the ocean to the South and the Ring Road winding its way up and out of the valley to the East,

Jakobi declared two years ago that she was done hiking but she was right here with us though a bit begrudgingly at first. She often hikes faster than the rest of us and we can see her way up ahead. Colleen and I are definatley the cabooses, stopping to look and linger. Ambiana is a look and lingerer too, she is aware of the magnificence around her and takes it in but she is also a quick hiker. I’m a meanderer.

High on the ridge we saw on the opposite side of the valley, a beautiful cascade spilling down the whole height of the ridge to the river. We marveled, took pictures, did a dancevideo shoot.

There were a fair number of people coming and going along the trail. The earth tones in the valley and on the ridges and mountain sides were stunning.

We went up and over and across, always moving upwards as the valley got narrower until we arrived at a boardwalk along a steaming creek full of people laying in the shallow water.

Downstream we found a deeper pool away from the main group of bathers and changed into our swimmies and got in the creek. After a long hike it felt good. The water was not exactly hot but it was warm and soothing on a cool overcast day.

After soaking a bit I got out and ventured upstream where most of the people were and got in and it was so much hotter. I pushed pebbles and rocks aside with my hands, scraping out a trough in the stream bed, to make the creek just a bit deeper. Then with a rock for a pillow I laid on my back in the hot water. Eventually when I didn’t return Ambiana & Jakobi made their way upstream to join me followed shortly by Colleen.

We all agreed that this was the spot and laid around forever like a bunch of freshwater starfish before finally getting out, eating some snacks and then leisurely hiking back out.

We spent some time at the hot vents and bubbling mud pots near the trail head before returning to the car, registering with the parking kiosk and driving back into town. We stopped by the town pool but after soaking in the wild we did not want to be in a swimming pool so we headed into town to get some food for the next few days.

We immediately loved the Icelandic grocery store BONUS seeing the giant pink pig painted upon the wall of the supermarket.

The store was very interesting inside where the individual coolers for dairy, veggies and meat were replaced bytwo big walk-in glass-walled cooler rooms. It was fun to browse the Icelandic brand foods and we used the camera option in the Google Translate App to read the labels. Simple point the camera at the label and the app overlays the translation on the Icelandic words. Very helpful.

Our 2017 Lonely Planet Iceland Book said there was a lava tube south of town we could explore for free so we drove out there only to find that in the years since it has turned into a tour costing 7500K for the hour long walk into the tube. So we turned around and headed East on the Ring Road with VIK as our destination.

We passed through SELFOSS, a slightly larger town than HVERAGERDI and back into the rain as the town gave way to large grassy plains. We passed lots more shaggy horses and finally Ambiana saw her sheep and we drove through many varieties of rain from drizzle to downpour. Our route crossed two large glacial silt rivers, the PJORSA and the HOLSA and as the rain gave way to sun we saw another gi-normas glacier MYRSDALSJOKULL looming up behind a ridge of mountains and spilling around the peaks we were approaching from across the glacial plains.

Covering an area of about 600 square kilometers MYRSDALSJOKULL reaches a height of nearly 1500 meters. It is the fourth largest glacier in Iceland and lies on top of an active volcano called KATLA, which erupts every 40 to 80 years. The last eruption was in 1918 and caused massive glacial floods that extended the coastline by 5 kilometers.

As we closed in on the mountains they pushed the Ring Road South towards the coast and we could see a waterfall falling off of the escarpment. It grew in size until we were upon it towering over the road and spilling its glacial melt in a torrent to the plain below. The pull off was full of tour buses and cars and I said, that’s the foss you can walk behind; we were speaking Icelandic now :). It was late in the day and we made a mental note to stop at these falls on our way back. In the meantime Colleen had been busy online booking us a night’s accommodation in SKOGAR, about 35KM before VIK.

The HOTEL KVERNA was originally an all girls boarding school right next to SKOGAFOSS which was on our list of waterfalls to see. We were grateful to have a place indoors as the rain had started again once we were past the waterfall and none of us relished setting up in a cold rain. Colleen checked us in and we moved up to our room which had a double bed, a set of bunk beds and a bathroom shared with the Scandinavian family next door.

Ambiana claimed the top bunk, we went back to the car and brought up our stuff and then Jakobi set off to explore the hotel while Ambiana went for a walk in the small pine forest behind the building and Colleen took her alcohol fueled stove to the parking lot to cook us tuna noodle dinner in the rain as she was afraid of setting off the smoke alarm in the room.

I wandered the hotel as well, checking out the hot tub and the sauna ,which unfortunately was out of order and looking at the old photographs on the walls of the time the hotel was a girls boarding school. One of the pictures on the hotel lobby wall was of a hot spring swimming pool in a nearby valley ago that was used by the girls of the boarding school for swim lessons. I searched my hot tub app for nearby hot springs and the pool came up. The app said it was the oldest man-made pool in Iceland, built almost 90 years ago, but I like to imagine there’s some much older Viking-made hot pool lurking somewhere in Iceland. The hot spring swimming pool was close, only 12KM away in a the next valley to the West. We had passed it just before arriving in Skogar.

We decided over tuna noodle, eaten around the round table in our room, to visit SKOGAFOSS first tomorrow and then go to the hot pool before heading on towards the black sand beaches of VIK. After we ate we took our after-the-dinner walk but there was not much to see, it was overcast and drizzly and the town of Skogar, population 20, did not have too much to it so we returned to room and I read while Colleen, Ambiana and Jakobi went and sat in the outdoor hot tub.

Having been in a hot river, I decided to skip the tub but they made some friends down there and I could hear their laughter so I decided to join them. It was 20:50PM and the hot tub closed at 21:00 so I had to hurry. The ground around the hot tub was a giant puddle so I ducked back in the doorway to the hotel to change and believing I heard the girl coming to kick us out I stumbled out to the tub pulling my suit up from my ankles and to Ambiana and Jakobi’s utter delight, exposing myself to the group in the tub.

“Why did you go back inside to change daddy-boy,” they laughed “if you were just going to run out naked to the tub?” “I didn’t want to get my warmies wet “ I told them “but when I thought I heard the girl coming I made a run for the tub thinking I would pull up my suit in one smooth motion only they snagged on my ankles.” Thus I emerged hunched over tugging at my suit, stumbling naked towards the tub.

Colleen, Ambiana and Jakobi laughed about it for days and I got maybe three minutes in the hot tub before the girl actually came, promptly at 21:00PM and kicked us all out. Time enough to say “ahhhh” and briefly meet the two other couples in the tub, one set from Ukraine displaced by the Russia invasion and the other from Kentucky. Then it was back to our room to read before bed once Colleen, Ambiana & Jakobi were done laughing.