Fannar rang me up after a fairly large night out with wolfgang. Did I want to go hiking? Yes, why not! Fortunately he ran late enough that I was awake, but not so late that we had no day left. I lept into action, showering and waking up, and we headed out for a walk, destination: Austurengjahver, a big hotspring near Kleifarvatn. I'd never heard of it when Fannar described it over the phone, but hey! walking! let's get out there!
The drive out was nice, I should spend more time down that way, it's definitely underappreciated. We also had the valley almost entirely to ourselves. We saw barely a handful of other cars. Getting out of the car and walking down the road (we were walking a loop back to the car) was making me reconsider the intelligence of this idea, but once we were under way it was all ok.
Grænavatn is certainly green, but it's not exactly photogenic. It's just a hole with green water in it, and the surroundings are fairly spread out, so although it's lovely, and has a very remote wilderness feel to it, it's not especially dramatic. At least, not with fog nipping at all the peaks across the valley.
After finding a sign pointing the way, we kinda felt that the "track" was a bit non-existant. We did find a cool gate though. An electric fence leading up to a gate about 2.5m high, with the wire going across the top, but absolutely nothing in the gateway. Not exactly secure :)
We eventually spotted some steam, and wandered over to have a look. It's a big vent. yep. definitely gets the "hver" moniker. No decent swimming options though. We stuck our fingers in over on the far side, but it was still far too warm for bathing. And probably not exactly reliably consistent temps either! There were all sorts of interesting patterns in the silt and sediment flowing around, but the steam was causing some serious fog problems on my camera.
We continued northwards, skirting around some more hazardously soft smokey ground, before heading up the top of a small hill. A nice view, and hell of a lot of wind!
With darkness approaching, we headed down and back across to the car, finding lots of small lava bombs, more than I'm used to seeing in one spot. Probably due to there being an old dirt road, which had disturbed enough ground to make them more visible.
We returned home via an exploratory side trip along the lake shore, looking at some getaway cabins, then Fannar dropped me at Hressó, so I could get some well deserved wakeup food.
