I had barely gotten out of bed, after a pretty terrible night's sleep with a sore throat and swollen sinuses, from some miserable cold I got here, when Wolfgang gave me a call, and asked me to come and join him in Krua Thai (downstairs) for lunch. Turned out he was having a holiday day, after taking his mother back to the airport, and was headed out to Reykjadalur for a swim with some other german friends he had visiting. I was feeling substantially better than I had the night before, and decided to go along.

Turned out it wasn't a completely german trip. Shahrad, Anna's boyfriend (Anna being a friend of Wolfgang's from Hamburg) was actually Australian, though he spoke german too. And a rockclimber. And a mathematician. Anna was a director/producer for a documentary film company in germany, so combined with a Master of Concrete Technology and a retiree, we had a pretty interesting group for the day.

We walked up from Hveragerði again, under lovely blue skies that only got better as the day went on. The wind eased off, and the clouds even disappeared. The track was a lot wetter than last time, probably because of all the snow and rain recently :) We headed for some of our normal spots, but they were all far too cold! We ended up going further upstream than I'd ever been before. Wellll up the hot side of the creek! I think the hot side was being cooled quite a bit by cold water runoff from the hillsides.

The water was only just deep enough, so we were all spread out a bit up the stream, but we started to build ourselves a partial dam, and excavate the base, and before long we were all involved, and between the dam wall, and Anna sitting in the gap, we raised the water level quite substantially! It was always exciting to dig up a rock out of the creek bed and find the bottom side to be incredibly hot. Life's exciting when you're sitting on top of some secretive pools of magma.

We ended up staying perhaps tooo long, I think we all felt a little cooked when we got back home again, but it was still a wonderful afternoon. (Though I was actually still to sick really, I was exhausted when I got home)