On the Road! - Hveragerði June 13 2015

Supplies had we are finally ready to head out of the capital and into the wilds of Iceland. We caught the free shuttle from the campground to the BSI bus station (actually it didn't show up but another random shuttle bus did and offered to take everyone waiting to the station for free since it didn't show - Icelanders are damn nice!), and caught the 8am bus east out of town. We bought Circle Route bus passes with Reykjavik Excursions that let you travel around the country one time and in one direction, as long as your headed in a constant direction you can just hope on and off as you like, pretty easy!

Hveragerði

We hopped off in Hveragerði, a smallish town about 45km from Reykjavik, just after 9am. The town sits in a large geothermal area and taps the heat source for just about everything. Turns out 90% of homes in Iceland are geothermally heated and there's a ridiculous supply of hot water. Hveragerði is a little town known for salmon fishing, thermal baths and hot rivers, and greenhouses. They've popped up a bunch and heat them geothermally which has made them the top producers of both flowers and available Icelandic produce, mostly tomatoes and cucumbers. They even have an agricultural school that grows bananas. Kind of awesome. At the end of our hike, we stopped by a 'geothermal restaurant' and bought some delicious banana bread from one of the endless array of young, clean cut kids with hip haircuts who seem to make up the majority of the tourism industry workforce.

 

We were mainly interested in the so called hot river and vents in the mountains behind the town. We hit up the bakery to make lunch and hit up the tourist information who graciously offered to store our ridiculously large packs while we hiked. Hooray!! No way was I going to make it 13km with that thing on. My strong, strapping husband could have, but that's because he has a kick ass beard. And is really strong. (Yeah, Chris walked away for a moment and left the iPad out. Muahahaha! - hubby).

The river trail is relatively easy to find, just head north for 3 km out of town towards the mountains and hang a left down a gravel road at the fork for the golf course. Follow the sign to Reykjadalur to a parking lot at the end.

 

 

The hike itself is something like 3.3km back into the hills and super easy to follow. It terminates at a boardwalk along the river which gets progressively hotter as you go upstream. Cody was completely unperturbed by how raging hot it was, while I had to go way down to the cooler parts. There even some blue-gray mud pots to rub on for a sweet mineral mask. Though they're boiling so will scald the crap out of you if you don't carefully scrape it from the outer edges.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All in all it was a pretty rad hike! Our first 13 km of the trip :) Though we were not prepared for the cloudless hot blue sky and got uber face sunburns. Whoops.

We got back in time to collect our packs before the info centre closed and with about an hour to spare before the onward bus arrived. Just enough time to shove more food into our faces and get our post-hike routines on! It is very important to maintain a proper post-hike regimen. His and her suggestions are below:

 

 

 

 

 

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