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Saturday's travel supplement includes a description of an Icelandic road trip, a drive around Route 1, which is pretty much what we did. Like us, Amelia Hill travelled with Discover the World, though she road-tested a package called 'Natural Iceland Farmstays' which won't go on sale until this summer (though there's no indication that she wasn't paying her own way). It sounds as if it needed a little road-testing, too: I detected a certain edge to her handling of Discover the World's claim to have "hand-picked a charming selection of rural accommodation..." and to the long hours' driving necessitated by their itinerary - and I don't think this is just because that was how we felt.
It's almost a year since I last wrote about our trip to Iceland; all that time we've been about to arrive at out hotel on Lake Mývatn. Discover the World had urged us to spend three nights there, to give ourselves two full days exploring Mývatn. We weren't convinced: our itinerary didn't give us very long anywhere, and we were trying to squeeze in as much as we could; besides, we'd heard about the midges. As it turned out, our hotel by the lake, while perfectly OK, wasn't particularly exciting (and I note that the farm-stay holiday takes you to the farm at Vogafjós where we lunched, and thought would be a good place to stay).
We packed our one day by Lake Mývatn full to bursting, though. We may have been lucky with the midges: we met nothing to compare with, say, the clouds of little black flies which are such an affliction on a bad day in Kielder Forest - though, inevitably, I managed to swallow one. For much of the day we weren't walking by the lake at all, but exploring the various manifestations of volcanic activity in the surrounding hillsides. But we did start our day with a short stroll among the pseudocraters immediately across the road from our hotel: 'pseudo' because although these smooth sided hillocks and circular lakes look like volcanic craters, they are actually formed in the molten lava by escaping steam.
Then on to Dimmuborgir (pausing only to admire some lava stacks by the waterside). This is a labyrinth of jagged lava formations, all pinnacles and arches and twisted shapes on which tradition or the local tourist office has exercised its imagination, seeing palaces and cathedrals in a three-dimensional Rorschach test. There's a signposted path, and by the time we had completed it, we were ready for a break.
Lunch, as I said, was at Vogafjós, and after lunch we went to the Earth Baths, the Jarðbödin thermal pool. I'd built up quite a resistance to the Blue Lagoon, the big thermal baths near the airport - it was so heavily advertised, and felt so commercial, not to mention expensive. But we couldn't very well leave Iceland withouut having swum in a thermal pool, so we opted for this lower key option, and I, at least, enjoyed it much more than I'd expected to.
I'd been thinking of it as a rather peculiar sort of swimming pool, but of course it's much more like a bath that's big enough to swim in (and when we were there, only a fraction of the area was open; beyond the enclosed pool is a whole lake, to which we didn't have access). The water is warm, and opaque, and sulphurous, and slippery to the touch. The ground beneath your feet - which you can't see - is uneven, but as smooth as if it has been polished, so there is no choice but to slow down, and move with great caution, and every now and then just drape yourself over a rock and watch the world go by.
It was extraordinarily relaxing, but we thought we could still manage a little drive, up into the Krafla volcanic area: past a field of steaming, bubbling sulphurous mud and up the mountain with increasing trepidation towards the plant where the volcano is tapped for energy.
It's almost a year since I last wrote about our trip to Iceland; all that time we've been about to arrive at out hotel on Lake Mývatn. Discover the World had urged us to spend three nights there, to give ourselves two full days exploring Mývatn. We weren't convinced: our itinerary didn't give us very long anywhere, and we were trying to squeeze in as much as we could; besides, we'd heard about the midges. As it turned out, our hotel by the lake, while perfectly OK, wasn't particularly exciting (and I note that the farm-stay holiday takes you to the farm at Vogafjós where we lunched, and thought would be a good place to stay).
We packed our one day by Lake Mývatn full to bursting, though. We may have been lucky with the midges: we met nothing to compare with, say, the clouds of little black flies which are such an affliction on a bad day in Kielder Forest - though, inevitably, I managed to swallow one. For much of the day we weren't walking by the lake at all, but exploring the various manifestations of volcanic activity in the surrounding hillsides. But we did start our day with a short stroll among the pseudocraters immediately across the road from our hotel: 'pseudo' because although these smooth sided hillocks and circular lakes look like volcanic craters, they are actually formed in the molten lava by escaping steam.
Then on to Dimmuborgir (pausing only to admire some lava stacks by the waterside). This is a labyrinth of jagged lava formations, all pinnacles and arches and twisted shapes on which tradition or the local tourist office has exercised its imagination, seeing palaces and cathedrals in a three-dimensional Rorschach test. There's a signposted path, and by the time we had completed it, we were ready for a break.
Lunch, as I said, was at Vogafjós, and after lunch we went to the Earth Baths, the Jarðbödin thermal pool. I'd built up quite a resistance to the Blue Lagoon, the big thermal baths near the airport - it was so heavily advertised, and felt so commercial, not to mention expensive. But we couldn't very well leave Iceland withouut having swum in a thermal pool, so we opted for this lower key option, and I, at least, enjoyed it much more than I'd expected to.
I'd been thinking of it as a rather peculiar sort of swimming pool, but of course it's much more like a bath that's big enough to swim in (and when we were there, only a fraction of the area was open; beyond the enclosed pool is a whole lake, to which we didn't have access). The water is warm, and opaque, and sulphurous, and slippery to the touch. The ground beneath your feet - which you can't see - is uneven, but as smooth as if it has been polished, so there is no choice but to slow down, and move with great caution, and every now and then just drape yourself over a rock and watch the world go by.
It was extraordinarily relaxing, but we thought we could still manage a little drive, up into the Krafla volcanic area: past a field of steaming, bubbling sulphurous mud and up the mountain with increasing trepidation towards the plant where the volcano is tapped for energy.
