Iceland review - 2002, Qupperneq 17

ICELAND REVIEW 15
Smári and Nína have run
Café Fjallafang for 11 years
out of a parked bus at the
Landmannalaugar camp.
Tour guide by summer,
Icelandic television host
Rósa sits for coffee with her
French hiking group at the
Landmannalaugar camp.
Father and son Atli Már
Atlason and Gudmundur
Freyr Atlason at the outset
of the so-called
‘Laugavegurinn’ trek from
Landmannalaugar to
Thórsmörk, packing 16.8 k
apiece and the compulsory
aluminium hiking poles.
Mecca
Ten hours into this trek, only a handful of
motorists have passed. We have crossed
into the Fjallabak Nature Reserve –
Fridland að Fjallabaki – and have just made
a stop at Ljótipollur, literally ‘ugly pond’, a
puzzling name for the stunning, red-walled
crater lake formed in one violent volcanic
eruption in 1480. The road advances quick-
ly upon Landmannalaugar’s signature rhyo-
lite mountains, whose imposing, soft rises
are streaked with colour in the dusk. I am
unconvinced that hundreds of people are
waiting for us behind this vista until a bend
in the road reveals 79 tents clustered in the
grasslands under the mountains. We have
arrived.
A few buildings sit in the valley at the
sharp rise of the Laugahraun lava field: the
Icelandic Touring Club’s 115-person sleep-
ing hut, a stable, two A-frames where sum-
mer park rangers live, and a slightly dis-
placed, modern bathroom unit. This facility
is a big to-do here, as it replaced a rather
infamous two-stall toilet that used to serve
hundreds of people at the height of tourist
season. Though the old stalls have been
dismantled, one returning tourist shudders
at its memory. “Maybe they are rebuilding
it in a developing country,” he suggests.
At 11 PM, it’s bright enough to see the
draw of this volcanic oasis – the baths.
Landmannalaugar is Iceland’s second
largest geothermal field. Everyone here
makes a pilgrimage to the rivers of mineral
water that flow out from under
Laugahraun and collect in temperate, shal-
low pools. Though the springs are about
200 m from the hut, a murmur of conversa-
tion emanates from the circles of white
shoulders in the steaming waters.
The trend this particular evening is to
enter the pools in a bathing suit. You hear
a lot of talk in Iceland about tourists being
at odds with the nation’s laissez-faire
approach to nudity. Tonight, the foreign
majority has skipped the back-to-nature
sentiment that a purist may regard as cen-
tral to the experience of visiting the
Highlands. Naked or not, this constantly
replenishing, embryonic spring water holds
many captive late into the night.
DAY 2: Landmannalaugar to Hólaskjól
In the morning, a Parisian painter sets up
his watercolour easel under the mountains,
where he will stay put for three weeks.
“These are the hot springs, where life is
teeming,” he remarks from his solitary
post. “If you want to get away, you just
walk. Everybody’s walking.” The temporary
community that formed the night before is
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