DAY 3 - Along the South Coast a tiny bit

As we were moving on to a new locale today, I started with floating around the clinic hotel's small private lagoon, open to guests only and not even all guests at all times. The lovely place we stayed is a small inn AND medical clinic, as the lagoon water has actually been proven in multiple studies to treat psoriasis. I guess there's not enough medical business or it's not lucrative enough, so they fill up the rooms with tourists.

After my paddle - it is so lovely being out in a warm pool while it's snowing - we had breakfast, and while Adam headed out for a couple of last photos I checked out and planned a route for us. I decided to ignore Google maps, which really doesn't know how to get around Iceland too well anyway, and be a little reckless and route us along the very sparsely populated, secondary road that hugs the south coast of the Reykjanes peninsula. I'm not stupid, though, I checked with the hotel desk for advice and they said the road should be fine and clear, and just to slow down if it was icy.

Turns out it wasn't icy at all, and I'm really getting spoiled with Adam doing the driving so I could sight-see all down the coast. We didn't end up with many pictures for that drive, though, for interesting little cultural or touristy spots were nil, and while the stark landscape is still so beautiful, it doesn't translate well in a photo. Oh, at one point early in the drive, though, we saw our first Icelandic sheep! Adam pointed out the field from quite a distance, where there seemed to be a grassier-looking (as opposed to lava-rocky) area dotted with rectangular bales, and he said there must be a farm as he could see hay bales, the first hint we'd had of ANY crop or animal operation in the area. As we got closer, I said "I think some of those bales are moving"... and lo and behold, they were in fact a flock of blocky little sheep, shaggy down to their feet with their winter wool.

The drive was uneventful to the very end when, being led astray by a combination of Google Maps and sketchy directions from the agent, I directed us to some odd locations that were NOT our Frost-and-Fire Guesthouse. This is OK, as we got an Icelanding travel checklist with our car rental that included "get lost in Iceland", so I guess we get that check mark. Eventually Adam made a different assumption at a roundabout which was not well described in our directions, and found the place. We are in a lodge with terrace rooms overlooking a river, with hot steam vents popping out of the steep riverbanks on both sides. Including in the driveway! This seems to be quite a normal thing here, and I'm interested to take some of the walking trails around the area and find more of them - including the two erupting ones reported to be a bit upriver.

Oh, and this town is called Hveragerdi, or properly in the Icelandic tongue, Hveragerði, which as far as I can tell with my very North American English ear, is pronounced Quer-eh-GEhr-dthi. The HV in the language is a Qu sound, and the ð letter, called eth, is a soft th as in "the" but not quite. But it's not quite a regular d, either. Somewhere between a d and a th as an English speaker would say them. It's not an easy language to catch on to here, for sure, though I'm loving the sound of it..

Once we settled in to our room, we had a bit of time so decided to walk to a town health centre where we had (included in the package, I didn't go looking for this) mud baths booked. It's just what it sounds like. Huge sarcophagi full of goopy volcanic mud, heated to roughly a-little-past-body-temp, that you squish into, an attendant being on hand to push you down as you float, and soak in for 15 minutes or so. Follow that with a warm shower, then a blanket wrap with a heated blanket to relax in. I don't know that it's really a proven therapy for anything, but it IS an interesting experience, and I'm quite well exfoliated after that and the 3 days in Blue Lagoon water with the mud masks they have. We ended that adventure with a dip in the hot pots at the centre - they have 3 different ones, outdoors on a pool deck, at different temperatures or with different jet configurations running.

Dinner was a little anti-climatic, as the restaurant we'd spotted, one I'd read about as being very good and cooking local foods in a 100% geothermal powered kitchen, was closed for renos. We wound up stopping at a little variety store that had a burger counter and shared one Icelandic hot dog (Pylsa or Pulsa) and a burger and fries. Both were decent fast food, but just that. I had heard some folks say the food was terrible here, which it is NOT at all, but it is first off a bit different, and second, a little hard to find. One thing I'm noticing is that Icelandic shops, restaurants, or cafes don't advertise the way a North American establishment would, and that seems to make them, to a North American eye, a little invisible. Not knowing the language, and not seeing big blaring logos on billboards all over, I'm finding it hard to know if I'm approaching a cafe, store, or office sometimes. I'm sure I'd get used to it in time.

In the time we were in the health centre, the weather turned from clear-just-getting-cloudy to a moderate wet snowfall, so we walked back uphill to the guesthouse in the snow. There is a small heated swimming pool here as well as a hot pot (hot tub) just under our balcony and right at the riverside, but it looks like we'll be saving those for another time and turning in a bit early tonight. We seem to have the place to ourselves and have some ground to cover tomorrow, so an early night in, now that I have got my hands on some cough medicine and hence half a chance at a full night's sleep, seems like a good idea.