Monday and Tuesday nights are the two that I’m most likely to have internet access because we’re staying with Tóti, our puppet wrangler. With luck we’ll also visit my friend Bernd who lives just outside of Akureyri.

We decided to go the hotspring after dinner. Dinner was delightful. The only other guests were a british couple. The gentleman schedules tours of Iceland and this is one of the facilities he regularly books for his clients. That he also comes here for vacations should tell you something about the quality of the accomodations.

For the first course we had a curried avocado and shrimp salad. We moved onto salmon (caught here) with lemon-pepper and blue cheese. It’s not a combination I would have thought of, but it worked really well. It was accompanied with roasted vegatables (potatoes, yams, onions and green olives) and a green salad. For dessert we had local blueberries, vanilla icecream over a sweet crumble.

The hotspring was on the other side of the fjörd. I will try to do justice to this. Imagine driving on a dirt road with moutains towering above the road on your right. On your left is a channel of water that cuts between these mountains. It’s like a deep valley with the sea in the middle of it. As you drive, there are no houses, no streetlights, no cars, only the light reflecting off the snow. You come upon a small shed on the strip of land between the road and the sea. It has a retangular concrete pool in front of it. The water is steaming.

You walk down a narrow footpath to the shed and in the darkness, shivering, you shed your clothes and pull your swimsuit on as quickly as possible. Two quick steps take you into the water. It is hot and delightful. The sea is just below you and snow swirls around your head, but you are warm. There are no sounds beyond the surf, the wind and the water trickling into the pool.

Can you imagine anything more magical?

We are leaving Heydalur today, but I want to come back later this year so that I can ride the horses and learn sea kayak.