Cold camp at Hrafntinnusker

The day started with sunshine - Kristjan noted this was "surprising". It took forever to get going, as it always does on the first morning of a walking holiday. Within an hour of starting out, we had the first rain showers, which were our companions for the rest of the week.

The first part of the walk is through an old lava flow (from the 1600s, I think). The lava is still in fantastic, knobbly shapes, and appeared grey on top. This is the Icelandic moss, which is grey when dry, and the most fantastic vibrant green you can imagine when wet.

We went past fumaroles into an area of orangey-brown rounded hills, so there was a lot of up and down, and some scree and snow patches to negotiate, but nothing difficult. We stopped for lunch by some hot springs - with fantastic colours and steam everywhere. The hills gradually got more black in colour, due to ash and pumice, and there were often hot springs - see Houblon's blip.

Towards the end of the day's walk, we climbed onto a high plateau, where everything was black underfoot, and there was lots of obsidian scattered around. It was a bit misty up there, and we passed a memorial to somebody who died up here in June 2004, very close to the hut. It was quite eerie. Getting lost up here in bad visibility would be easy.

We had a view down to the hut and campsite (at 1100m). It's pretty exposed up here, and often windy, so there are a series of low dry stone walls which are used to shelter tents. It was blowy and a bit damp as we put our tent up. The ground is a mixture of ash and pumice - not terribly solid, so we were glad of the walls. As you can see, we anchored every peg with stones as well - obsidian is good solid stuff for this purpose - but be careful it doesn't shred clothing - it's sharp.

If you look closely you'll see that Houblon, not known for feeling the cold, is wearing his lightweight down (substitute) jacket under his waterproof...

Although it was windy and raining most of the night, the tent stayed put and we were cosy and warm.