Laugavegur

I tried to find two Icelandic girls whom I met in Hrafntinnusker. They taught me a card game called - as I heard it - "rummy" and they were the first Icelanders with whom I spoke more than a minute, therefore I was sad to give up on searching, not seeing them around, either asleep or gone further.

Plan for today: to go back to Landmannalaugar, which means 25km hiking. As far as I know, the rest of the trail to Thorsmork is rather flat, but Alftavatn-Landmannalaugar has one big ascent and one descent. I'd cut it into 4 pieces:
- Alftavatn - Haskerdingur (the mountain with the view), which is mostly going up with one HUGE ascent (you go up 400-500m on 1-2km distance or so, I'll check it with my GPS data later)
- Haskerdingur - Storhiver (hot springs): up and down, up and down, half of the way you walk on ice/snow
- Storhiver - Hrafntinnusker, quite a flat area with some hills, easy and relaxing after the previous parts. You can see the hut all the time and it's quite a good motivation to move forward. The snow is gone,
- Hrafntinnusker - somewhere in the middle between the hut and Landmannalaugar: mostly going on ice, but don't worry, it's going down most of the time,
- somewhere - Landmannalaugar: the final descent, easy and going through beautiful scenery. The last 2-kilometer path goes through lava field and it's flat

We set off from Alftavatn at 8:40 and we reached Landmannalaugar campsite at 16:10 but we walked quite fast and we didn't stop much for taking photos as we had already did it for 2 previous days. We stopped for 40 minutes at Hrafntinnusker though to eat and drink something. Remember, there are no restaurants or snack bars on the Laugavegur trail so bring everything you need in your backpack. However, water in toilets/kitchens is drinkable so don't worry about it. To sum up, it's possible to shorten two parts of Laugavegur to only one day and reach your destination at reasonable hour (the sun is up almost all the time, but adding 4 hours for taking photos, which is more than enough, you will still be there when the sun is high in the sky). However, you lose the possibility to do one of the side trips, therefore: do not hurry, take your time, enjoy the beauty of Laugavegur!

As it wasn't late in the day, we decided to go back to the secret place with hot pool. We pitched up a tent and had a bath but this time a few groups of people came from time to time, had a bath and went away. I asked one of them if it's okay to stay here but they just didn't know. An hour later, a man (a farmer?) came shouting "get the hell out of here" and we were about to pack our stuff and go somewhere else when two other men came and said everything was okay, they don't mind and that we should chill out. We must have looked worried (: Eventually we stayed there, but I felt a bit like an intruder, even though I tried not to spoil that beautiful place as hard as I could.

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