Running the Laugavegur Trail
I was looking for a long weekend destination that was a little different, would provide a good running challenge and was a short haul flight away from London. After flicking through the pages of my new Wanderlust book in deepest darkest January 2017 I happened upon the Laugavegur Trail in Iceland. I had a winner.
The trail itself is billed as one of the top hiking trails in the world ranked alongside Macho Piccho in Peru and The Milford Track in New Zealand. The 55k route is in South-West Iceland going from the geothermal area of Landmannalaugar down to the deep ravaged gorges of Thorsmork. Once on the trail you can understand why it has such high status.
I flew out with Icelandic airlines on the morning of Friday 30th June, 2016, from Gatwick and got the bus from Keflavik International airport into Reykjavik which took about 40 minutes. The airport in Reykjavik is the domestic airport which is slightly confusing if like me, thats where you thought you would be landing.
I had booked to stay at the Hotel Holt in Reykjavik on the Friday night which apparently is a fairly famous place in Iceland. The hotels walls are adorned with artwork from various famous Icelandic artists mostly depicting everyday life in urban and rural settings. The food and wine for dinner that night was all a little expensive but then, this is Iceland and pretty much everything here comes with a premium price tag.
Up early on the Saturday morning for coffee and a lovely breakfast I headed out for the short walk from the hotel down to the BSI Bus Terminal and jumped on my pre-booked bus out to the start of the Laugavegur Trail at Landmannalaugar. From what I could see the bus company were servicing the start of the trail with a couple of buses a day, one at around 8am and another at around 2pm. The bus journey took around 5 hours including a couple of refreshment stops and a mechanical failure that held us up for a bit. The bus first travelled along tarmac roads then very soon along unsealed roads which gradually deteriorated in quality. Our big bus with its off road tyres gobbled up the miles kicking up dust behind us as we went. You can certainly see why the tour companies recommend a sturdy 4x4 if you are planning on doing a fly-drive tour anywhere in Iceland.
“There were spectacular geothermal vents letting off steam all over the place, the endless barren lava fields that just seem to go on forever and then the deep gorges at the southern end of the trail”
After driving through a barren, treeless wilderness pretty much as soon as we left Reykjavik, arriving at Landmannalaugar was a bit of a shock to the senses as it was really quite hectic with loads of people and plenty of tour buses and 4x4's. It was a little odd seeing all these people milling around in the middle of nowhere as there are only a few accommodation huts, a small visitor centre and what seemed like a makeshift Mountain Rescue hut.
So that was it, after a lovely snooze in the warmth of the bus I was off along the trail. Setting off just after 1pm my next stop Thormork 55ks to my south. I wasn't too worried about the time as even if I finished late at night I'd still be running in day light due to the effect of the midnight sun.
As you can see from the snaps and the videos below, the scenery is pretty mind-blowing. It reminded me of the volcanic areas around Rotorua on the north island of New Zealand. There were spectacular geothermal vents letting off steam all over the place, the endless barren lava fields that just seem to go on forever and then the deep gorges at the southern end of the trail carved out years previously when volcanic eruptions melted the ice caps and caused huge amounts of melt water to rush down the mountains and into the valleys. Pretty spectacular and other worldly.
I got down to Thorsmork in about 8 hours, pretty shattered and ready for some food and a bed for the night. You know when you get to the end of a run or a long walk and all you can think about is the place you're about to crash for the night, the fact you can finally stop, and just relax? Well, as you can imagine, I had this great feeling towards the end of this run, right up to the point when I was informed by one of the wardens in the hut at Thormork that actually the hut where I was booked in for the night was a couple of ks back up the trail, off a fork in the path where I had just come from. Not what I wanted to hear.
I finally got to Skagfjörðsskáli, the hut I had booked into, and crashed right after I had devoured my high calorie, freeze dried meal in a bag from the great guys at Expedition Food. The hut is in the beautiful Langidalur valley over looking the river and was booked through The Iceland Touring Association. Even at this time of night it was still light thanks to the mid-night sun and there were many people still milling around. I found a bed, unrolled my sleeping bag and collapsed for a good nights sleep ready for the journey home the next morning.
The journey home turned out to be a bit of an epic. Have a watch of part 4 of the video blog below and hear how I managed to get out of Thorsmork after missing my bus the next morning and, through the kind generosity of a local Icelandic chap, made it back to the airport just in time to catch my flight back to Gatwick.
