Landmannalaugar Hot Spring

The water arrives clear and keeps moving through the pool, and one end of it runs hotter than the rest. Sit in that end for a while before the walk back and the cold barely registers. Around the pool the ground is black lava on one side and banded mountains on the other, with the campsite behind it and a steady traffic of walkers arriving off the Laugavegur with packs or setting out on it.

Walks go in every direction from here. Bláhnjúkur takes about an hour up, the path to Brennisteinsalda crosses the Laugahraun lava field, and the crater lake Ljótipollur is about four hours away. Longer routes leave from the same point: Hellismannaleið at the foot of Hekla, and the Sprengisandur crossing through volcanic desert. Riding trips run in summer into valleys such as Jökulgil, which is hard to reach on foot and impossible by car.

• 4x4 and river fords — the way in is an unpaved highland track with unbridged crossings, around eight of them; a two-wheel-drive hire car will not get through.
• Changing is basic — an open dressing room stands in front of the pool, and the campsite alongside can be used to change or leave dry clothes.
• The toilets are charged — camp toilet facilities sit close to the pool, and using them is not free.
• It is not a quiet spot — the pool is beside a campsite, with walkers coming and going and children in the water.

The last stretch is almost nothing; the drive is the whole of it. The road in is an unpaved highland track for 4x4 vehicles only, fording rivers and streams that carry no bridges — around eight crossings on the way in, and the final couple of hours are all gravel and water.

At the end, two unpaved car parks lie within about 360 m of the site, the nearer of them about 230 m away, and the pool is a stone's throw from where you leave the car. A stop carrying the name Landmannalaugar sits about 315 m from the site. Everything else — the hut, the campsite, the information boards — is grouped in the same few hundred metres.

Best: summer, the season the place is set up for, when riding trips go out and walkers come through on the Laugavegur.

Avoid: winter for the hiking and the horse riding; cross-country skiing is what the area carries in that season.

Days vary more than months up here. Highland weather turns fast, and it is the wind on the walk back from the pool, not the water, that decides how long you stay in.

Landmannalaugar sits inside the Fjallabak Nature Reserve, so this is protected ground and vehicles belong on the marked tracks. The car park runs under a reservation system introduced by the Environment Agency to hold down the traffic that used to knot up the site in summer.