mikeapp

Monday 3rd August We flew back from Egilsstadir yesterday morning and in the afternoon I spent a while in the main tourist information centre. The group tour I was on finished yesterday, and all the other members of the group had now left for home, but I had tagged a few days onto my holiday in order to do some sight-seeing around the Reykjavik area. There a half a dozen main tourist companies which each offer various day trips from Reykjavik, with at least 50 different trips available between them, covering pure sight-seeing but also any number of activities such as horse riding, glacier walking, cycling, diving etc. My aim was to spend my last three days seeing as much as I could. In the tourist office I booked ready-made tours for today and tomorrow, and ... read more

Tuesday 28th July We are staying for two nights here at the Hotel Alfheimar in Bakkagerdi, to allow us to have an acclimatisation day before setting off on our trek tomorrow. As we were driving north from Egilsstadir yesterday afternoon there was a range of prominent peaks on our right. They are had snow-capped summits but their summits were also in the clouds most of the time. Depending on the weather, today's walk may have attempted to go to the summit of one of those peaks, but this morning it seemed clear that the summits were going to stay in the clouds for most of the day so instead we did a circular walk going partially up to the summit ridge. We had breakfast in the hotel at 8am and then made ourselves a packed lunch ... read more

The other 5 members of our small tour group had arrived at the Kex Hostel yesterday afternoon and evening so this morning we packed hurriedly and went down to try and get some breakfast. I say 'try' because breakfast doesn't start being served until 7am and we had an internal flight scheduled at 8am. Fortunately Reykjavik's domestic airport is much closer to the city centre than the international one, just a 10 minute taxi ride from the hostel (also free WiFi at both!). Our 40-minute flight to the northern town of Akureyri was on time and our Icelandic tour guide Oskar was there to meet us at Akureyri airport with a 4-wheel-drive minibus. Akureyri is Iceland's second largest urban area (with obviously the capital being the largest) with a population of less than 20,000, and we ... read more

Friday 2nd August Another excellent full English breakfast at Quarryside B&B in Banks at 8am and I was back on the walk at 9am. The weather was quite dull to start with but after about an hour it brightened up considerably and required a stop to find my sun hat and apply sun cream. On every other morning so far I had creamed-up before setting off as most days started warm and sunny. There is a very short stretch of wall just as you leave Banks but that was the last I was to see of Hadrian's Wall for the rest of the walk. The vallum and the spoil mounds were still visible in places but the middle third of the walk really does contain all the wall remains. These last two days were also very ... read more

I will start by trying to clarify a few points about the length of Hadrian's Wall, the length of the Hadrian's Wall Walk, and the length you actually need to do to walk it (which are not quite the same!). When the Romans first built the wall (starting in AD 122 and completed by AD 128) it was 80 miles long. However, these were 'Roman miles' which were a bit shorter than our modern miles. A Roman mile is considered to be 1617 yards whereas a modern mile is 1760 yards so a Roman mile is about 0.92 of a modern mile (or 1.48 kilometres). This means that the actual length of the wall is 73 modern miles. The official Hadrian's Wall Long Distance Footpath is however 84 modern miles, 11 miles longer than the actual ... read more