Hot Pursuit

On a pilgrimage to Iceland’s famed geothermal springs, AMIE BARRODALE and her husband discover a hidden pool inside a remote cave—and the pleasure that comes with going outside their comfort zone together.

- Amie Barrodale

For my birthday last year, my husband, Clancy, and I travelled from our home in Kansas City, US, to Iceland. We rented a house in Old Reykjavík for eight days. We planned to visit a lot of hot springs, beginning at the world-famous Blue Lagoon. I once worked at a magazine in New York City, and a co-worker’s iChat photo was of himself at the Blue Lagoon. It looked like a dreamscape. The water was pale blue, and the surrounding land was black lava rock. In the picture, my co-worker had white foam on his face. When I asked him what it was, he told me it was soap that floated on the surface of the lagoon and gathered in rocks. You could just put it on your face.

But when I got to the Blue Lagoon, I realised there were things my co-worker hadn’t mentioned. The soap was actually silica. It did gather in rocks, but so did other things, like dirt and human hair. Teenage attendants in parkas carried buckets from which they passed out clean silica, which you could use as a face mask. It felt a bit like a water park in the Midwest. The kids taking selfies and the sloppy drunks wading up to the in-water bar distracted me from the natural beauty of the landscape.

We wrote to the man who’d rented us the house to ask if he could recommend a hot spring. He listed a dozen. None seemed quite right. One was, according to its website, infested with “harmless biting parasites.” One was not actually warm. Several were just large swimming pools. At the bottom of the list—because it was a five-hour drive from Reykjavík and located on private property—was Grjótagjá Cave. It was his favourite hot spring. “But since you have only a few days,” he wrote, “it’s really too far. Some of the roads are very rough.”