Hveragerði, Abbreviated

I woke up Tuesday to learn that my boots were gone. I left them in the dormitory (Hotel Domus) all day monday and didn't especially glance at them more than once or twice. When I went to pick them up today they were not the same boots - a pair of size 9 sneakers had been left in place of a pair of nice size 10 boots.

So, instead of all day hiking around Hveragerði, I went to Hveragerði for about four hours - leaving a bit later and coming back a bit earlier - and still got to see most of the interesting sights. Now I'm back in Reykjavik and thinking about going to bed early...

Hike 6 - Reykjavik Parks & Gardens

So much for taking it easy today. It didn't feel like quite so far because my foot didn't hurt. Somewhere along the line my boots started aggravating the Achilles tendon (I think) of my left foot, so that it hurt to take a step. I've been walking through it for days, but today, despite walking seven miles, was a "break" in that I haven't put on my boots today. I went by Hotel Fron where my duffel is living and switched out my Crocs for a pair of actual shoes - not seven-mile-hiking shoes, perhaps, but it did the trick. My feet are tired but my heel feels better.

Tomorrow I go to Hveragerði and actually attempt to walk around in boots with a pack, which may or may not go well. However, there's plenty close to the city so I won't be disappointed even if I can't walk quite as much as I might want to (note that "as far as I might want to" is pretty relative here - obviously I walked eight miles or so in Vík).

Side note: I cannot seem to remember how to pronounce Hveragerði. Part of this is because the pronunciation is weird, but a lot of it is that the tour guide for our Golden Circle tour explained that it meant "steam garden," which resulted in me filing away the town under "steam garden" and never needing to have some rough notion of how it was pronounced in order to remember the place.

Not in Hyderabad

I am in Bangalore. Depending on how outward-looking your favorite news sources are, you may or may not start hearing a great deal about Hyderabad in the next few days. Hyderabad is one of the closest major cities to Bangalore, but we're talking about a significant distance. In any case, no one has any idea what's going on yet, but two bombs went off in Hyderabad and they're reporting something like 40 people dead, a number that keeps rising.

There were two attacks that were successful from what we know now, around 8 PM - that's 10:30 AM for those of you on the east coast. The attacks were at popular tourist/family destinations, one was at a popular Gokul Chaat store and the other one was at Lumbini Park where a laser show was taking place.

It was an odd irony to hear about laser shows, I was speaking about laser shows today when nine of us from the lab climbed Savandurga, essentially a big brother of Stone Mountain, and my suggestion that this mountain would be a reasonable place to project a laser show as well was ... um ... not enthusiasm - "then they'd put this place in Lonely Planet and it would ruin everything!" I didn't get any pictures: I woke up late and got my camera - sans batteries. However, I mapped out the way we walked up the mountain:


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