One of my strongest memories of Iceland will without doubt be its smelliness.

Most of Iceland doesn’t smell much at all – or smells of nothing more than moss and water and sea. But the volcanic areas make up for it tenfold. The water in their hot springs has a lot of sulphur in it, and smelled like a mixture of sewerage and rotten eggs. And because the water comes out steaming, the smell is quickly distributed and reaches the nose easily, and spreads well with wind.

For some reason I seemed to be a lot more sensitive to that smell than most visitors. Maybe it’s something that takes a special gene, like smelling asparagus in your urine? Or perhaps it’s just due to the pregnancy. Anyway, I couldn’t go near a sulphurous spring without retching and gagging. So any time we wanted to see a fresh lava field or bubbly mud pools, I was trying to walk upwind of them, walking very fast when we got close, and breathing through a hanky and as lightly as possible.

And what’s worse – the hot water in their taps comes from hot springs! At one of the hotels the hot water stank so strongly that I had to wash myself and brush my teeth with only cold water, which was very cold since it probably came straight from a glacier. I was very relieved to discover that the next hotel had less-smelly water and I could actually wash my hair again!