Welcome to Hel(k)l(a)

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After our last two stops on the Golden Circle-- first at the gurgly, bubbling cauldron of Geysir spitting steaming water angrily into the sky, and lastly at the breathtakingly beautiful waterfalls of Gulfoss--all foaming and spraying like some enormous mythical creature--we rode our gal Suzy towards the quiet riverside town of Selfoss. At Selfoss we set up our camp for the first time--and actually set up IN the city itself, just down the road from a Landsbankinn ( the bank infamously responsible for Iceland's 2008 economic crash). Here we battled the ever-persistant daylight and finally caught some--albeit a few--Z's.
Our third day in Iceland began fueled by the same spark of adrenaline that spurned our trek around the Golden Circle. We woke early, collected bearings, acquired free cups of coffee at N1 (Iceland's answer to the QuickTrip) and set off for the oft-mentioned base camp of Landmannalauger. After cruising the Circle in such a breeze-like fashion--Jessie snoozing on and off, me enjoying tiny free cups of coffee from intermittent N1's--we decided that traveling through Iceland couldn't get any easier. Simply type destination in on GPS and go and explore. Well, we couldn't have been more wrong.
Zooming out of Selfoss with grins on our faces we couldn't wait to get to Landmannalauger, which according to our maps and GPS, shouldn't have been more than an hour and a half away. However, it wasn't until then that the "highway" we rode on literally began to disappear beneath our wheels. At first this was nothing new--at some points throughout the Golden Circle we had to traverse hairy, unpaved roads--but for some reason, this seemed different, the road appeared tougher, rockier AND seemed unending... the green pastures and mountain-scapes of the Circle had long since past and had transformed to infinite gray and black lava fields with no end in any direction. We passed no cars, saw little signs of life in any direction. It was only the hope of paved roads ahead or something resembling civilization that kept us going...
As we drove through those never ending lava fields toward Landmannalauger we were reminded of what volcano these fields indeed belonged to: Hekla, believed in medieval times to be the literal mouth of hell. And for us right there--climbing the narrowest and most graveled passes at 10 mph, with no sign of life anywhere, watching our gas needle plummet with the same speed that we felt our spirits draining--it might as well have been.
And then, like Dorothy landing in Oz, color splashed into our surroundings, in lively greens, toasted golds, and watery blues. Lava rock gave way to grassy meadows, mountains of black rubble transformed into majestic gold mountains draped with snow, and sprawling lakes with glassy blue surfaces spilled out over the sand. This was Landamalauger and we couldn't have been happier to have arrived.

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Comments

[joani]

Love the funny shoe horn rock.

[MoGrizzly]

Looks like you're on a different planet!