A number of years ago, my brother went to Iceland. He stayed in Reykjavik and did day trips. One of the places he visited was Landmannalaugar in Fjallabak Nature Reserve in the Highlands. He said it was better than The Golden Circle so we skipped the golden circle (shock! horror!) and went to Landmannalaugar instead. It’s nowhere near Reykjavik but it’s also only accessible by an F-road, which we weren’t allowed to drive on with our rental car, so we booked a tour.
This tour was probably the most expensive tour I’ve ever taken that wasn’t overnight. But that’s the nature of tours in Iceland and Iceland and general. As much as the tour companies are making a lot of money, gas is ridiculously expensive and I assume wages are as well. Anyway, we resolved pretty quickly to not think about the money and enjoy ourselves.
Wet got up early and caught the very beginning of the hotel’s breakfast. Then we wandered over to the Hilton across the street to get picked up. We waited and waited and Jenn checked her email only to read our pickup had been delayed by at least 30 minutes. We later found out that their brand new van had died which is why they were late. We had a real character as a tour guide who had lots of well-used lines for us tourists. He was quite funny and made the beginning of the long drive breeze by. Also, it helped that we had yet to drive on the Ring Road so we were of course glued to the windows as we drove across a landscape that seemed to be from another planet. Soon we were in sight of one of their many geothermal powerplants and saw our first of many examples of steam just pouring out of the ground.
We stopped in Selfoss to pick up additional people and get some food for the Highlands. (There is nothing in the Highlands. Well, there is one really expensive bus.) We ended up getting sandwiches and pastries from a bakery that is a bit of a chain.
Soon we left the Ring Road and entered the Highlands. At first, the roads were normal and we drove through farms and ranches. But the further and further we got away from the Ring Road the more we could see some hills in the distance.
Our first stop, before we got into the Highlands proper, was Hjálparfoss, our first of numerous waterfalls that we would see up close over the next week.
This waterfall seemed really impressive. It was our first, though. Now that I’ve seen a few hundred of Iceland’s waterfalls, I’m not sure where it ranks, though at least it’s distinct. It’s certainly worthy of a name.
Everything in Iceland is named. Or at least, it feels that way as there are plenty of waterfalls (and other things, I’m sure) that don’t appear to have names. But most things of note have an apparently distinct name. This makes it relatively easy to identify each one, even if I can’t pronounce any of them.
Immediately after, we headed up into the Highlands. Not long after climbing up into them, we found our way to the F-road we’d follow for the next 30 km. An F-road is a gravel track in the interior of Iceland that doesn’t have any bridges on it. All F-roads require 4-wheel-drive and some require vehicle snorkels. The reason we took the tour was because we were not supposed to drive on F-roads ourselves, even in our SUV (though many tourists still do) and because we did not have a vehicle snorkel. (You see a lot of jeeps and trucks with massive tires in Iceland and it’s the one country where they really are justified. Some areas of the country don’t even have F-roads and so require a fully all-terrain vehicle.) I don’t know how long it took us, but we spent something like an hour or more driving the 30 ish K from the main road to Landmannalaugar because of all the pot holes and rocks. I am very glad I wasn’t driving.
It’s really hard to put into words how strange the Highlands look. As we entered, the guide said something like “Welcome to the Moon” and it felt completely appropriate. But the thing about the Highlands, and about all of Iceland is, nothing is the same for that long. Though parts of where we went this day looked like the Moon or Mars, other places looked nothing like that.
It was a beautiful day. Actually the tour guide told us it was the best day of the year in the Highlands. Naturally, we were a little skeptical despite how nice it was, but later our Airbnb host said it likely was because of how cold their summer was. Anyway, because it was a beautiful day, the guide “added” two stops. The first was at a double crater:
As usual with photos the sheer size doesn’t really convey. It’s actually quite high up – that’s a cliff edge, not a beach – but, since it’s basically the Moon, it’s hard to tell.
A little while later, we stopped on a ridge for more views:
After the two viewpoints we kept making our way slowly on the really bad road. Eventually we reached a valley where the floor was completely flat and we could see buildings and cars. We hadn’t seen buildings in over an hour and had only seen the odd car (some of whom had zoomed by us on this terrible road). As we approached there were two parking lots, one smaller one on the near side of the river and a much larger one next to the compound on the other side. We drove through the river – because our van had a snorkel – and parked among the other tour buses and vans by the campground. There were a bunch of tents – people camp up here! – a permanently parked bus that sold extremely expensive food and drink, and a few other buildings, the biggest of which was just toilets and showers. We all visited the toilets and then assembled at the flagpole for our hike.
The hike was through a lava field, the first lava field we’d hike through though we had driven through one on the way here.
Though that trail looks quite easy and is in that section the trail really varied in difficulty. Our tour guide described it as “easy” among other things and what we would learn is that both tour guides and Icelanders in general thoroughly underestimate how hard a trail is. The main loop at Landmannalaugar is hardly “easy.” It’s intermediate. And the hike I did in the middle of it was intermediate at least, but the tour was advertised as accessible to anyone and the guide was asked multiple times by the older people on the tour how hard it was and he just had no idea people would struggle. This is obviously, in part, just a tour guide thing. Tour guides who do hikes do the hikes all the time, sometimes as often as once or twice a week. So they’re used to it. (Though they should also be used to people struggling, right?) But it also seems to be emblematic of Icelanders, perhaps even Europeans. (I have seen social media videos about “easy” walks in Europe that turn out to be big climbs, after all.) The number of times I read “a short walk” or “an easy walk” when it was an actual hike…well, I lost count.
And the thing is, Jenn and I are at different levels. I am, after all, a goat. (If you didn’t know that already, I have scrambled a lot in my life and just innately do it for some reason.) Moreover, I have a pretty big appetite for hiking and my eyes might be bigger than my stomach the older I get. So many of these “easy” hikes weren’t as obviously easy to someone who hasn’t spent their whole live clambering over rocks. But more to the point, the “short” walks almost always involved a fair amount of elevation change that only made it short for people who are used to doing it every day. And the further you are from Reykjavik, the less safety measures are in place. Anyway, just think about it before you go because, though plenty of sites are literally next to the highway (as you’ll see), plenty others are “a short, easy walk” from the parking lot which is, for many people, either not easy, or not short, or both.
Anyway, it’s impossible for my words or these photos to do Landmannalaugar justice. As you walk through the lava fields, there’s all this obsidian, some of which is quite shiny. And the hills around the area, known as rainbow mountains, are all different colours, tan, beige, red, white, green. And it’s the rocks from the geothermal activity, apparently, rather than plant life.
After a bit, we came to an incredibly flat valley that was clearly a formal lake bed. And then we say the vents.
There’s just steam spewing out of the ground. This is a common thing in Iceland – we saw some on the way up from the bus – but it’s still really strange to anyone who hasn’t grown up with it. And it’s just right there. (There’s actually a “photo booth” here where you can get up close to one of them.)
At this point, we had a choice. We could climb up the volcano in the above picture, the second highest in the area, or go back through the lava fields to the parking lot. Jenn and a few others opted to go back and most of us opted to climb the volcano.
Here’s a few ponds Jenn took a picture of about 1/3rd of the way up for the time being:
The trail didn’t have a lot of switchbacks – Icelanders appear to not feel the need for as many as us – and so there were sections that were just gravel tracks straight up the side of the volcano – because everything is gravel in Iceland.
The view from the top was pretty fantastic. While I was looking around, one of our group, the guy who made it up first, started walking around filming, an absolute no-no anywhere where there is a chance you could fall. And, out of the corner of my eye I saw him slip. When he regained his composure I saw a look pass over his face, he knew he almost went over. But then, moments later, he was doing it again. It’s frankly a miracle he didn’t severely insure himself and ruin our tour.
A thing people who don’t scramble don’t realize is that it’s always harder on the way down. It’s harder for at least two reasons. First, your momentum is headed down the hill, not up the hill, so you have to work to slow yourself down a lot of the time. And the second reason is simply that you are looking down a mountain rather than just at some rocks on the way up. Well, one of our group found out that it is indeed worse going down and got stuck on part of the trail. She essentially got paralyzed with fear, blaming her shoes and trail, and couldn’t move. We had to coach her down for a while but she did make it.
The way back through the lava field was significantly more challenging than the way out and all I could think about was how this was an “easy” or “not bad” hike. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed it. It’s been a long time since I properly scrambled. But I was thinking about the other people on the trail, some of whom were just not ready for something that would absolutely be classified as “intermediate” in Canada.
One of the really cool things on the way back is the “Green Valley”:
You just walk along this river bed with this small stream and the opposite wall is just green rocks for ages. It’s wild.
After I got back from the hike, I found Jenn and we ate our sandwiches from the bakery in Selfoss. Now, maybe it was the hike but that sandwich was just delicious.
One of the draws of Landmannalaugar is what you do after the hike. In the valley next to the lava field is just a marsh. And in the marsh is a pool where streams heated by the volcano and streams from the mountains mix. The only way you can soak in the water from the volcano is if it mixes with other water as it’s 90-100C when it comes out of the ground. Anyway, there’s this pool in the marsh. And there’s a boardwalk to it and there are these wooden panels that don’t really hide you from anyone and you change on next to them in full view of everyone. (You can change in the bathroom stalls, too, but then you have to walk to the boardwalk and this isn’t the warmest place in the world.) And then you just get in the little pond and soak. The closer you get to the source, the hotter it gets so few people sit near the inlet. There is algae – it is really just a dug out section of the marsh, it seems – but it is a really, really, um, cool experience.
After the hot spring we got back in the bus and headed on the extremely long trip back out of the lava field. On the way out, we stopped at Sigöldugljúfur aka the Valley of Tears.
Then we were out of the Highlands and on the long drive back to Reykjavik. It took forever and we didn’t get back until like 8:30 or so. Many restaurants close at 9 so we ended up getting takeaway Chinese and eating in our hotel breakfast dining area.