No pics in this post yet as the hotel wireless is very slow and I need to go and test the geo-thermal spa, so posting this and will try pictures and todays post later.
Great start to the day. We hadn't been able to pay the dinner bill the night before as the phone lines were down in the hotel and they couldn't take credit cards. This meant we had to speak to the owner this morning to sort out paying. He joined us for coffee at the breakfast table and went through the map with Sharon to show her the way to what he considers to be Iceland's most beautiful lake. It was a diversion of about 2 hours up a dead end to the lake, but well worth it, more later.
From Hotel Highland we had to go back down to the guest house and petrol station, to pay our bill for last nights dinner and fill up with diesel. We then set off for the Northern Fjallback route. This was much smoother than yesterdays rocky road, so speeds were higher and there was more traffic. The traffic included a Honda Accord, a Subaru Forester and several buses. Now these aren't ordinary buses, these are Icelandic buses. Like English buses on steroids and some with 4 wheel drive. It is rather scary to be travelling along a loose lava surfaced road at 80 kph and go round a corner to be confronted by a bus though. It also gets very high and at one point we were at 2295 feet and so were the buses.
Mounted the bullet cam on the Land Rover door mirror to get some video of us crossing fords, left it on all day in the end and used it not only for fords but also for the roads around Langisjor. Got some interesting video, if I get a good enough wireless service I will post some in the blog.
We stopped to admire a couple of views, including a volcanic crater full of water, and were into Landmannalauger for lunch. There is a shop there in an old school bus, it is in the middle of the mountains and everything has to come in the way we had, through fords and up slopes. The coffee and tea were only Ikr250 each though, which was cheaper than Geysir yesterday, next to the main road. We had a bit of a walk, watched the bathers in the thermal springs and ate some lunch.
After a short drive we turned off to go to see “the most beautiful lake in Iceland”, Langisjor. It really is fantastic, and the drive there and roads around it were even better. Much of it was across a lava desert with just a pair of tyre tracks running across a huge expanse of black sand , rock and ash. Unfortunately the weather wasn't on our side and at one point the road just disappeared into the mist. We tried to follow a road at the bottom of the lake, the owner at Hotel Highland had said “it goes up the mountain, unless they have closed it”. Well the mountain had fallen onto it! We got as far as some big boulders and I would have gone further had we had another vehicle with us, but on our own it seemed best to turn round. We were after all an hours drive from the nearest 'main' road and that was a loose surfaced mountain track. So we headed back to the 'main' road.
As we headed down out of the mountains the scenery became greener and the road took on a whole new character, sweeping round lumps and weaving between the tributaries of the glacial delta. Eventually it rejoined the macadamised surfaces and then route 1, the circular road around Iceland. A 30 minute run down route 1 bought us to the town of Vik and our hotel for tonight. We had a wander up to the filling station to buy a phone top up, looked in the grill bar there and decided to eat at the hotel. A wise decision, delivering and excellent steak and an excellent chicken with Viking beer and ice cream for afters. Unfortunately no wireless, so this is being written in OOWriter and will be posted when we next have wireless.
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