Saturday: another day with sun and no rain!
We began with a trip to the tourist information office in Klaustur - a nissen hut opposite the petrol station. This was because we wanted to travel the F208 - the 60-mile cross-country road past Eldgja to Landmannarlaugar and thence to Hella past Hekla. We had heard reports that this road was still impassable, so we needed to check before we invested 2 hours getting to the blockage. According to the road information map, the middle 10 miles of the road was indeed closed, so we adjusted our plans accordingly. Our Swedish motorcyclists were there too so we said a quick hello and wished them well across the sandstorm zone ahead. Our plans were to have a lazy day and end up at the hotel in Hella in the evening.
First, we went back to the beginning of the Laki road near which is the canyon through which the river Fladra runs before it exits the highlands and enters the floodplains below them. This is a beautifully river cut canyon with vertical sides and is only 20-30m wide in places. We walked up the eastern edge looking down into the abyss 250ft below and taking some photos. There was one bit of rock that was a bit like a teaspoon - a narrow piece maybe 15” wide led to a 2ft diameter circle at the end. Approaching from the grass at the side, it seemed simple to walk out to the round bit, take some photos, turn round and walk back again to the grass. The first bit was OK - then I looked down to take the photos, which was not at all good, then I tried to turn round, and found this almost impossible! Resisting the temptation to get to my hands and knees, which might have seemed more secure, but actually would have made the job harder, I eventually managed to turn around and walk away - but I won’t be doing that trick again in a hurry. I also started taking some photos of the very varied wild flowers that we had been seeing on our travels - unfortunately the videocamera had ceased functioning on Thursday so we now were relying on stills.
At the main road junction on our return a couple were hitch-hiking and as we were no longer in a big hurry we decided to give them a lift. Lucas and Brigitta were from Bern and were spending 2 weeks touring Iceland by bus and on foot. They had been hoping to go to Lakagigar, but the bus wasn’t running due to the snow so they had decided to stay near Vik. We decided to give them the chance to see the cliffs at Dyrholaey and have a picnic lunch while they explored. When we got to the top, we were the only vehicle there, and while the Swiss team went off to look at the arch, I went over to the cliff by the car-park for a pee. There I noticed that all the puffins, which we had seen flying and swimming, but not perching, were in fact roosting on the ledges of this cliff - and some of them were only a few feet away posing for their photos. The next 30 minutes were spent wriggling ever closer to the puffin pair, eventually getting so close that it was hard to get the camera to focus on them.
After lunch, we went down from the heights and along to the headland and beach where some more interesting undercut cliffs adjoined the black sand beach. The columnar basalt of the cliffs was undercut where it sat on some tuff deposits, presumably from earlier eruptions, though it looked as if new magma had come up from below and pierced the basalt in places. There was lots of glassy chocolately rock (a sign of fast cooling) and big blow-hole cavities inside the rock itself. You need to know a bit more than I do about geology to tour Iceland successfully!
We then moved on to Hella, still with our hitch-hikers aboard, and they decided to camp the night near the stream by our summer-house of Tuesday evening. We would then journey together by car to Landmannarlaugar the following day, and they would stay there and do some wilderness walking while we went back to Reyjavik.
That evening, however, we enjoyed a pleasant barbeque cooked by the Swiss, with trout, followed by various types of pork and gammon and all accompanied by grilled tomatoes and mushrooms. We provided the bar, which was quite well stocked, with sherry, beer, whisky and a bottle of Rioja bought on the black market from the back door of a Hella restaurant - at only 3 times the UK retail price.