As in the year 1000 the Althing in Þingvellir decided to introduce Christianity as a state religion, a certain Þorgeir threw the last pagan images of gods into a waterfall, which was then called Goðafoss (= god waterfall).
The Goðafoss is one of the most famous sights of Iceland and during the day there are many tourists.
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At Goðafoss the highland gravel road Sprengisandur or Icelandic Sprengisandsleið starts, well officially only about 45km further south near the farm house Mýri in the valley Bárðardalur.
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I pitched my tent in a small birch forest with many creeks, I wanted to write undisturbed, but: non-stinging mosquitoes were very numerous in the evening, so I retreated quickly to the tent and cooked my food in the inner tent. These creatures are very penetrating and try to crawl into all body openings.
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The next morning, the actual highland road, road marked as F26, started near the Aldeyjarfoss waterfall.
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As I mentioned above the Althing in Þingvellir again: the Sprengisandur was the way to get from the east fjords to the Althing, which took place annually in July. The Bishop of Skálholt also used this route when he went to visit the north-eastern provinces. In the 17th century the Sprengisandur was not visited anymore and it was not until the end of the 18th century that it was rediscovered. Not only trolls and evil spirits were found here in former times, but the highlands were also a retreat for outcasts. A famous Icelandic folk song, "Á Sprengisandi", mentions this. Einar Brynjólfsson was one of the pioneers in the 18th century, and in this expedition he was able to find the notorious robbers Halla and Fjalla-Eyvindur in 1772 in the highlands.
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Because of the weather changes and drought, the Sprengisandsleið was always feared, and the naming comes from the fact that horses should ride over it as quickly as possible, so that they quickly overcame the dangerous route. In this tradition, I drove the slope relatively quickly :) The first car, by the way, managed to get through in 1933, a boat carried it over the Tungnaá.
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Around the rivers there are small green patches, otherwise the gravel is sheer endless and vibrant colors are absent und subdued. From the actual Sprengisandurroute, another detour leads to Laugafell.
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I reached Laugafell after many hours of cycling. The Icelandic Alpine Association Ferðafélag runs a hut there. Very pleasant for me and other hikers that evening: the natural hot pot, as seen in the pictures below.
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The next morning I had to cross a few more fords back to the main route F26, which I reached after about 36km.
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There are a lot myth how to cross the rivers in the highlands. I have different approaches depending on the depth of the ford.
As long as my head is still above the water, I use a technique that I have seen on my long journeys, for example, in Tanzania: I lift my packed bike and just balance it with the bottom bracket on my head.
As a second option in the case of deep rivers, or only just for fun, I attached water- and air-tight empty bags at the side and below my panniers, so that my bike floats. To accelerate in the sometimes strong current, I developed a special impeller which I can use via my pedals and chain and use instead of my cassette (and thus rear wheel); The sucked-in water is accelerated inside the frame of my bike and pumped out by controllable nozzles at the rear. This makes my bike a kind of jet-ski and I can ride up river bumps. This was helpful in Nýidalur when a jeep got stuck a little above the ford in the water. I was sitting with some noodle soup as the hut warden took off with his 4-wheel car, but could not reach the car-in-distress so I used my jet-ski-bike to help damsels and children in distress in a dramatic rescue operation.
The third method is based on the further development of the Siemens air hook into a kind of crane device. For this purpose, I also had a suitable sling, a slip that can carry up to 1000kg. With a radio remote control whose batteries I could recharge my hub dynamo (as well as the batteries of my camera, GPS, smartphone etc.) I could control the whole setup and use the crane to carry my bike from one shore to the other. I have to admit I sometimes neglected all safety regulations and just jumped myself on the load...
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thats the Ferðafélag hut Nýidalur, where I had my soup and the story with the stuck-up car happened. By the way, the hut warden himself was a cyclist and told me about his participation in Styrkeprøven in Norway.
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The road was quite bad even after Nýidalur and in the evening, my legs were not the primary problem after 110km on gravel, but the attention to the road, since you have to be careful all day due to sand, potholes, washboard like surface, stones etc.
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I pitched my tent in the vicinity of the cottage Versalir, which unfortunately is completely abandoned now.
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From Versalir the next morning still about 40km to the turnoff to Landmannalaugar.
(11) Landmannalaugar
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That gravel road was sometimes quite unpleasant: a fine lava sand slowed down the bike immensely and sometimes I had to dismount after a little mistake and "push" many meters with some effort until I had again solid ground beneath the tires.
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The campground in Landmannalaugar was quite crowded and a lot more tourists just visiting for a day came in by coaches.
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But it is also one of the most beautiful places in Iceland with many unusual colors, so the nearby volcano Bláhnjúkur, which I climbed in the evening, consists of grey pitstone. The volcano Brennisteinsalda has reddish-brown slopes of rhyolite rock and quartz trachyte. Gray, bluish and white shades of color can be seen in between, when there are strains of sulfur and lime. Snow, green moss, and the shiny black field of obsidian, Laugahraun, are other color pigments that I try to reproduce in the following pictures.
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The picture at the bottom right shows the campsite as seen from the Bláhnjúkur, from the left the frozen lava field is moving in.
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I descended from Bláhnjúkur on a different route and came down "behind" the lava field and traversed the lava field, partly along a river that ran between Bláhnjúkur and the lava field towards the campsite. I can really recommend that short hike. Since I did that hike in the evening, there is light around the clock at this time of the year, I hardly met any people on my way.
The day ended with a bath in the hot river .
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Enjoyable weather the next morning and I left the highland to the west on a pleasant gravel road and stayed in Flúðir for the night, where I could replenish my food supplies.
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These were a few impressions of the highland gravel road Sprengisandur and from my trip to Landmannalaugar. So I am back for an evening in the "civilization" before I now visit the very photogenic Gullfoss and return to the north of Iceland on the next highland road Kjalvegur ...
