Today’s objective was the campsite at Landmannalaugar, out in the Fjallabak reserve. We took Route 26 north and then turned onto F208 North.

Route 26 is paved almost the whole way. The asphalt holds until Lake Krókslón, near the Sigalda power station, because the road is kept up for the hydro works. It runs through open farmland and then rising moorland, with the highlands building ahead.

Two mountains stood out along the way, and they could not be more different. North of the road was Hekla, the big snow-streaked mountain that dominates this whole stretch, one of Iceland’s most active volcanoes. From some angles it looked like a broad cone, though it is really a long ridge, with lower hills trailing off beside it. It has erupted more than twenty times since the country was settled, and in the old days Icelanders called it the gateway to hell. The dark broken lava along the road is its work.

The other was Búrfell, a flat-topped mountain with steep sides and a level top, standing over six hundred metres. It is a tuya, a table mountain, and its shape is the record of how it formed. It erupted underneath a glacier, and the ice hemmed the eruption in and gave the mountain its flat top and steep walls. The name means storehouse mountain, for the shape. Hekla is a ridge built by fire in the open air. Búrfell is a block built by lava trapped under ice.

After the power station the road becomes F208, and from there it is gravel, about twenty-four kilometres of it to the camp. We aired down at the turn.

The first stop was Sigöldufoss, right beside F208 near the power station. The river Tungnaá comes down here in a wide, broken fall over dark volcanic rock, more spread out than tall. The water is grey with glacial silt, the colour of the rivers that come off the icecaps. It sits a few steps from the road.

The second stop was Sigöldugljúfur, a little further along, known as the Valley of Tears. The name is not from any sad story. It comes from the canyon walls themselves. Dozens of thin waterfalls run straight down the vertical rock through green moss, so many and so fine that the cliffs look like they are weeping, and that is where the name comes from. From the rim you look down into the gorge at all of them falling together into the river at the bottom. That river is a clear, bright blue, and the contrast with the grey glacial water at Sigöldufoss is sharp. The falls do not come from a river above. They are spring-fed, groundwater emerging from the rock itself, which is why they appear in a row along the wall rather than dropping from the top. The walk in from the road is under two kilometres, about half an hour.

F208 itself was the surprise of the day. It rained on and off, and even under grey cloud the country was beautiful, dark rhyolite hills and green moss and the crater lakes coming one after another as we climbed toward the camp. Some guides call this stretch monotonous. We did not find it so.

We made camp at Landmannalaugar with one ford behind us, the short crossing at the end. And the forecast for tomorrow is fantastic, clear and bright. We waited almost a week to come here, holding out for good weather instead of driving into fog. It looks like that gamble is about to pay off.