We woke to clear skies. Then we drove east toward Múlagljúfur canyon, and by the time we got there the clouds had come in. We started up anyway. As we climbed the weather began to clear again, and by the time we were high on the trail it had mostly broken open.

Múlagljúfur is a canyon a little east of Fjallsárlón, off the ring road, and it is still a quiet one. The trail runs about six kilometres round trip to the main viewpoint, with around three hundred metres of climb. It is a moderate hike. With all our stops and the time we spent looking, it took us about four hours.

The first stretch had a fair number of people on it, out to the first viewpoint over the waterfall. That fall is Hangandifoss, a tall thin one dropping down the canyon wall, and most walkers go that far and turn back. Past it the trail roughens and steepens, and the crowd thinned out. From there on we had it much more to ourselves.

The higher you go, the more opens up. The canyon drops away green and deep below the path. Behind it the glaciers come into view, the ice coming down off Fjallsárlón and the icecap above, and out the other way the flat coastal plain runs down to the sea. We stopped often. It is the kind of place where you keep turning around to look back.

When we came down we drove on to Hof and the turf church there, Hofskirkja. It is the last turf church built in Iceland in the old style, put up in the 1880s, dedicated to Saint Clement. There has been a church at Hof for seven hundred years. This one has a timber frame, side walls built of stone, and a roof of turf laid over stone slabs, so grass grows across the top of it and it looks half like a house and half like part of the ground. It sits in a small graveyard with turf walls, the headstones set in the grass around it. It was restored in the 1950s by the National Museum, which looks after it now.

The weather closed in again as we drove on east, back toward the national park campground.