Today we went to visit Skálholt. It is a quiet place now, a single church out in the farmland with a few low buildings around it, and nothing about it looks important. But for over seven hundred years this was the most important place in Iceland.
Today we came down out of the highlands. After a few days on the Kjölur road, in the geothermal country and the glaciers, we were heading back toward the lowlands, and we had one stop in mind on the way, a waterfall called Brúarfoss.
Today we moved from Hveravellir to Kerlingarfjöll, the next stop south on the Kjölur route. It is not a long drive, about an hour and a half, but it takes you into the gap between the two big glaciers. Kerlingarfjöll was the thing we had come to this road to see. Today we got a clear day to visit it.
Hveravellir is a geothermal area in the middle of Iceland, roughly halfway along the Kjölur route between Gullfoss and the north coast. It sits between two glaciers, Langjökull and Hofsjökull. We had been waiting for a clear day to go, and this was it.
Another very wet day. So we used it for jobs that needed doing anyway. We drove to Selfoss to find hardware parts for some minor repairs on the truck. While we were there we also bought hydraulic lines and fittings as spare parts for the the motorcycle lift that got damaged during the recovery effort at Langjökull.
To make the day not completely about work and maintenance, we stopped at Faxafoss on the way. Waiting for the weather to clear tomorrow.
We spent the last few days near Gullfoss and Geysir. We wanted to hike to several waterfalls in the area before venturing again into the Highlands. But it rained hard for the last 24 hours, sometimes heavy enough to make hiking impossible, and fog cut the visibility down. So the hikes were off. Instead we drove about an hour to the Geothermal Exhibition, inside the Hellisheidi power plant near Mount Hengill. We had tried the week before but got there too late, as it was closing. This time we made it.
The Golden Circle is the most traveled route in Iceland, three stops that most visitors do in a single looping day from Reykjavik: Þingvellir, the geysers, and Gullfoss. We had already spent two days at Þingvellir, covered in an earlier post, so today was the other two, taken slowly and with a few detours the tour buses do not make. The thread running through all of it turned out to be water and heat, the same two forces in different arrangements: boiling out of the ground at Haukadalur, falling through a canyon at Gullfoss, carving rock at Brúarhlöð, and finally growing tomatoes under glass at the end of the day. What follows is the day stop by stop.
Every version of a day like this one ends with a tidy sentence about dropping back onto the truck for the run out of the highlands. This is what happened between that sentence and the truck actually moving.
On the way out, I rode the driver’s side front wheel on a soft patch and dropped into it, almost burying the wheel. I am the only one to blame for not picking the correct path. The front differential went in deep, packed into a mix of rock, mud, and ice, and the whole truck tilted over far enough to make us uneasy. The other three wheels were more or less free, but not enough grip to drag the buried corner back out.
The plan for the day was simple: get inside a glacier. Iceland’s second largest ice cap sits a few hours north of Þingvellir, and drilled into it is the largest man made ice tunnel in the world. Reaching it meant a highland F-road to a base camp at the edge of the ice, where Carioca would wait while a glacier truck carried us the rest of the way, since no ordinary vehicle goes onto the ice itself. The tunnel was the objective. Everything else was the way there.
The name comes apart into two Old Norse words: þing, meaning assembly, and vellir, meaning fields. Assembly fields. The same root gives English its “thing,” which once meant a gathering before it came to mean an object, and it survives in place names across the old Norse world, Tynwald on the Isle of Man, Dingwall in Scotland, Tingwall in Shetland. Anglicized, it becomes Thingvellir, which is how most signage and most visitors render it. Both spellings point at the same ground.
Þingvellir National Park lies about 28 miles northeast of Reykjavik, in the southwest of Iceland, spread along the northern shore of Þingvallavatn where roads 36, 361, and 52 meet.
Two things happened on this ground, and they are not related in any way a geologist or a historian would accept. The crust pulled apart here, dropped a block of land between two faults, and left a valley with a wall on either side. Nine thousand years later, a people who had crossed the ocean to escape a king needed somewhere to meet and agree on laws, and they picked the valley. The rock did not intend the parliament. The parliament did not know the rock was still sinking beneath it. But the site works as it does because of what it is: the wall carried a speaker’s voice, the plain held the crowds, the river fed them. And the ground kept dropping the whole time, nearly thirteen feet since the first assembly convened. Both stories have to be told, and neither explains the other. That is what makes the place worth two days.
We woke to rain at the campsite, with the forecast calling for it on and off through the whole day. There was no chore on board that actually needed doing, and there is no such thing as bad weather for people living in a truck, only the wrong clothes for it, so we put on our warmest and driest layers and walked out into the park anyway.
