We leave Iceland tomorrow. We came off the ferry on the twelfth of June, sixty two days ago.

Sixty two days is a long time to spend in one single country, and we saw a great deal of it. As a reference, the average tourist stay in Iceland during the peak summer months is around 10 days. We did not see all of it but we saw a lot of it. Iceland is about forty thousand square miles, the size of Kentucky, and it holds countless number of waterfalls, and canyons, calderas, tuyas, lava fields, ice caps, fjords, small towns, historical places and black beaches. A few easily accessed by the ring road but the vast majority only reachable by 4WD dirt roads and the most remote ones located deep in the highlands and only accessed by F roads or even smaller tracks. That is not enough time to reach them all. There were things we did not do. We never made it to Mælifell for instance, the green cone on the black sand near Mýrdalsjökull that next to Askja on our list. We leave it for another time when we can come back and concentrate exclusively on the highlands remote areas.

We got a perfect day to visit our last destination in the highlands: Askja Volcano

Askja erupted on the twenty ninth of March 1875 and threw ash across the whole east of Iceland.

It rained all the eighth and it did not stop once, so a hike would have been wet and cold and not worth doing.

The camper needed nothing, so there was nothing to clean and nothing to fix, and we rested. It was a welcome rest.

The ninth looked no better on paper, but we went anyway. The plan was two waterfalls in the highlands, Aldeyjarfoss and Hrafnabjargafoss.

We woke near Djúpivogur. The weather was the same as the night before. Low cloud, wet air, and rain on and off. Nothing had cleared. The forecast was not good for the day either.

So we had two choices. Stay where we were and wait. Or drive the rest of the East Fjords and take them as they came.

We decided to drive. There are a few places down here we still want to see properly. Moving north put us closer to the roads into the highlands, and that seemed like a better use of a wet day.

We left the campground at the national park on a very wet day. The rain was steady, but there was one stop we wanted to do before moving on, so we drove the short way to Svínafellsjökull.

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.

The next day we came back to our own route, and the first thing on it was Jökulsárlón again. This time we did it differently. Instead of the main car park by the bridge, we drove to a parking area further east, one that most tourists never use. There is a network of trails out here on the sand, and one of them runs all the way from the glacier in the national park down to Diamond Beach, about seventeen kilometres end to end. We did not do the whole thing. We walked a little over two kilometres of it, out to a quiet stretch of the lagoon.

We camped that night at Stokksnes with the German family, out on the peninsula under the mountain, and spent the next morning there with them.

We left the campground at the national park and drove east toward Jökulsárlón, the glacier lagoon. On the way the size of the icecap began to show itself. Glacier tongues came down out of the mountains one after another, reaching from the high ice out onto the plain, and you started to feel how much of Vatnajökull there is behind them. The day was clear and bright.

For most of Iceland’s history this stretch of the south coast was among the hardest parts of the country to reach by land, sealed off less by mountains than by the meltwater draining off the ice above it. The rivers crossing the plain changed course too often for a bridge to hold, and the terrain shaped by that instability, sand flats, braided channels, glacier tongues reaching down to meet them, still defines the walk above Skaftafell.