Embers and Meltwater: Bjarni og Landmannalaugar I

Bjarni og Landmannalaugar, I

First comes last
When I found myself getting behind on writing blog entries, I shrugged, I wasn't in Iceland to keep a diary. I've gone on dozens of trips and never kept a diary and on some I took very few or no photographs. This travelogue writing was all new, and I thought Iceland was just too important an adventure not to keep a travelogue about it. But what's a promise you make to yourself? Exactly. While traveling, I got behind and behinder and not fusst and less fusst about keeping up.

This is a brilliant idea!

Write this particular travelogue post the very last, as it was about my first big excursion into the hinterland of Iceland. To Landmannalaugar!

Landmannalaugar was also the very last I got bookt on, and I was already in Iceland by then. After months of patiently waiting on a waiting list and then anxiously waiting on a waiting list and then in despair on a waiting list and then morbidly depresst on a waiting list and then wallowing in self-pity about why was I even here in Iceland now on a waiting list and then wanting to get totally wasted on beer except I couldn't afford the beer well I could afford it but where in hell does one spend $10 on a bottle of beer? The expensive beer put all things into perspective. There's no solace in a $10 beer. None. I found that I wasn't that upset about not being bookt yet after all. Jeez. 1000 krónur bjór.

Adventure companies won't commit to any tour without their having a minimum of two persons, and I found this the biggest drawback for someone travelling alone. But it makes sense: can you imagine the horror being stuck in a jeep for hours with an insane inane tourist talking incessantly & unceasingly? The guide might lose it! get lost! disappear! on purpose! South Iceland Adventures simply cannot take that chance, with their staff OR with me. Did I take my Lonely Planet guide to Iceland much too literally? Book flights and accommodations and rental cars early! Ok, that done and dusted in January. But booking excursions? Not going to happen. No one else on the planet was thinking about Iceland in the middle of winter.

Then, Sunday night, Bríet Rún sends a brief email, there's an opening in two days, for Tuesday, shall we book it? Yes! After five months now, I'm also on a first-name basis with the entire staff at South Iceland Adventures. Well, everybody's a first-name basis with anybody in Iceland. The point is that everyone on staff knew who I was.

Happy birthday, Bríet Rún! I arrive Tuesday morning and there's a major birthday cake to celebrate it. I, eh, go straight for the coffee. There's enough of us signed up that day for there to be two jeeps going to Landmannalaugar! Bjarni is the guide I'm assigned to and there are five of us in his jeep. We get going and head north northeast into the interior, eventually on the Landvegur 26 and we find the "F" road that will take us east into the frontier, the unexplored Iceland, where no tourist should go alone....

[...pic...]

Já.is
I'll pause to add here a note about the online Iceland map Já.is which really helpt this traveloguing possible. I've been able to retrace where I've been and make corrections on other posts and add place names I didn't remember. Without Já.is, I'd'n't've ever been able to properly describe the Landmannalaugar adventure or any others! Takk.

F roads
A quick stop to let some of the air out of the meter-diameter tires and then we're off road on an "F" road. (1 the ride's less bumpy and 2 if there's a lot of air in the tires, we might float downstream when we ford a river.) "F" numbered roads are mountain ("fjall") roads into the interior of Iceland, where for the better part of the year, they are closed, inaccessible by any vehicle, the roads are under hundreds of meters of winter snow and ice. Then suddenly one day in early June, the snow and ice just vanish, gone, and excursions like this one are possible. "F" roads are not paved, and never will be. "F" roads have no bridges and never will.
I'm making an assumption that the "F" means "fjall", but I've come up with some other "F" words that are eh, descriptive.

4X4 vehicles are the only vehicles that can successfully drive on an "F" road. Not just over unbridged rivers, but the roads are one-lane and the shoulders seem a meter high. You could never pull over. Even 4x4s have trouble head-on with jeeps.
Fords (vöð og vatnasull?) are the only places to cross rivers safely. These unbridged river crossings change day to day, where they are, how safe, how deep, how fast. We leave all that decision-making to the guide who has guidelines: drive an up-stream angle; drive over where wide not narrow, don't change gears....
Forlorn. Intelligent drivers have left their smaller 4x4s at the bank of the river they know they cannot cross; either they don't know how or they know the vehicle won't make it. I saw dozens of forlorn 4x4s. There's been lots of rain. (There are buses making regular stops though, so one's not stranded and going nowhere.)
Floaters. A non-4x4 rental car will float downstream attempting to ford a river. You're downstream without a paddle.
Fearless. The driver must appear fearless fording a river, show gravitas, and keep the tourists excited this-is-wicked and not panickt o-hell-we're-gonna-die.
Fearful. The driver must be fearful for the safety of his passengers. Fear is under-rated; with it, expect intelligent decisions and no recklessness.
Fuck. It's ok to belt out "fuck yeah" after a successful more-difficult crossing. It's ok to mutter "oh fuck" if you're not gonna make it.

Jakob Hürner/CC flickr

Unbridged
So... the way there. Plug in Landmannalaugar into the GPS and drive. To be fair, I don't believe Bjarni lookt at the GPS screen once. Writing this, I thought I'd try to find the way using a Já.is map, but there were too many grey dashed lines in the hinterlands indicating "F" roads, all crisscrossing each other, ah, but one road had a determined east-bound look to it, was named Landmannleið F225, and ended exactly at Landmannalaugar, AND, when I plugged in where I thought we started and askt directions for Landmannalaugar, here's the Já.is map. Hmmm. It says it's a 52 minute drive to Landmannalaugar. WOW. That's EXACTLY how long it look to get there, 52 minutes! I'd found it! the route we took!

Richard Jones/CC flickr

Not all F208 to Landmannalaugar was at all impossible, just unpaved;
it's just when it came to unbridged rivers...

If you zoom in on the map, and follow the route, you'll see that there are at least six unbridged crossings from A to B. Each was over a rapid stream, a grey stone and gravel washout on either side, a ramp of sorts down and then up on the other side. Each was different though, deeper, shallower, bumpier than hell, smooth as tarmac, and after crossing one, I'd soon enough forget how we did it, how Bjarni did it, I mean, and except to watch and see if all those guidelines were true, they seemed to be, and to listen for any mutter of "oh fuck" which I never did hear. I was never unsure whether I was doing my part, which was always to be 100% "hell yeah" and with enough practice, I could've been 100% "fuck yeah". Me learning how to unbridge a ford? me behind the wheel? happily, that's not going to happen.

Robban Anderson/CC flickr

Pause

At Landmannalaugar, 52 minutes later, it's a base camp in the Jökulgilskvísl river valley. There are dozens of tents, a camping hut for 75, proper WCs and showers, picnic tables, lots of 4X4s in the parking lot, even a few buses from Reykjavík. Base camp for the 4-day Laugarvegur hike south to Þorsmörk. Varuð. Click that link and you'll spend the next four hours planning your next adventure.