Road to the highlands

Our next plan is to move to Hrauneyjar in highlands and to see a few waterfalls before we get there.

This is river Þjórsá, Iceland's longest river. Mountain in the clouds should be volcano Hekla.
This photo was taken from our first off-road and 4WD experiment. Well, to be completelly honest with you, it was neither off-road nor 4WD. But that side road looked terrible enough that we would not dare to go there with smaller car :-) Small baby steps to gain confidence ;-)

Our reliable car waited us while we took pictures of alleged Hekla.

Hjálparfoss

Nice small waterfall Hjálparfoss of river Fossá, surrounded by basalts and lava formations. It is only short detour from main road. One might wonder which stream has cold and which hot water :-)

Gjáin

Gjáin is very nice valley full of small trees, twisted lava formations and small waterfalls. Finally some possibility to get out of car and walk kilometer or two.

We kept eye open for route to waterfall Háifoss, but without any luck. Probably because it looks like it is close only on road maps and other non-walking maps.

Shorly before reaching Gjáin. Left side of dusty road. Nice contrast to an oasis we arrived soon.

In order to get to Gjáin you need either to use walking bridge or just cross laughable stream. But it never looks like that for the first time :-)

Gjáinfoss at the end of valley (at least we did not cross stream and headed back).

Highlands

It about 8pm when we get to highlands. It is cloudy again and being in desert does not ask for many photos. Better say, a few of them are sufficient.

We arrived to Hrauneyjar, settled in and went for short drive to see what we can expect tomorrow (only 1 week ago road F208 to Landmannalaugar was closed, so we are interested how it looks like).

There will be more photos next time.