The K has come round very quickly and other contenders for this letter included the Krafla power station, the imminent eruption of Katla and the explosion crater Kerið before settling on the Kjölur route.
There are a handful of roads running across Iceland’s Interior, also known sometimes as its Highlands. It’s a very wild area, very remote, very inhospitable, the bit where no one lives because it’s just not possible to live here. Those Interior roads are closed for a huge chunk of the year – the road to Landmannalaugar, a very touristy road by Interior standards, one which really barely scrapes the edges of the Interior, doesn’t open until late June and closes again by late August, mid-September at the very latest if the weather’s really good. The snow in itself is enough to make the roads up there unpassable; the storms that ravage the region can be spectacular. And the Kjölur route is not in any way the Landmannalaugar road.
The yellow bit on this map is the Kjölur route – at least, the bits between the yellow markers are. It starts at Gullfoss, which is where the Golden Circle meets the very edge of the Interior. It winds its way up between the Langjökull and Hofsjökull glaciers – Langjökull is the one you can see from Gullfoss – and it emerges an hour or so east of Akureyri. It’s the route the Iceland On Your Own buses take on the Highland Circle passport – they take you from Reykjavik to Skaftafell, then back up to Landmannalaugar, across the Sprengisandur route and up to Myvatn, back to Akureyri and then to Reykjavik via the Kjölur route. I’ve drawn the rest of the Highland Circle route on my map in blue (except the Sprengisadur, which is pink). That’s how I came to cross both those Interior routes, in a crowded tour bus.
The Sprengisandur route is the one to the east, a truly desolate road that covers nothing but black volcanic desert. The Kjölur route is a motorway in comparison. I hadn’t really eaten for a couple of days before heading north up the Sprengisandur so I spent that day – oh yes, day, it leaves Landmannalaugar at 9.30am and ends up in Myvatn at 7.30pm – feeling kind of unwell. The Kjölur bus is marginally faster; it leaves Akureyri at 8am and finally gets in to Reykjavik at 6.30pm after stops at Hveravellir, Gullfoss and Geysir.
Which makes it an interesting route – you get to see a lot of the Interior and you also get two-thirds of the Golden Circle thrown in. I’ve covered Gullfoss and Geysir before, they’re standard tourist stops and very well worth doing but I haven’t told you about Hveravellir yet.
Hveravellir is a little oasis beneath Langjökull, home to a small hut and campsite – and a hot spring. Of course there’s a hot spring, the name Hveravellir means the hot spring field (hver = hot spring, vellir = field, as in Þingvellir, or as in airfield, flugvellir). The Vikings knew about this hot spring but it wasn’t until the 1950s or 60s that it was dammed and turned into a bathable pool. I wasn’t there long (all the way back in 2013!) so I haven’t inspected it closely. If I’d known about it, I might have built a 24 hour break into that bus journey to appreciate the spring and the remote setting. It looks like a nice spring, its cold water supplier from a hose so the natural temperature of the water doesn’t take your skin off, a little deeper than the spring at Landmannalaugar and big enough to comfortably seat at least a dozen.
Beside the facilities is the hot spring area that provides the hot water; a field of blistered yellow earth, screaming steaming piles of rocks, bubbling mud patches. The usual at a hot springs area, really, but special because of how remote it is. The remote ones are usually smaller, in my limited experience. We only had half an hour off the bus so I probably charged around like a bull in a china shop trying to see everything, including another hidey-hole belonging to 18th century outlaw murderer Fjalla-Eyvindur, who also had a cave at Hvannalindir, on the way to Askja. Outlaws were sent into the Interior and if they survived out there for twenty years, they could be pardoned. I don’t think any outlaw survived as long or became as famous as Eyvindur. There was another outlaw at Hveravellir, Magnús, but according to legend, he got hungry and gave in after just three weeks on the run.
Our other stop along the Kjölur road was at Kerlingarfjöll, another campsite, this time beneath a mountain rather than a glacier. It has a little collection of red and green triangular huts and judging from the photos on Google Maps, at least one of the huts is more like a relatively luxurious mountain hotel. Kerlingarfjöll also has a hot spring area, although I can’t find anything bathable right now. This is more the wild sort of hot area, a bit like the one above Landmannalaugar, steaming patches of Earth sprinkled liberally over the hillsides, producing dramatic vistas of steam on lingering snow. Again, no time to explore properly but it’s going on my list for another time.
A couple more hours of mountains and bad roads and at last we bumped into the tarmac just north of Gullfoss. It’s still a long drive back to Reykjavík, not to mention the half-hour stops here and down the glorious smooth road at Geysir but it felt like home.