Sometimes it’s fun to raise the threat level, just to feel the blood rushing through your veins as you wonder whether this is the greatest plan you’ve ever had. Was it a good idea to scramble down the cliff to the edge of the water? After all, we were three miles away from the nearest farm and it was some time after midnight. We’d had to walk all the way from that farm because a mountain route led here, and you can only drive on those challenging F roads in a four wheel drive vehicle. In fact we’d been walking barely five or ten minutes before we could see that Brian, our trusty yellow VW camper for the week would have disappeared down the very first pothole we came across. It looked more like a brontosaurus print than anything else. A brontosaurus that had been practising for the Dinolympics triple jump final for that matter. In lead lined hobnail boots. Concerned about the potholes at the end of your road? Try driving here and see whether you’re still that bothered. The brontosaurus obviously wasn’t.
After forty minutes or so of route marching along the rock strewn track that calls itself the F26 road, an unseen watery crescendo gradually building as we got closer, we arrived at the lonely outpost of Aldeyjarfoss. From here, you could continue your journey south for more than two hundred kilometres, across what must be some of the most remote and hostile terrain in Europe before finding yourself on a tarmac road again. Maybe one day - if somebody else is doing the driving that is. For now we were happy enough to be here, further from civilisation than ever before, and when civilisation consists of a couple of farms somewhere back down a long gravel road, and a gift shop and café more than forty kilometres away at Goðafoss, that makes you feel even more alone. You really wouldn’t want to have any mishaps out here in the middle of the night when there’s nobody else about. To be honest, even if a party of synchronised swimmers happened to be nearby, armed with scuba gear, rubber rings and an industrial size fishing net, they’d still only be watching you gasping your last frozen breaths as the icy river whisked you away down the canyon.
So of course we clambered down to the bubbling surface of the cauldron. After all, it didn’t look too sketchy, and as long as we kept away from any edges, we’d be just fine. And if there were any unfortunate incidents, what a spectacular way to wave the world farewell, floating out of that beautiful bowl, with its cathedral like basalt columns and that ever boiling centre at the bottom of the fall. And by the time we’d carefully picked our way over the rocks and arrived at the bottom, there was no denying that it had been worth the effort. I’m not sure what was more spectacular, the sight of all that furious water, or the thundering sound that filled our ears until it spilled back out of them and into the world again. It was those online pictures of the view from above that had caught my imagination and caused me to chase across the subarctic landscape of Northern Iceland to this place, but the sense of wonder that came from being down at the water's edge, so close to the action, was something else again. Standing here, mesmerised by the endless pouring of patterns onto the surface of the raging cauldron isn’t something easily forgotten, and neither is the acute awareness that you’re a long long way from anything that bears the stamp of humanity. In most places during our visit, other people were never very far away, even when our images pretended otherwise. And even if there were nobody around those other places, there were car parks, rubbish bins, electricity pylons, or road signs. Here in a world apart from the one we all know, things were different. We might as well have been on another planet.
Four years later, Aldeyjarfoss remains a stark and lonely highlight of that first trip to Iceland. If it hadn’t existed, or even if it had been a few miles further along that heavily rutted mountain road where brontosauruses once roamed, we’d have never come this far. We’d have missed Goðafoss and the Whale Watching trip out of Húsavík the following morning. So despite the extra miles and a particularly long and tiresome slog to the south east corner the next day as a result of coming here, what a good job Aldeyjarfoss is exactly where it is. Far away enough to make getting there an adventure, but not impossible to reach without a tractor on steroids. And most of all, it leaves me wanting more. On our second trip we touched the opposite end of the F26 road on our outing around Háifoss and Þjófafoss, and now I’m hungry to explore the bit in the middle. Time to start saving up the funds to hire that tractor I think.
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