The sleep in the hotel room was a lot better than in the car. On this third day in Iceland, I still didn’t have any concrete plans. I continued on the Golden Circle and went to Gullfoss, a big big waterfall. This site, being on the Golden Circle, which is a popular route of three famous tourist spots, was full of tourists being delivered by the busload.
Seeing all the photo-taking, I wondered, “Are we experiencing, or busy Instagramming?”. It seems the first reaction of seeing something incredible was “I have to take a picture of this!”, and it wasn’t much different with me. It’s a weird human instinct of trying to store things on the camera/phone memory, for future reference, instead of using our eyes and other senses to record the sensation.
After Gullfoss, the Golden Circle route goes south, so you turn left after leaving the car park. Here I thought, “I wonder what’s down the road to the right?”, so I turned right, and followed the road into the interior of the island. At that point I felt I was on an adventure; rather than knowing where I was going, I didn’t. The road streched across the vast empty landscape in front of me. After a while, even the paved road ended, and I was driving on gravel. I noticed that I would pass a huge glacier - Langjökull, the second largest in Iceland - on my left. When I saw a left turn, I decided to take it and see how close I can get to it. After a while I caught up to a small Kia hatchback. I was driving a 4 wheel drive on a very rough gravel road; I wondered if this car would make it on this road.
At the end of this road, there was a cabin which was a base for a glacier expedition, with some trucks and minibuses with giant tyres parked outside. The Kia parked near me, and a man with hiking gear came out of it. He was going to do a 2-3 day expedition up the mountain in front of us.
There was a minibus with giant tyres taking tourists onto the glacier, but this kind of adventure didn’t really interest me. After a while I drove back to the main road and back down south, taking a lot more pictures of the desolate scenery along the way.
I found a gas station with a store and had some lunch. After all the driving I was tired yet again, so I took a nap in the car.