The last view a plateau before opening up to the vast open view of Vatnajökull.
In my opinion, the most beautiful part of Iceland is the south-eastern coast. Having been driving for a few hours along the south-western coasts from Reykjavik, you are often flanked by mountains to your left and the artic ocean to your right. In fact, you don’t really get to see how vast Iceland really is. That changes almost instantaneously as you are driving along the ring road, where the view suddenly opens up to a vast open area of Skeiðarár Sandur, a wide plain of black volcanic sand marbled with creeks of run-off from the Skeiðarárjökull glacier, an outlet glacier of Vatnajökull. You also get to enjoy this view as you drive along on a rather straight road, though there are a view spots to stop to grab some pictures. In fact, a few hundreds of years ago, the road that we were travelling on was exactly where the glacier stood.
All that remains of Skeiðará Bridge - two girders
The next must stop area is as you turn to face north along the ring road - Skeiðará Bridge Monument. This is the remains of what used to be the longest bridge in Iceland that succumbed to the floods of melted glacier water during the 1996 Vatnajökull eruption (Yes the glacier is sitting on top of a volcano and hence the phrase ‘fire and ice’). This is a testiment to just how powerful Mother Nature is. In fact, the bridge was made to withstand 9000kg/sec flow rate of water and being engineers, they probably factored in an additional reserve factor that would increase the tolerance by 1.5-2x and yet it still collapsed under the might of the runoff water. Isn’t that just mind boggling crazy how powerful nature can be. Coming from and growing up in a city which does not experience any natural disaster, I found this to be truly amazing. You can also get some epic panoramic shot of the ice cap here.
From left to right: Skaftafellsjökull, Svínafellsjökull, Öræfajökull
Just a short 10 minutes drive after, you will finally arrive at Skaftafell National Park. Don’t forget to remember your license plate number to pay for parking, which you must pay if you intend to stay for more than 10 minutes. They have an automatic capture system at the entrance to determine if you have paid for parking.