Drove the Golden Circle today, which is SE of Reykjavík. The first stop was Þingvellir, a natural park that was made a Unesco World Heritage site in 2004. The Vikings established the world's first democratic parliament here in AD 930. The area has a very large fissure-ridden valley, caused by the separation of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates.
Geysir was the next stop (after lattes to warm us up)! This was the original hot water spout after which all the other geysers in the world are named. Every 5 - 10 minutes the water rises 15 - 30 meters, then disappears into what seems to be an enormous hole. The crowd waiting patiently around it with cameras posed would gasp with delight whenever this occurred.
After that was Gullfoss, Iceland's most famous waterfall. It drops 32m and has a double cascade. On sunny days it creates rainbows, and we managed to get one in the photo, as the sun peeked out for a few minutes.
Our last stop on the route was Kerið. This is a green lake in the middle of a crater, which was formed by a 6500 year old explosion. Apparently Björk performed a concert from a floating raft in the middle of the lake. When you first approach it, the site takes your breath away!
Our weather has been cool (temperature range 9 - 13 degrees) with intermittent rain, but I hear we've been lucky. This year Iceland has had the most rain reported since the 1880's!
We've been staying the past few nights at a good B&B that is located in a great spot because it's allowed us to walk everywhere we wanted to go. Although they don't provide breakfast, we've had full use of the kitchen, much like a hostel, and that has saved us some money. We thought that England was expensive, but Iceland is more so. The other guests are friendly, but for the most part they have been the super hiker types that have gone on multi-day hikes in the rain, and one even ran a marathon in difficult terrain. Needless to say, we felt a bit out of place in the company of such folks.
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