We decided on taking the afternoon tour so that we could sleep in. At 12pm the minibus collected us, a few others from around the city, and headed off towards the first stop - Þingvellir the site of Iceland’s original parliamentary meetings and inside the national park. While the temperature in Iceland hovered around 4 degrees for our time there, the wind chill factor was extreme. Our guide dropped us off at the top of a walking path and agreed to meet us down the hill. While the landscape was stunning, Timon and I walked very fast to the pickup place just to escape the cold. We paused briefly for some photos because it was impossible to ignore the volcanic rocks, mossy crags and frozen waterfall. Another significant aspect to this area was the meeting of the American and Eurasian tectonic plates. I’m not 100% sure what this means except that every year the fault line separates by 2cm and the gap is filled in with lava like material. It seems that Iceland was created, and continues to expand, through this shifting of the plates. The guide explained that the island is mirrored, and that a mountain on the west coast could be matched exactly to a mountain on the east coast, as they had once been the same mountain. Pretty crazy cool stuff.
We drove another 40 minutes to Gulfoss waterfall. The wind was so powerful that it prevented the bus door from opening. I had to hold down my beanie (oh yeah, I found my original beanie in my suitcase – yay!) with both hands whilst trying to shield my eyes from the gale. Even walking was difficult. Timon and I decided to skip the slippery path down to the base of the waterfall and instead climbed up to a viewing platform. The icicles on the milky water looked like wax and hopefully our photos do the scene justice. While it was hard to even look at under the weather conditions, it was a spectacular view. The third stop on the tour was the geysers. There is only 1 active geyser in the area and it was called Strokkus. We walked through the field of bubbling, boiling pools of water, thinking, despite signs indicating temperatures of 80-100 degrees, that it would be nice to jump in and warm up a little. We skidded around on icy paths and waited with freezing fingers poised over cameras until Strokkus exploded in a pillar of boiling water. Very cool. We also took a quick tour through the multimedia centre where there was looped footage of the geyser and a small display of Icelandic stuffed animals.
On the way back to Reykjavik, our guide stopped so we could pat some Icelandic horses. These horses are very special as they’ve been bred in isolation over thousands of years, and any horse that leaves Iceland may never return. Sounds quite dramatic right? I was expecting giant Viking beasts but really they were quite tiny and fluffy. T & I tried to pat them but as we had no food they weren’t much interested.
Even though we were pooped when we got back to the hostel we booked into the Northern Lights tour at 7.30pm. This involved another couple of bus rides and alternating between sitting in the warm bus and freezing our butts off outside in a parking lot while we stared up at the night sky. This tour was a bit of a bust as the lights were nowhere near as colourful and glorious as the postcards depict. But to be fair, nature is unpredictable and you have to take what you can get. There was a brief moment of awesomeness at about the 2 hour mark, but after 4 hours we were so ready to go home. The tour guide was a funny dude and he told us Icelandic troll stories all the way home.
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