The Golden Circle

(Wrote this yesterday on the bus back from the south coast, uploading it while at the airport, waiting for my flight to Glasgow).

Day 3 in Iceland was mostly spent outside of Reykjavik, on a tour to some of Iceland's biggest natural

landmarks on what they call 'The Golden Circle."

My day started as all the others in Reykjavik did: with coffee in the lobby of my hostel. One detail I

don't think I've mentioned is that there's a HUGE tour group of French high school students staying in the hostel on holiday. I remember band trips in high school and the troubles that a half dozen chaperones had controlling us in a hotel, I can't imagine what it'd be like for TWO chaperones managing 40 kids in a hostel with a bar on the first floor. Every day while I drank coffee and waited for tours, I was surrounded by high schoolers chattering in French, while the two teachers pulled their hair out trying to keep everything in line. Anyway, today I sprung for the breakfast at the hostel while waiting for my tour pickup, and got to try Skyr (a thicker, creamier Icelandic version of Greek yogurt) for the first time.

Mountains on the mid-Atlantic ridge.

My tour guide and driver Addya picked me up around 8:30, and once all the tourers had been picked up, the first stop was in her hometown of Hengill to grab some snacks from a bakery. To get there though, we had to cross the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, one of several places in Iceland where the meeting of the American and European plates has some dramatic effect on the landscape. More on that later, but the bottom line here was that we crossed through some very pretty mountains.

On the way into town she had also explained something I thought was funny: this part of Iceland grows a TON of tropical fruit. During the last Ice Age, the glaciers coverying the highlands in Iceland were so heavy that the weight actually pushed the island down so much that the lowlands flooded and became seafloor. The result is that when the glaciers retreated and the lowlands resurfaced, the landscape was flat as a pancake and the soil was super fertile. The area is also a geothermal hotspot, so locals took advantage of the combination of the two and built giant steam-heated greenhouses that grow a lot of things you don't normally see this far north (like tomatos, coffee, chocolate, mangos, and bananas). I'd seen a lot of Icelandic chocolate around town and didn't think much of it, as I just thought it was branding for souvenir shops. Apparently not! The effect on the landscape is pretty dramatic too, though not in a way you can really capture in a photo. Basically when we crested the mountains, everything in front of us was suddenly over 50 feet below where it had been and completely FLAT.

In town we stocked up on snacks and drinks and such. There was also an exhibit on a major

I'd already eaten, but this voffla was calling my name. It made
for a good mid-tour snack

earthquake that hit the area a few years ago, but I just talked to Addya instead. I was curious about what living in a country this expensive was like, so I asked her about the cost of living around here. She said she, her husband, and her two kids lived in a house about a half-hour from Reykjavik that cost the equivalent of a little under $2000 a month. There's not many apartment complexes here due to the extra dangers of tall buildings in an earthquake-prone area, but if you can find one, then the prices are about on-par with Seattle (a 1BR will run you ~$1k in the suburbs, ~$1.5-2.5k in central Reykjavik).

Back on the road, our first stop was Faxifoss ('Horse's Mane Falls'), a minor waterfall near sheep country. There was also a giant sheep pen off to the side, that Addya said the farmers used for separating each other's sheep from each other. During the spring, they herd the sheep up into the highlands to graze, but don't bother trying to keep all the herds separate. When it starts getting cold again, they herd them back down to the lowlands in batches and use pens like this to separate the different flocks.

For sorting sheepies. The pen, not the van.

Up next was Gullfoss ('the Golden Falls'), the first of the three sites that make up the Golden Circle. It's a massive two-stage waterfall that thunders through the volcanic landscape quite dramatically, with the river forming a deep canyon through the basalt after the falls. Since it's still right on the

Gullfoss from above. It was cool seeing the melting snow starting to
fall into the river.

border of winter and spring here there was still some snow on the ground, though it was all in the process of melting and falling into the river in giant icy chunks that were just barely hanging on the edge of the cliffs. That made for some cool shapes and dramatic photos, so I was quite happy. I walked down the trail and got a view from the middle-tier of the falls, which had a great view down the canyon and was totally worth the muddy shoes and damp hair. After that I walked up to the top tier for a view of the falls in context of the surrounding landscape (which was lovely), a bowl of lamb stew from the cafe at the falls (which was unsurpingly mediocre), and some more Skyr (which was at least tastier than the room temp, unsweetened Skyr at the hostel).

The first of a series of unsurprisingly mediocre meals. Most of the great sights in Iceland are out in the middle of NOWHERE, so normally the cafe attached to the gift shop is the only option for lunch when you're out seeing them.

Next stop on the trip was Geysir National Park, which is the second major stop of the Circle and is

This is the actual Geysir geyser. It only erupts every few years or so,
but thankfully it's younger brother Strokkur goes off every few minutes.

where the word 'geyser' originally came from. Its namesake geyser (the Geysir geyser, which is a lot of fun to say), is the second biggest in the world, but only goes off after major earthquakes or eruptions. The one I posted a video of earlier is Strokkur, which is much smaller but goes off every ~3-7 minutes. I got some lovely photos of the springs and geysir (both of which kept fogging up my glasses), and got a noseful of sulfur, which really made me crave some hard boiled eggs. The geyser was obviously the coolest part, but I also loved Litli-Geysir, a tiny little hotpot that was bubbling away more furiously than anything else at the park. I made a round through the gift shop while waiting on others at the bus, and saw a really nice looking Icelandic wool blanket. I figured why not and went to buy it, but got stuck behind a group of Chinese tourists who were trying to get an explanation of the VAT tax-refund system. By the time they finished and I was checked out, I was one of the LAST ones on the bus. Ah well, it's cool and fuzzy and they weren't going to leave me, so I call it worth it.

STROKKUR. Every time I hear that name I feel like you need to yell it in an angry Nordic accent.

The last stop of the day (and last site on the circle) was a place with an Iceldandic name that uses a couple non-latin characters, but it looks like 'Pinglliver' and is pronounced 'Thing-kli-vir.' Originally, it was an interesting enough site thanks to it being another of the places of the European and American plates, giving it an alien landscape of mountains, rivers, cliffs, lakes, and rifts. The historical significance of it though is that it's the place of the first Parliament in Europe. About 50-100 years after arriving, the Viking settlers realized that if Iceland was to be a proper country, then there needed to be codified set of laws governing it. The 'government' at the time was semi-feudal,

Part of the rift formed by the meeting of the tectonic plates.

with clans ruling over different sections of the country. The heads of each clan acted as police, judges, and mediators over their territories, but the laws they enforced were decided upon when all the clan heads met once a year at Pinglliver to decide on new laws and carry out judgments on lawbreakers from the past year (usually being lashings, temporary exile, permanent exile, or beheading). At this point, writing still wasn't very widespread, so one clan's chieftan was elected as The Law Speaker, who was tasked with memorizing all the laws of the land for that year. He would stand in front of the cliffs (which acted as an impromptu megaphone) and read them out to the assembly (which, seeing as the annual Parliament was also the big social event of the year as well, was actually most of the population of the country) so they knew their rights and laws. To accommodate the water needs of the crowds, they diverted a river over the cliff of the continental divide. This created a waterfall that fed a river through the area, as well as a tiny island in the river. This island was used as the site for executions so that the blood and gore could wash away down the river, which gave the waterfall a simultaneously brutal and punny name, Axefoss ("The Ax Falls").

The Law Speaker would stand where that flag was when addressing the assembled masses.
Incidentally, this was the first actual flag I'd seen flying in Iceland. Not even Parliament or the
Prime Minister's office were flying one. 

The area itself was gorgeous as well. The lake was filled from runoff from a nearby glacier that filtered through the porous volcanic rock (taking up to 80 years to reach the lake in some places), meaning the water is startlingly clear. Visibility when swimming in the lake is almost 500 feet, making it one of the best places to scuba dive in the world. Since the water averages between 33-35 degrees Fahrenheit year round, I skipped that opportunity (And, you know, because I don't know how to scuba dive :P) But it was still cool to see. One portion of the lake is used as a wishing well, so the bottom is lined with coins. The guide said that it's over 30 feet deep, but even still you could almost read the denominations on the coins at the bottom. The continental divide made for some really dramatic cliffs, and there was a section of the fault line that looked like a gorge that could close up on you at any minute.

According to Addy, despite being crystal clear these coins are sitting on the floor of the lake 9 meters down.
I wouldn't have believed it until I dropped a coin in and watched how long it took to hit the bottom.

That being the last stop, we headed back into the city. I put my feet up and sorted photos for a bit, then went out looking for dinner. One of my roommates, Jenn from Ireland, joined me in walking around looking for food and we swapped travel stories for a bit. She's from Ireland originally, but lives in Madrid and works as a freelancer for a Belgian company (#Europe), but has lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore as well. She pointed me to a restaurant some of her friends had enjoyed earlier in the trip (a pub named 'The Sweet Pig' in Icelandic), then went off to grab some food from the grocery store (she was on a tight budget, this being her last night of 10 in Reykjavik). I got a beer and some food (covered later), then wandered home and drifted off to sleep after getting another blog post up.