Exploring the Golden Circle

Well it was definitely difficult to wake up this morning at 7 after last nights excitement, but we had our tour of the Golden Circle this morning and it didn’t disappoint. Our driver today was Rebecca, an Italian national who left her job at a Michelin restaurant in Bologna after they wouldn’t let her take off 4 days to go to a wedding. She went on skyscanner and the cheapest place she could go was Iceland. She fell in love with the place and now is a tour guide of 2 years here and doesn’t miss Italy at all. She said it is way more expensive to live here but it sounds like tour guides generally make pretty good money. Most of them are independent contractors hired by the tour companies. Tourism has blown up since the volcano eruption and basically there are 300,000 people here and 2-4 million tourists (can’t remember if I already told you this), so I would think the tour guides are high in demand. An apartment to rent here in Reykjavik is the equivalent of about $2400 per month (and that’s for about a 400sf apartment) so pretty comparable to LA prices. 

Our first stop was the Kerid Crater which is at the top of a volcano. You can walk all along the top but you can also decent into the crater and there is a frozen over lake too. So no lava and obvi no heat here either. We learned here about more Icelandic folklore-

1. Trolls- these were usually bad, always causing trouble during the night, especially to Viking ships… but kinda dumb because they turned to stone every time they got caught by sunrise

2. Gnomes- these are mostly associated with Christmastime 

3. Elves- for some reason rocks seem to be homes for elves. 

The red ground around the volcano is said to be blood based on folklore but it is really the iron content of the soil. 

Next we headed to the biggest waterfall I’ve ever seen… it was huge and so powerful. It was called Gullfoss (in Icelandic ll = tl which makes this way harder to pronounce). The falls has a few different stages and levels, and the viewing points are so far away from the falls itself but you can still feel the mist from them. 

We stopped by the Icelandic version of Old Faithful at our lunch stop. The Strokker geyser goes off every 4-6 minutes, a little smaller than Old faithful but pretty similar. You can smell the sulfur and feel the steam rising. There are all sorts of small geysers around the area as well. Interestingly enough, all the heat in the country is geothermal, which is why we concluded that so many apartments and homes had windows open in the winter. There is also no thermostat in our hotel room, I assume because you regulate the temperature by opening the exterior window. 

Our last stop might have been the coolest, it was the continental divide where the tectonic plates of North America and Europe meet. There is a pretty large piece of land that seems like a valley because of the elevation change. It’s a no mans land that is between both of the tectonic plates and was a valley where the first Icelandic parliament was held. You can see all these fissures that remind me of the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Called Thingvellir, the area is protected by mountains on all sides and there is also a lake there that has crystal clear fresh water (with visibility of 150m!). That made it appealing to the Vikings for their commons (think real life renaissance faire) and capital in 930. It was later moved to Raykjavik because that actually had a better location and less wind. 

The first official church is also here, recognized in 1930 but built long before that, and it also definitely wasn’t the first church built in Iceland, just the first one that was made official. 

We learned something else interesting on the way home- Iceland is covered 1% in trees and 10% in glacier. 40% of the island used to be covered with trees but the Vikings cut it all down for wood or it was burned by volcanic eruptions and it never grew back. So now 99% of the land has no trees, and volcanic soil is really hard to grow things in. So the government is putting tons of money into growing trees (target is 4% coverage) to help with wind control and to stabilize the soil. The problem is that sheep, who reign free all summer, love to eat evergreen sprigs. As the saying goes, “if you get lost in an Icelandic forest, stand up”. 

Our trip hope ended with a little more shopping through a snowy downtown and then we got a quick bite. Our trip to the Blue Lagoon got canceled because of the erupting volcano Sundhnukagigar. Apparently there are noxious gases from the eruption that are making them close the lagoon. So we will be going to Sky Lagoon which is right outside the City for some sort of authentic Icelandic bathhouse experience. But for now, sleep please!