Since we only had two full days in Iceland on our layover, we made the most of it by booking a six-hour bus tour of the Golden Circle with Reykjavik Excursions. A bus driver and friendly guide took us efficiently around the loop to see the most popular natural sites within a few hours of Reykjavik.
The first stop on the tour was Gullfoss. It’s hard to express the vast scale of these falls in photos, but the size of the tiny people walking on the path on the left helps.
We started with high, distant vantages and then walked all the way around until we were being soaked by the spray. Gullfoss is the “golden waterfall” and it lived up to that name and made good on our guidebook’s promise of frequent rainbows.
Þingvellir national park straddles a rift where the North American and Eurasian continental plates meet. They are slowly sliding apart. The current church (Þingvallakirkja) dates to 1859, though a church of some type has stood on the site for nearly 1,000 years.
You could easily spend hours at any of these stops along the Golden Circle, though we got about 30 to 45 minutes at each. Still lots of time for photos and to get a feel for the place.
All the mountains in Iceland are formed from volcanic eruptions, some tens of thousands of years old, some newer. Glaciers are visible in the distance, where we were told there are snowmobile tours offered.
At each stop on the Golden Circle there were really nice facilities with modern, freshly renovated tourist centers, good bathrooms, and decent food and beer which we enjoyed at the Geysir stop regardless of the expensive prices.
The tour guide gave lots of interesting general information about Iceland and Icelanders. Tourism has become extremely important to the Icelandic economy, creating a large number of jobs. The guide credited social media for the surge of visitors in recent years, particularly after the 2008 currency crash that temporarily made it very cheap for many visitors.
Of course the rising number of visitors is also having an impact on locals with the usual side-effect of raising rents — not to mention frequent rescues of visitors who find themselves in dangerous situations along the rugged coastlines.
The final stop on our tour was at Geysir, the site of the first geyser known to Europeans and hence the one that all others are named after. Currently another geyser in the same theothermal field (called “Strokkur”) erupts most spectacularly every 8 minutes, as if on a schedule. The surrounding area is filled with smaller geysers, bubbling ponds, steaming trickling rivers and a sulpheric smell. Signs warn that the water is 100 to 120 degrees Celcius.
Litli Geysir is a tiny little guyser about 50 feet away from the main large one. Amusingly enough, the nearby Geysir Hotel has recently opened a small offshoot location, which is called, you guessed it, Litli Geysir Hotel.
