Day 3 – Golden Circle Tour of Iceland

Golden Circle Tour Route

Today we took the Golden Circle Tour via bus to see some of the natural beauty of the country. Iceland was created by volcanoes and remains volcanically active today. The interior, where we were headed today, is a high, mountainous plateau and totally snow-covered. There are still active volcanoes, lava fields and glaciers inland, but they are much further to the interior and the roads to them are impassable in the winter. Iceland itself, by the way, isn’t nearly as cold as you might think. It is warmed by the Gulf Stream and has a temperate climate, despite being just outside the Arctic Circle. It rarely goes below 17 degrees in January but also stays pretty chilly even in the summer.  For us it remained around 32 degrees and snowed, sleeted or rained just a little every day. The wind, as we found on our last night, can be very brutal and basically the whole interior of Iceland is uninhabitable.

Lake at Þingvellir National Park

Our first stop on the tour was Þingvellir National Park. The largest lake in Iceland is there. You might also notice how low the sun is in the sky in the photo. That is at mid-day and it never gets any higher in January. Conversely there are places in Iceland where the sun never sets in the summer.

Between the Tectonic Plates

Þingvellir is also an area where there is an interesting geological feature. Iceland is actually where the American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet and the fault line passes directly through the park and divides the island.  In the middle is a “no man’s land” that doesn't belong to either continent. In the photo it looks narrow but in most places the divide is about a half mile wide. 

Gulfoss

The next tour stop is the Gullfoss Waterfall. In Icelandic, “gull” means “gold” and “foss” means “falls.” Apparently in a certain light, the falls appear to be golden in color, hence the name for the tour. This was the coldest stop on the tour as the arctic winds were blowing strongly across the plain and there is little protection from it. Iceland has a lot of waterfalls which I think are mainly from glacier run-off and 70% of the energy they use comes from hydroelectric energy. The other 30% comes from geothermal plants.

We stopped on our way back at the Geysir geothermal area. Geysir is the source of our word “geyser” and the whole area resembled a mini-Yellowstone National Park with geysers and steam vents everywhere and the strong smell of sulfur.  The major geyser there erupts every 6 to 8 minutes and it is quite impressive. The eruption is not as tall as “Old Faithful” but it starts with a beautiful blue bubble of water before it spurts.

Geysir

One more stop at a very old church on the way back to our hotel but honestly it wasn’t all that interesting. It was going to snow that night and so we decided to have a leisurely dinner and not to try to go out and see the lights. Eight hours on the bus today was enough.

In terms of food options, the two main staples for dinner are lamb and fish. I had lamb chops one night and a fillet of lamb another. Jeanne had a nice lamb soup one night. Tonight I had cod and a lobster soup. Another somewhat surprising option is hamburgers and hot dogs are very prevalent.  Unlike in the US, they don’t have mayonnaise for the burgers but hamborgarasósa (hamburger sauce) which is kind of a pink color and resembles McDonalds “special sauce.” I believe it contains mayo plus ketchup and maybe some paprika. We tried not to eat American and stuck to the local foods.