The bus from Arctic Adventures came to pick us up for the Golden Circle tour in front of the hotel, at the city bus stop # 9. This was the shortest tour of our 3 day tours with Arctic Adventures. It was supposed to go from 9 AM to around 5-6 PM. The tour description listed the stops at Thingvellir National Park, Gullfoss Waterfall, Geysir hot springs then a 2-hour stop at the natural geothermal hotspring of Secret Lagoon at Fludir.
Today we did not get lucky: it was raining all day. I couldn’t even take pictures from inside the bus. The bus was only half full. We were the last pick up so we ended up having the last 2 rows to ourselves. It turned out to be really good because of the rain, our jackets were all wet and we could hang them up to dry in the back seat. Our driver and guide was Halmek (I asked a couple of times but he did not spell it out for me, so this is the best I could do). He was an older guide and came from a family of farmers. He was very knowledgeable about Iceland, its history, its culture and its traditions. The younger guides we came in contact with was very happy with the lift on the beer ban. Halmek hated it and blamed it for the lower birth rate in Iceland since 1989: it was 6 children per woman before, now it is only 1.6 child per woman. He mourned the loss of dancing and fighting on the weekend and blamed the obesity seen in Iceland with men sitting around drinking beer!
The first stop was Thingvellir National park. It is located in a rift valley between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. On the way there, we passed by the Law Rock where Halmek told us the lawmakers stood there to talk to the people and because of the acoustics, they all could hear very well! No picture due to the rain! We saw the rock walls where the rift was but it was raining so hard, we only ran out, took a look and ran back inside the visitors’ center. Obsessive-compulsive me had to buy 2 emergency rain ponchos that cost 1,000 kroners ( about 8 dollars). Worst part was it stopped raining hard, only sprinkling a little bit, after we got on the bus to travel to the site of the Geysir Hot Springs. Well, we’ll use those emergency ponchos for our next trip.
As we walked into the hot springs area, I saw the column of hot water and smoke that erupted from the Geysir. Two eruptions in a row and I got a picture of the second one then we waited for another 12 minutes in the cold sprinkling rain. We also walked around and saw a lot of little geysirs, one named Litli Geysir that kept bubbling all the time. In the visitor center, I saw fur of entire Icelandic fox, beautiful but quite expensive too!
We next saw a majestic view of the force of the glacier, the two-tiered Gullfoss waterfall. Uphigh the wind could blow you over and there was only a rope to hold onto along the climb. It was awe-inspiring. The water was not very clear and Halmek told us the run-off from the glacier is kind of muddy because it carried the lava rock, the sand, the leaves.
We next had a treat as Halmek stopped by a dairy farm for us to have a taste of the Icelandic ice cream. We got a picture of the cows that made the milk for the ice cream! Wow! That’s fresh! Then we went to a horse farm where I got to pet a full-grown horse but not very tall. We heard plenty about Icelandic horses from Halmek and the other guides: there are around 65,000 horses plus 20,000 foals each year on the island. Once a horse leaves Iceland, it cannot come back. There are 200,000 Icelandic horses around the world.
My favorite part of the tour came next: the Secret Lagoon at Fludir. It was a windy and rainy day and the water in the lagoon was around 95 degrees Farenheit! I stayed there as long as I could. It was so heavenly to walk around (the lagoon was only about 4 ft deep) and submerse myself in that hot water with the rain pelting down and the wind blowing the rain in my eyes. I got a shower cap to put on my head to limit the damage to my hair from the minerals in the water (thanks to YouTube). One tour guide told us she learned to swim in that lagoon when she was a kid and it stayed exactly the same.
