A Golden Circle, an Almost Golden Day

John and I are staying at the Ekra Reykjavik apartment hotel. It is a small place with only six rooms. Ours has a kitchenette, so I guess that is why it can be considered an apartment, even though it is pretty tiny. But there are a lot of things I like about it, and one is the deck outside our room.

It has a lovely view of the city and the green roof of the building behind us.

We are on the fifth floor and the door next to John leads to a small elevator. It's almost a perfect place to stay. Why almost? Well, we are in the liveliest neighborhood in Iceland and the party did not stop last night until about three in the morning! Fortunately, we were both incredibly tired so we slept through most of it. In fact, we were so tired we both slept until mid-morning. And for those of you who know me well, you know I am usually up even before the sunrise. 

It was just after noon before we were ready to get started on today's activities. We decided to do the quintessential Iceland tourist experience today, The Golden Circle. This is a driving loop that starts and ends in Reykjavik and takes in several of Iceland's most iconic or historically important sights. I'll explain the "golden" part of it later on. 

The first stop, after about forty minutes of driving, is Pingvellir National Park. The place is pronounced "THING-vell-eer" and it means "Assembly Fields" in Icelandic. I have to admit that if I were just driving through the area and saw this area, I would probably not have stopped. It is a flat valley between two ranges of small hills. There is one large lake here and several other smaller ones. At first, it is hard to see what is so special about this area.

But there are two special things about Pingvellir. One of them is in the picture below.

This is no ordinary gully. The split in between the two ridges of rock is perhaps the only place on earth where you can see the mid-Atlantic ridge, the rift between the North American and Eurasian plates. For those of you who have not been thinking about geology for a while, in most places on earth tectonic plates scrape past each other or crash under each other. But in the middle of the Atlantic, the plates are actually pulling apart at an average rate of two centimeters a year. And as the plates move apart, magma begins to spurt up from below the crust. There is an enormous mountain range on the bottom of the Atlantic and Iceland is one of few places where the mountains are rise above the level of the sea. So, when you come to Pingvellir you can walk in between the two plates. Pretty neat, isn't it?

But if you're an Icelander, there's way more than simple geology here. It's called the "Assembly Fields" because for a thousand years the people of Iceland sent their representatives here to solve disputes and enact laws. It was here that the decision was made to accept the Christian religion from Norwegian missionaries. (The Icelanders were deeply divided on this, so those who objected were still given permission to sacrifice to the old gods, drown unwanted babies, and eat horses.) During the independence movement of the nineteenth century, as Iceland sought freedom from the Danish crown, Pingvellir became an almost sacred national site.

From here, we headed to Geysir. If that sounds like a word you know in English, well, that is no accident. Long before Europeans had seen the gushing water in Yellowstone or in Rotorua, they had seen geysers in Iceland. And none were quite as spectacular as the one here. So, in time the name for a specific place became the name for a geological phenomenon. And now you know a neat little bit of etymology and one word in Icelandic!

However, the great geyser here, the one that dazzled Europeans for centuries by shooting water 200 feet into the air every three hours or so, lost its mojo after some earthquakes in the area in the nineteenth century. So the center of attention now is the Strokkur geyser. About every ten minutes or so, it shoots water about 50 to 65 feet into the air. If you had your camera ready, it would look something like this picture I found on Google.

I was not expecting the eruption, so this is what I got:

Strokkur is fun, but it is not anything special if you have spent time in Yellowstone. But it dazzled the Europeans who were standing around us.

We ended up spending more time in the gift shop here. John has been continually complaining about how cold he is since we arrived in Iceland, even I who wear shorts in the middle of a Rogue Valley winter, found it a bit chilly. So John was delighted to find long underwear for sale there, and somewhat to the consternation of the salesgirl, he insisted on wearing them out of the store instead of putting them back in the box. She insisted we keep the receipt handy in case the alarm went off. It didn't.

We pushed on to the third stop on the tour, the Gullfoss waterfall. Remember when I said earlier that I would explain why the circle is "golden?" Well, in Icelandic Gullfoss means "Golden Falls." And that inspired somebody in the state tourist office to call the whole thing "The Golden Circle." I am not sure why the Icelanders called the waterfall golden, but it is nevertheless an impressive sight, particularly the rainbow that is visible most of the year.

Since we had a pretty late start, it was close to eight o'clock by this point and it was time to head back to Reykjavik. We went home through some of Iceland's most pastoral countryside. One thing I noted, as we went past farm after farm, was that whatever baling machine they use here seals the hay in plastic.

 

I am sure that if you are farmer this is hugely practical and efficient. But it's impossible for me to imagine Monet painting any of these giant garbage bags.

We stopped in the village of Skaholt towards nightfall. This was a major settlement in Norse times and the church there was the seat of one of the most important bishops in medieval Iceland. Today, there are only a few farming families in Skaholt. But there is still a church here, though not the original one.

The new church was built in the 1960s and the surrounding dormitories, a retreat center for members of Iceland's state Lutheran church, suggest the monastic close that once surrounded the ancient cathedral. The interior of the church is a little dull, even by the low standards of contemporary ecclesiastical architecture.

We came back to Reykjavik as the sun was setting. That sounds wonderful, but I had to drive for miles with the sun in my eye no matter how well I adjusted the visor. And when we came back to the center of town there was no parking to be found on the street. So I found a parking garage not too far from where we are staying. And that was where the day turned less golden. Probably because I was tired, I did not turn quite sharply enough and I put a scratch and a crack in the plastic bumper. I bought insurance when I rented it, and even if I hadn't the damage is not all that significant, but it will still be a hassle on Tuesday when I return it before our trip to Scotland.